MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by app_bitcampo | 2025-05-20 17:35:11+00:00
Hi everyone, this is my first post here on HN. I'm founder from Brazil and part of Y Combinator Summer 2025. I built Bitcampo, an agriculture app with interactive 3D models (cattle, bees, etc). If you can, check it out: https://bitcampo.com – register an animal and let me know what you think of the 3D models! Built almost entirely solo with React Native + Three.js, and we already have 100+ real users.
by riemannzeta | 2025-05-20 17:35:39+00:00
I think it's interesting that in physics, different global symmetries (topological manifolds) can satisfy the same metric structure (local geometry). For example, the same metric tensor solution to Einstein's field equation can exist on topologically distinct manifolds. Conversely, looking at solutions to the Ising Model, we can say that the same lattice topology can have many different solutions, and when the system is near a critical point, the lattice topology doesn't even matter.

It's only an analogy, but it does suggest at least that the interesting details of the dynamics aren't embedded in the topology of the system. It's more complicated than that.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-20 17:36:23+00:00
Three mostly unrelated thoughts.

1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.

2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.

3) I wonder, is the line

> Today, I will have lived.

An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that, in French? As the article notes

> This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on.

It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into, basically, a choice of tenses.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-20 17:36:24+00:00
Once I became a software developer my mom gave me a Dilbert desk calendar every xmas. She had worked in tech startups since 1979 and loved Dilbert. She was the type of person to always try and bring the positive, never complain. I like to think that Dilbert gave he a chance to release some things/commiserate with me.
by Animats | 2025-05-20 17:36:34+00:00
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are also putting in a "standard gauge" line, so they can interoperate with the rest of Europe.

What coupler are they going to use? Switching from Russian automatic couplers to European buffer and chain freight couplers is a step backwards. (It's amazing that the EU hasn't modernized freight couplers. There was something called "Eurocoupler" proposed in the 1970s, but it was never implemented. A "Digital Automatic Coupler" with data passthrough is being proposed now.)
by trod1234 | 2025-05-20 17:37:12+00:00
You are wrong. It is not 'American' anything.

This is plain corporate malfeasance and corruption.

If anything its highly anti-American, borderline communist/state regime.

American values include many things, one of the more important being free speech.

Such a violation deserves reciprocity, stop blaming issues on the wrong things.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-20 17:37:29+00:00
>And Western culture has currently found itself in an unsustainable place which means that if things don't change, it will simply die only to be replaced. And I think that'd be a shame, because while it has its own deep flaws, it's undeniable that Western culture has had an extremely positive overall influence on the world.

Your not wrong, but I think your dealing with an overly optimistic view of things. Just because someone says in a poll they want a family doesn't mean they have the means to start one.

At 19 my first girlfriend wanted twins, but it would have completely infesible for that to happen.

If we want this dream world to happen, it would need to be one where you can graduate highschool, buy a house and support a family. This mythical time has only existed once in American history.

Less people are making it. When you can barely eat, getting married and having a family isn't likely. And the decline in marriage rates supports this.

>We find that marriage rates among the middle class have declined significantly over the past 40 years and have now fallen below those in the top income quintile.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/middle-class-marriage-is-...
by aragonite | 2025-05-20 17:37:41+00:00
You're right that writing a preprocessor would be straightforward. But while you're actively editing the code, your dev experience will still be bad: the editor will flag emoji identifiers as syntax errors so mass renaming & autocompletion won't work properly. Last time I looked into this in VSCode I got TypeScript to stop complaining about syntax errors by patching the identifier validation with something like `if (code>127) return true` (if non-ascii, consider valid) in isUnicodeIdentifierStart/isUnicodeIdentifierPart [1]. But then you'd also need to patch the transpiler to JS, formatters like Prettier, and any other tool in your workflow that embeds their own version of TypeScript...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/81c951894e93bdc...
by jrussino | 2025-05-20 17:38:44+00:00
I find it neat that the simulation appears to "pulse" almost like a heartbeat, because so many of our activities are tied to the clock and state changes disproportionately occur on the hour or half-hour. It's especially noticeable when using the "fast" playback option.

