MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vel0city | 2025-05-30 13:50:23+00:00
in like 2005, one could get an unlimited data add-on to an AT&T dumb phone for something like $15/mo. If you managed to get a 3G dumb phone, you'd get a 3G-enabled SIM card.

Just take the SIM and pop it in whatever GSM device supporting the right frequencies and boom cheap unlimited data. It seemed like as long as you didn't use a device AT&T sold they never noticed it wasn't your cheap dumb phone.

It was tricky buying Euro phones. They'd mostly work but usually didn't support the more widespread lower frequencies for AT&T (was it 850 or 900MHz? I don't quite remember). Usually the higher frequencies were well supported like 1900MHz and 2100MHz, but those were pretty hit and miss on coverage and would often die once you went inside a big building.
by ddingus | 2025-05-30 13:50:35+00:00
Very interesting!

I am likely to have ADHD. Was never diagnosed as a youth because I never allowed it. Seriously! Growing up during the late 70's and 80's was a weird time for these things.

My mistrust in all of that came from watching friends get diagnosed then medicated. Then most of those people kind of shut down. Some presented very differently, generally not in a good way, as far as I was concerned.

A few personas I loved just got medicated away.

So... nope. Not gonna happen. I threw up a barrier that took well into maybe my late 30's to come down.

I had decided very young that I was in charge of who I was, nobody else and was fairly aware of all that during formative years. My trust was literally zero on that front, unless knowing someone would, in my eyes, be good for me.

From there, I identified with who I thought were pretty great people and the rest got the Okie Dokie, next treatment.

These days seem different for sure.

I knew damn well I was not neurotypical, a word that did not appear for many years ahead of my own struggles, and frankly that had to be OK, because I needed to be OK to exist as me. Who were others to say otherwise?

Today, seems like we live in a more permissive society than we did before. I do know my own perception is keen for having managed my own struggles. I can reach others and help. No meds needed, just real trust and the right experiences.

Sometimes meds are needed too. I feel they are used in lazy ways too often. Other means should be first.

And my beef with the meds boils down to how effective the right experiences can be.

Kid has anger management issues?

Medicate!

Or.. maybe put then into a wrestling club and see them mello right out and become a great, fairly tolerant person.

Both can work well, and both can go badly too.

It mostly boils down to how the humans in charge of debugging and empowering the young humans handle problems and the tools they use.

IMHO people reached for the meds far too often back then.

Maybe we are now too permissive, not doing enough to tease out the best in people, coping instead.

What I like most in your take is you are self aware and have others like you to build on.

I did not. Or, I did, but finding them and experiencing what you are was a lot harder, due to how less connected everyone was back then.

What I did was seek good mentors. Found them and came up OK, and capable. You appear to be getting after the same thing.

Good!

It all starts with self acceptance and awareness. From there, many who achieve those things can build on that and live a fine life.

I bet you do. Thanks for sharing a little perspective. It is high value.
by amai | 2025-05-30 13:50:58+00:00
Has anyone ever done a sensivity analysis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_analysis ) on the world3 model?

How does the model react to small changes in the starting values? Is collapse an attractor of the model that cannot be avoided independent of the starting values? Then the question would be, how realistic is a model that predicts collapse independent of starting values?
by moffkalast | 2025-05-30 13:52:16+00:00
Yes at this point it's starting to become almost a matter of how much you like the model's personality since they're all fairly decent. OP just has to start downloading and trying them out. With 16GB one can do partial DDR5 offloading with llama.cpp and run anything up to about 30B (even dense) or even more at a "reasonable" speed for chat purposes. Especially with tensor offload.

I wouldn't count Qwen as that much of a conversationalist though. Mistral Nemo and Small are pretty decent. All of Llama 3.X are still very good models even by today's standards. Gemma 3s are great but a bit unhinged. And of course QwQ when you need GPT4 at home. And probably lots of others I'm forgetting.
by rightbyte | 2025-05-30 13:53:01+00:00
I did read the article and it does deal with fake photos being an old thing and name drops e.g. Stalin's former companions being removed one by one from photos.

"There was a brief window where photography and videos became widespread so events could be documented and evidenced."

Photos are video have in themself not been evidence. You need trust the photographer or publisher too, since the camera was invented.

Moving the cost from big $$$ level to my neighbour level makes scams more personalized, sure.
by glimshe | 2025-05-30 13:53:47+00:00
If you were judging based on HN comments, you'd think that AI is failing miserably. In reality, people are using generative AI more and more - even if they do so silently or while criticizing it.