How different this would have looked before the invention of mechanized timekeeping!
by idontwantthis | 2025-05-20 17:40:08+00:00
> Builder.ai hired auditors to study its financials, indicating that something may have been off behind the scenes. According to Bloomberg, former employees alleged that the company had inflated sales figures by more than 20% on multiple occasions.

Sounds like fraud from top to bottom.

> Before Engineer.ai largely rebranded to Builder.ai, it attracted a minor scandal. Engineer.ai claimed to have built a largely automated app development platform, but the platform in truth relied heavily on human engineers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

AI: Actually, Indians.
by hunglee2 | 2025-05-20 17:40:23+00:00
Indeed true - US is 4% of the global population but 25% of the global consumption, if not more. You can see this via the eyeball test - everything is bigger: cars, houses, even the people. US invented 'overproduction' to smear Chinese manufacturing, but did not consider the other side of the coin, which is US 'overconsumption'. Two to tango etc
by dismalaf | 2025-05-20 17:40:42+00:00
Even without scripting Blender, GLTF is a "scene" format. GLTF files hold information about models, textures, lights, etc... So you can create your scene then import straight into your game with GLTF (open source, super common).

And of course since Blender is used for movies, it does scenes well already.
by burmanm | 2025-05-20 17:40:59+00:00
If you look at the map you will see that there isn't multiple tracks coming from Russia to Finland. Some of them were even designed to be blown up if necessary (such as the Salla rail tracks).

Finnish rail roads are mostly north-south bound (or west of Helsinki) which are not helpful to Russian advances. The only way for them to transport weaponry would be through east-west bound (near the border) and there isn't many. It's easy to take such out and they would not impact our infrastructure at all as they're not heavily used (if at all since eastern part of Finland is economically the weakest link anyway).

It's quick and easy in the end to destroy. Rebuilding them under artillery fire isn't easy.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-20 17:41:07+00:00
Yes, my Ryzen 7600 has an integrated GPU enabled. AMD's iGPUs are really impressive and powerful, but I do not have any idea what to do with it and despite that I moved to an Nvidia GPU (after 20 years of fanboyism) specifically because I was tired of AMD drivers being terrible on Windows, I STILL have to deal with AMD drivers because of that damn iGPU.

I could disable it I guess. It could provide 0.05% faster rendering if I ever get back into blender.
by inanutshellus | 2025-05-20 17:41:12+00:00
You can't both honor a constraint and give an out for it.

Remember OG twitter and someone complained about the 140 character limit. Imagine the reply was "ok fine we'll let you use more than 128 characters, but you have to click an 'advanced' tab." instead of the "be clever" retort we really got from Jack Dorsey. Immediately there'd be no constraint at all, just an annoying step where you had to click an annoying checkbox.

Point being - if the design is intended to be constrained, then it's perfectly reasonable to own that.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-20 17:41:31+00:00
A common verb "now"??

> Grok (/ˈɡrɒk/) is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment",[1] Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term."[2] The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
by nitwit005 | 2025-05-20 17:41:43+00:00
> No one else can manufacture USD's, so other countries have to acquire them by shaping their economies to supply goods and services demanded by the US.

They can just buy dollars from the other countries that already bought dollars. A huge amount of trade is dollar denominated, so there's no need to directly sell to the US.

> For the US, this is a simple trade off - gain massive political influence (and market intelligence - all USD transactions go through US institutions regardless of where those transacting partners are located), at the expense of hollowing out domestic industry and running a deficit in physical goods traded.

That's just false. There's no magic mechanism to force transactions to flow through US banks.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-20 17:42:02+00:00
C does not run everywhere - you need to compile it to a binary per-platform and per-architecture first, then your platform+arch specific binary only runs on that specific combination... And even then there might be dynamically linked libs to worry about.

You may as well call binary (i.e. 1s and 0s) the Lingua Franca in that case.