The jury is still out on AI-centric workflows, but AI augmented workflows are here and won't go anywhere irrespective of what the Internet mob says.
by allturtles | 2025-05-30 13:53:51+00:00
No offense to the people of Velankanni, but Our Lady of Good Health is rather rinky-dink compared to the great historical cathedrals. Looks like the nave is about 20 feet tall and the bell towers 40 feet maybe? Notre Dame it isn't. Per your Wikipedia link, it was designated a Basilica in 1962 but seems to have been mostly constructed before that.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-30 13:53:55+00:00
People have a hard time reconciling the difference between “raise group X up” and “knock group Y down”.

The former is a universal good and the correct way to remedy historical injustice. The latter is punishing people, literally, for the sins of their fathers.

There is of course complexity and some zero sum situations where raising X harms Y, but most of the world is not zero sum and you do not have to start from that default position.
by brianshaler | 2025-05-30 13:54:21+00:00
You can use spherical harmonics to encode a few coefficients in addition to the base RGB for each splat such that the rendertime view direction can be used to compute an output RGB. A "reflection" in 3DGS isn't a light ray being traced off the surface, but instead a way of saying "when viewed from this angle, the splat may take an object's base color, while from that angle, the splat may be white because the input image had glare"

This ends up being very effective with interpolation between known viewpoints, and hit-or-miss extrapolation beyond known viewpoints.
by davidjade | 2025-05-30 13:54:27+00:00
I have a pretty vivid memory of reading an article in the late 70’s or 80’s in a computer magazine (BYTE?) of a hardware/software project to digitize piano rolls. They were digitizing original Gershwin (he created a lot of piano rolls) and discovering new things about the way he played. I’ve search and searched but cannot find that article anywhere.
by quelup | 2025-05-30 13:54:32+00:00
This is awesome. Just for awareness - I started going through the book a few days ago and there's a lot of other useful information outside of the LC style questions (e.g. what's actually important on a resume, how to realistically get your foot in the door with companies, etc.). Very data driven and comprehensive, so for me there's still a lot of value in the non LC parts of the book.
by lopatin | 2025-05-30 13:54:37+00:00
Here's how it caught my Snake bug: My snake representation is a vector of key points (head, turns, tail). A snake in a straight line, of length 3, facing right can look like this: [(0,0), (2,0)]. When a Snake moves (a single function called "step_forward"), the Snake representation is compressed by my code: If the last 2 points are the same, remove the last one. So if this snake changes direction to "left", then the new snake representation would be [(1, 1), (1, 1)] and compressed to [(1, 1)] before existing out of step_forward.

Here's how the bug was caught: It should be impossible for the Snake representation to be < 2 points. So I told Opus to model the behavior of my snake, and also to write a TLA+ invariant that the snake length should never be under 2. TLA+ then basically simulates it and finds the exact sequence of steps "turns" that cause that invariant to not hold. In this case it was quite trivial, I never thought to prevent a Snake from making turns that are not 90 degrees.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-30 13:54:42+00:00
Screw it; I just added a basic CLI. Implemented save, load, view, help, fetch, and show. I'll add the ones you suggested as well, if they're supported by the underlying data structures. (e.g. the cam stuff is straightfwd, but `remove solvents` may reduce to `hide hetero atoms; sort of like how `show` just toggles the view mode`.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-30 13:54:54+00:00
Exporting to .so (a) makes it non-portable (you suddenly need to ship a whole compatibility matrix of .so files including a Windows DLL or several) and (b) severely constrains the language design. It's very hard to do this without either forcing the developer to do explicit heap management using the caller's heap or very carefully hiding your VM inside the shared object .. which has interesting implications once you have multiple such libraries. Also you don't have a predefined entry point (there's no equivalent of DllMain) so your caller is forced to manage that and any multithreading implications.

It basically forces your language to be very similar to C.
by agentultra | 2025-05-30 13:55:03+00:00
The TigerBeetle team does this too and it's an interesting approach. One of their developers did a talk on it at HYTRADBOI this year [0].

[0] https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/c222d11a-6f4d-4211-a243-f5b7f...
by cowpig | 2025-05-30 13:55:04+00:00
Ollama[0] has a collection of models that are either already small or quantized/distilled, and come with hyperparameters that are pretty reasonable, and they make it easy to try them out. I recommend you install it and just try a bunch because they all have different "personalities", different strengths and weaknesses. My personal go-tos are:

Qwen3 family from Alibaba seem to be the best reasoning models that fit on local hardware right now. Reasoning models on local hardware are annoying in contexts where you just want an immediate response, but vastly outperform non-reasoning models on things where you want the model to be less naive/foolish.

Gemma3 from google is really good at intuition-oriented stuff, but with an obnoxious HR Boy Scout personality where you basically have to add "please don't add any disclaimers" to the system prompt for it to function. Like, just tell me how long you think this sprain will take to heal, I already know you are not a medical professional, jfc.

Devstral from Mistral performs the best on my command line utility where I describe the command I want and it executes that for me (e.g. give me a 1-liner to list the dotfiles in this folder and all subfolders that were created in the last month).

Nemo from Mistral, I have heard (but not tested) is really good for routing-type jobs, where you need something with to make a simple multiple-choice decision competently with low latency, and is easy to fine-tune if you want to get that sophisticated.

[0] https://ollama.com/search
by _fat_santa | 2025-05-30 13:55:12+00:00
I would correct that quote to say “Gemini was trained to respond that it was impressed with my idea”

Being “impressed” is a human feeling that can’t be transcribed to an AI period. An AI can tell you that it’s impressed because it’s been trained to do so, it doesn’t “know” (and by this I’m referring to knowing what the feeling is, not knowing the definition) what it means to be impressed
by _l7dh | 2025-05-30 13:55:21+00:00
Behind this rhetorically articulated question, there is a simplistic view of content generation and consumption. First off, if you use LLMs, you are _constantly_ reading stuff nobody else bothered to answer you. So, it's not about who speaks, it's about the what. Then, what you deem as written by nobody turns out (not without irony) an average of so many (possibly) good writings and thoughts, gleaned from various corners of the web. In this regard, I particularly like--and want to shout out--the author's clarity on the work's attribution. It's not his. It is Claude's, hence, everybody's (in a sense). Finally, as a mere form of compressed human written productions, LLMs don't have agency over what they generate. So the prompting, the idea, as well as some editorial decisions are still attributed to the person behind this, hence making it unique in its own way. Instead of seeing as a piece that he didn't bother write, I see it as piece he chose to edit summoning the ghosts of every writer who ever put something on internet, which again, he correctly credits (to the limits of knowing what exact data Claude uses... which is another story).
by infecto | 2025-05-30 13:55:23+00:00
I don’t think it’s clear to anyone who is going to be the winner 5-10 years from now. Waymo is rolling out and it definitely is a way to solve the problem but it’s still not widely available in the US. I cannot use it to commute to work daily.

I have no idea who is going to win or what that strategy will be, vision only, lidar, combination etc. but it’s false to make claims like yours. I get it though it’s easy to take your hate for an individual in an extension to other adjacent discussions. I don’t like the guy either but not worth making up silly claims.
by ctkhn | 2025-05-30 13:56:31+00:00
This sounds interesting but as someone who hasn't worked at AWS, and isn't already familiar with TLA+ or P, I would have liked to see even a hello world example of either of them. Without that, it sounds like a lot of extra pain for things that a good design and testing process should catch anyway. Seeing a basic example in the article itself that would give me a better insight into what these actually do.
by cratermoon | 2025-05-30 13:57:23+00:00
I have a large repository of notes, article drafts, and commonplace book-type stuff. I experimented a year or so ago with a system using RAG to "ask myself" what I have to say about various topics. (I suppose nowadays I would use MCP instead of RAG?) I was not especially impressed by the results with the models I was able to run: long-winded responses full of slop and repetition, irrelevant information pulled in from notes that had some semantically similar ideas, and such. I'm certainly not going to feed the contents of my private notebooks to any of the AI companies.
by anonymoushn | 2025-05-30 13:57:41+00:00
If the library has two vocabulary learners, only one of which does the described thing, then isn't it unambiguous which implementation within the library the question refers to? And wouldn't it be ambiguous to instead say "how does Unigram do it" without referring to any particular implementation?

Anyway, the paper says "Frequent substrings can be enumerated in O(T) time and O(20T) space with the Enhanced Suffix Array algorithm (Nong et al., 2009)", which is hilariously underspecified, at least in part because a suffix array algorithm isn't a top-k algorithm.
by danw1979 | 2025-05-30 13:58:13+00:00
I’ll wager that sugar is probably better for you (in moderation) than artificial sweeteners. I remember reading something not that long ago about insulin response to sweeteners being similar to sugars. Give me fat coke over diet coke any day.

But yeah, I agree with your point that “naturalism” isn’t often optimal.

I’ve read the book he wrote after this article and it’s really quite good. The principal that if your great grandparents wouldn’t recognise it as “food”, then avoid, is a pretty good rule of thumb.
by rollcat | 2025-05-30 13:58:16+00:00
I keep wondering. Is there even a decent FOSS tablet (as opposed to desktop) environment? There are plenty of reasons why iPads and Macs have vastly different UIs. KDE seems strictly desktop-focused. Gnome seems to be pulling in both directions, but a considerable amount of functionality is only accessible thru crammed menus and buttons.

What about the apps? I've heard really good things about Krita, but what's the killer app?
by coisasdavida | 2025-05-30 13:58:18+00:00
I often use the term "pianola" to search the Vinted plataform for keyboards. Apparently italians use this term for stuff they don't think too much of. Recently I used the same "trick" on the Wallapop plataform. But Wallapop has a higher dose of spanish and portuguese in the mix. They use the term in a different way and the search results are usually flooded with piano rolls. It would be cool to buy all those lots just to check out which songs they contain.
by RS-232 | 2025-05-30 13:58:22+00:00
> The challenge that you have with unmanned systems today is you’re going to have to do something that is a little bit out of the ordinary to address all of them,” he said. “They’re not particularly expensive. Their impact is probably way outsized.”