Lets not get started on C build chains (especially cross-compiling) ... cmake Vs cygwin Vs msvc Vs whatever else these days with hacky-and-brittle ifdefs conditionals everywhere just to make it work - chaos! JavaScript just runs on pretty much any modern computer you can sit down at or put in your pocket, and even on more exotic things that don't have it installed by default you are about 10 seconds away from installing the official package and you are off and running.
by sotix | 2025-05-20 17:42:53+00:00
In the US, this happens hundreds or thousands of times per year. The last major CEO was probably more recent, but you have high profile CEOs in Sam Bankman-Freid, Elizabeth Holmes, and Ken Lay. In fact, after Enron, CEOs and CFOs took on significantly more responsibility and risk by being personally liable for the financial statements. CEOs are arrested all of the time, so I’m not sure I understand your point.
by theahura | 2025-05-20 17:42:57+00:00
Thanks for the follow up. I've been following your circuits thread for several years now. I find the linear representation hypothesis very compelling, and I have a draft of a review for Toy Models of Superposition sitting in my notes. Circuits I find less compelling, since the analysis there feels very tied to the transformer architecture in specific, but what do I know.

Re linear representation hypothesis, surely it depends on the architecture? GANs, VAEs, CLIP, etc. seem to explicitly model manifolds. And even simple models will, due to optimization pressure, collapse similar-enough features into the same linear direction. I suppose it's hard to reconcile the manifold hypothesis with the empirical evidence that simple models will place similar-ish features in orthogonal directions, but surely that has more to do with the loss that is being optimized? In Toy Models of Superposition, you're using a MSE which effectively makes the model learn an autoencoder regression / compression task. Makes sense then that the interference patterns between co-occurring features would matter. But in a different setting, say a contrastive loss objective, I suspect you wouldn't see that same interference minimization behavior.
by dblohm7 | 2025-05-20 17:43:42+00:00
Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.

As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-20 17:44:33+00:00
That was kind of my point: we're still at a stage where checking a list of supported laptops and vendors is pretty much mandatory.

This is totally laptop vendors' fault, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter.

PS: it would be fine if there was a few good options in all categories. Right now I see nothing comparable to an Asus Z13 but with first class Linux support for instance.
by skarz | 2025-05-20 17:44:36+00:00
Yes, "now". According to Google Trends[0] there was little to no search interest in the term until December 2023.

Usage of 'grokked' on HN: 1,147[1]

Usage of 'hacked' on HN: 37,272[2]

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-20 17:45:21+00:00
> Adams did such a great job exposing the absurdities of the American white collar workplace, as seen by the underlings. So it is puzzling how he went over to the dark side of the pointy haired Boss.

Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)

His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-05-20 17:46:02+00:00
tl;dr

> Much to my surprise, when checking the App Store page, I saw that an update to the app had been approved by Apple only 14 minutes prior. I downloaded the update, tapped upon one of the previously "locked" items, and entered my backup password. Boom, the previously locked 2FA codes were now unlocked and restored, ready for use.
by monooso | 2025-05-20 17:46:26+00:00
Surely you can choose to only install "Deno native" dependencies?

It may sometimes be difficult to find such an option, but that was always going to be the case without Node compatibility.

Now, in theory at least, you have the option of sticking with Deno native dependencies, and an escape hatch when none are available.

That seems like the most pragmatic solution to the ideology vs adoption dilemma.
by vunderba | 2025-05-20 17:46:36+00:00
From the landing page:

> Artists can use text prompts to shape the music, while controlling the key, BPM, and other characteristics.

Sigh.

All I want is the ability to take an existing piece of music that I've already written, and then use a sort of "auto-accompaniment Band in a Box style" to add additional complementary instruments. Being able to analyze a purely melodic piece and generate possible percussive layers would be a lot of fun.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-20 17:47:11+00:00
Very interesting. The readme notes "Different than the others - Astra is a new approach to compiling JavaScript/TypeScript applications. It uses a different method than other compilers like pkg or nexe." but never really explains what the difference is. Is it just that the code is run through esbuild before the SEA step or is there some other "magic sauce"?
by gwern | 2025-05-20 17:47:41+00:00
Have you noticed the most recent one, gemini-2.5-pro-0506, suddenly being a lot more sycophantic than gemini-2.5-pro-0325? I was using it to beta-read and improve a story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43998269), and when Google flipped the switch, suddenly 2.5 was burbling to me about how wonderful and rich it was and a smashing literary success and I could've sworn I was suddenly reading 4o output. Disconcerting. And the AI Studio web interface doesn't seem to let you switch back to -0325, either... (Admittedly, it's free.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-20 17:47:50+00:00
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.