This isn’t a dismissal of drones at all. It’s an acknowledgement of how diverse and inexpensive drones are.

A stinger missile is ~150k USD. A grenade duct taped to a drone is ~150 USD. That’s three orders of magnitude, so you can see why a manpad isn’t an economically viable countermeasure to most drones.

Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.
by overu589 | 2025-05-30 13:58:47+00:00
These accounts are meant as curiosities of our humanity, however I find them quite sad.

> sense of some consciousness beyond this one

Consciousness allows our capacity to entangle and hyperdimentionalize. Our minds are technology, whatever mess we make of them.

We are not alone in our own minds. There are entire cultures capable of mindfucking us, though most obviously we mind fuck ourselves.

Besides this horror freak show of banal pathetic modernism groping through vomit for the ascendant secrets of enlightenment, there is the wonder that we are indeed spiritual technology and something more than this is going on.

As for personalities stolen, your controls can hypnotize you with countless behavioral anomalies, influencing honesty, biases, sense of self, even gender dysphoria. Many people live lives of personalities crafted by their controls. They have no idea who they themselves are.

The pirates are among us, Ayahuasca gives the nutters a stage to relate with us all.

I know how abhorrent non traditional discussions are for the adamant deniers, I hope this can be taken as topical discourse as far as karma is concerned.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-05-30 14:00:02+00:00
> only have a foggy idea how convenient working in modern C can be

Here is a list of C++ features that C doesn't have, that are an immediate deal-breaker for me:

- reference and move semantics - templates, and type constraints with concepts - namespaces - `constexpr`, `consteval`, and other compile-time magic - `auto` type deduction - trailing return types - RAII (can't believe I put this this late, but eh) - a passable (although still not perfectly complete) standard library that blows the C standard library out of the water - improved semantics that allow programmers to reason about the logic in code better, than obsess over pointer arithmetic - built-in virtual functions, function pointer tables, etc

I can list more, but this is going to end up as a list of 'essentially every feature in C++ that isn't in C', which is the very reason for the former language to exist.
by SkyBelow | 2025-05-30 14:00:16+00:00
If Bank C is forced to take the loss, it'll be more careful in opening accounts for scammers to withdraw money. If Bank C is in a country that doesn't care to enforce such losses, then Bank B (or A if A is big enough) will think twice about deciding to do business with Bank B. Moving the cost of the scams onto the banks will strongly incentivize them to prevent the scams.
by prophesi | 2025-05-30 14:00:19+00:00
Any FOSS solutions that let you browse models and guesstimates for you on whether you have enough VRAM to fully load the model? That's the only selling point to LM Studio for me.

Ollama's default context length is frustratingly short in the era of 100k+ context windows.

My solution so far has been to boot up LM Studio to check if a model will work well on my machine, manually download the model myself through huggingface, run llama.cpp, and hook it up to open-webui. Which is less than ideal, and LM Studio's proprietary code has access to my machine specs.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-30 14:00:20+00:00
Tcl/TK was updated to v9 recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661906

but the binaries haven't been readily available --- compiling from source is straight-forward on most platforms, but for Windows, a pre-compiled option is far more accessible to most potential users.

The link was supposed to be to:

https://www.tcl3d.org/bawt/download.html#tclbi

but the #tclbi part got stripped off --- arguably #tclpure would be a better destination, since it would afford folks a choice of "Batteries Included" or no.
by Ayesh | 2025-05-30 14:00:53+00:00
Congratulations on publishing this. I use `git add -p` quite a lot, and this project looks interesting!

I knew that you could place a `git-xyz` executable and you can call it as `git xyz`. I didn't know you could do it with flags !?!

A small video or some screenshots would help a lot. If you can record interactivity with ascii-cinema, that will be even better.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-30 14:01:07+00:00
Is my understanding correct that Lisp's powerful macro system stems from the ability to write the eval function in Lisp itself? From what I gather, Lisp starts with a small set of primitives and special forms—seven in the original Lisp, including lambda. I recall Paul Graham demonstrating in one of his essays that you can build an eval function using just these primitives. Those primitives are typically implemented in a host language like C, but once you have an eval function in Lisp, you can extend it with new rules. The underlying C interpreter only sees the primitives, but as a programmer, you can introduce new syntax rules via eval. This seems like a way to understand macros, where you effectively add new language rules. I know Lisp macros are typically defined using specific keywords like defmacro, but is the core idea similar—extending the language by building on the eval function with new rules?