The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
by fallinditch | 2025-05-20 17:47:55+00:00
I don't have a wsj account, so just responding to the title and subhead (Eliminate online classes, ban screens, and restore Socratic discussion as education’s guiding model).

AI is bringing a paradigm shift in the nature of education, the shift is too big to respond to with restrictions like 'ban screens'.

It's understandable if incumbent educators try to cling to the old models of education that they represent, but, like King Canute, that attitude is bound to fail.

For sure, adding Socratic debate to the curriculum is a good response, as would the addition of more widespread teaching of philosophy subjects. But the general reaction to AI as a harmful cheating tool is misplaced - it ain't going away, so it's time to rethink some of the fundamentals of what education should be - and that is a great opportunity to create better models of education.
by da_chicken | 2025-05-20 17:48:04+00:00
Yeah, and the purchase approval process is in place specifically so that someone who knows what to look for has looked at it and verified that it's an acceptable configuration.

This is the exact same problem as Clinton's blackberry enterprise server. Doing it right was hard and time consuming, so they ignored that and did what they wanted.

Only we should be a lot more demanding that our officials in 2025 have a better basic understanding of the importance of computer security than in 2005.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-20 17:49:10+00:00
> this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people.

Well, back then the US had freshly banned slavery, so there was an ample workforce that could be hired for dirt cheap.

The Soviets and the Wehrmacht pulled off similar feats in WW2, but back then the rails and sleepers didn't have to be built to last many decades, so in addition to loads upon loads of forced labor from concentration camps and gulags, the work effort was massively reduced because easier technology could be used.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-20 17:49:57+00:00
> They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market.

Yep, it's mostly this. Especially for businesses under 300 users, you get Exchange, EntraID, Defender EDR, InTune(MDM) + the Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot all integrated for $22/user/month. For a little extra you get a half way decent PBX for VoIP too.

If you tried to piece all that together yourself with different services, then integrate them to the same level, it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than that.

Microsoft is smart too, as none of that requires Windows either. Even of these companies switched to Linux or macOS en masse, they'd still be using Microsoft.

Plus, there's still no competitor to Excel for business types. We might be able to use Google Sheets to great effectiveness, but the finance department at the behemoths can't. The world runs on Excel, like it or not.

> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.

This is true for all fields not just tech/IT. Competent windows sysadmin work nowadays isn't all that different from macOS endpoints or Linux. Everything can be scripted/automated with PowerShell, or just using the Graph API for 365 stuff. You can effectively manage a windows environment and never touch a GUI if you don't want to.

Microsoft usually isn't the best at anything, but what they excel at is being "good enough" and checking boxes.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-20 17:51:03+00:00
> Back in the day there were a bunch of `x2y` programs[1], like html2pdf, xls2csv, rst2odt, jpg2png, png2jpg, etc...

They're still around. A problem is loss of information on each conversion. For example, wav->mp3 loses info. Converting back (mp3->wav) won't get you the exact .wav you started with. Similar thing with file types supporting different resolution graphics, vector vs. bitmap, metadata being stripped, features in format A not supported in format B, etc.

Another problem is the explosion of M:N file format combinations. A possible fix would be a universal (?) in-between format, functioning as a container for [portions of a file] + whatever metadata was extracted from original. That way you can at least do conversions along the lines of video container formats, where container type is changed but video inside does not get decompressed/re-encoded. Or simular operations like extracting/shuffling pages in a pdf document.

All in all this is not an easy problem & therefore unlikely to be solved anytime soon.