MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jljljl | 2025-05-28 18:22:28+00:00
Is there a collection of note taking practices (such as they exist) among the great thinkers/scientists in history? Is there an assessment or study of their notebooks somewhere that distills best practices? Are techniques like ZK or spaced repetition based on those practices or studies? Have they been studied for desirable traits?

The science of notetaking so far seems to have a lot of art and opinion, but little science
by jdprgm | 2025-05-28 18:22:44+00:00
- "Try" on the main LP call to action implies there is an available trial but just leads to a buy page. You really should have a trial, even something like just 1 week.

- Fan of the perpetual fallback licensing. Though $99 is a high barrier but i'm guessing you are targeting more creators/studios vs a more general consumer target (would think more like $20-25 for general consumer).

- You mention performance in this post but not at all on the landing page. The 38 minute video in the minutes would be very important to know for many potential customers. Would want benchmarks on various machines and info like parallel task processing, impact of and requirements around vram, etc. I would want an insight into what processing hundreds to thousands of hours of video is going to look like.

- I am curious how (and shocked) that electron itself was somehow responsible for a processing bottleneck going from 10-14 minutes to 3 minutes. Wasn't electron just responsible for orchestrating work to CLIP and likely ffmpeg? How was so much overhead added?

- I built (but never released) a similar type media search tool but based on transcriptions in Electron and didn't run into many performance issues

- Usually a lot of the motivation for building in Electron in the first place (or Tauri) would be cross platform, why mac only (especially for something like bulk media processing where nvidia can shine)

- I too recently went down the path of hadn't coded in Swift in 10 years and also investigated Tauri. I opted for Swift (for a new app not a re-write of something) and it has been mostly a pleasure so far and a dramatic improvement compared to my last swift app from around 2014 or so)

- If the LP section about active users is true it sounds like you've already found some modest success (congrats). Did you already have relationships/audience around the studio/creator space? Would be interested to hear about the marketing
by willchen | 2025-05-28 18:23:12+00:00
I recently built an Electron app (http://dyad.sh/) and I looked at other options like Tauri, but Electron has such a mature ecosystem (e.g. https://www.electronforge.io/) that I was able to ship a cross-platform app in a couple weeks (Mac+Windows) and then adding Linux support was pretty trivial.

The only downside from my point of view is the large installer size for Electron apps, but it hasn't been a big issue for our users (because they will need to download quite a bit of other stuff like npm packages to actually build apps with dyad)
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-28 18:23:34+00:00
It is more that services allow more backward compatibility than direct DB changes, because you can also code additional logic to maintain that.

Of course in a narrow case where all apps that need the same DB need to be upgraded/fixed in lockstep, maybe you can get away by directly updating the database. But more than 2 teams, it will quickly be a nightmare of conflicting priorities across teams, amount deployment coordination required.

"Oh you cannot change this schema right now because 3 other apps depend on it and they dont have time to make the necessary changes in their app to accommodate this right now, for the next 6 months"
by andybak | 2025-05-28 18:23:45+00:00
> By definition, API Client is a devtool that makes it easier for devs (& co.) to design, test, document, and debug APIs. If it's confusing, we can take it to Postman, but it's an industry standard, been that way for a long while.

That's not the definition of "API client" I'm familiar with. In fact it feels like a very specific definition of "API client" - which is a broad term that I am familiar with.

(Why does it sometimes feel like I am not getting the memos that everyone else is getting? It's like when a new job description for an old job suddenly appears and everyone pretends that what it's always been called!)
by neilv | 2025-05-28 18:23:58+00:00
> None of it is saved.

As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company.

If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved.

In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.
by mk_stjames | 2025-05-28 18:25:23+00:00
They literally have a locations information site, which has a map, and shows if the locations are open or closed. So, they already have a web team capable of doing this because they already have it.

https://locations.wafflehouse.com/

What this person did was summarize this to a single map with red dots and a "% closed" indicator at the top. And tying it to the connotation that it is due to storms/natural disasters with the "index" moniker. Not something Waffle House really needed.
by seanhunter | 2025-05-28 18:25:31+00:00
Example: Since this deal was cash + equity I wondered whether telegram has a public valuation. I searched google and got an AI summary saying that the market capitalization of TELEGRAM is $7.4767.

That's dollars not billion dollars, because google's AI summary was referring to some scam coin which has a total marketcap of a big mac and fries plus or minus. It seems now to have updated to refer to the messaging app and _their_ (probably also scam)coin.
by strange_quark | 2025-05-28 18:25:35+00:00
No, IMO, the whole tech industry is cooked. AI is pitched as the next big thing (tm) that will delivery hyper-growth again, and when LLM-based AI doesn't live up to the insane claims being made, the bubble popping will take out players up and down the value chain, investment in tech overall will get massively pulled back, and the job market will get flooded by layoffs.
by kouru225 | 2025-05-28 18:26:09+00:00
It’s always great to find someone who’s been thinking the same as you have been, but took the time to formalize it.

For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me.

Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.
by puppycodes | 2025-05-28 18:26:11+00:00
There is sooooo much cool tech right now.

major advancements in hardware especially. Low cost FPGA's, amazing 3D printing tech, drones, its endless. There are some really interesting things happening in headsets for brainwave computer interfaces as well. Theres radar, microwave and ultrasonic. Open source investigations, tons of security advances, zero knowledge systems, Theres handheld raman spectrometers. Don't forget all the wild ways we can connect socially right now with VR, AR, etc... Theres home lab genetic engineering with high voltage electricity, theres all kinds of new monetary tech, We are on the verge of creating a feasible cure for HIV. If your looking for software based ideas some of my favorite github accounts are @sindresorhus and @mafintosh are always doing something interesting.

In my opinion its harder to decide what not to dive into.
by cheald | 2025-05-28 18:26:59+00:00
Right, and I think that in this case the person making the original statement was probably erroneously using "ChatGPT" to mean "LLM" (in the same way that "Kleenex" is used to mean a disposable tissue).

It's true that ChatGPT-the-product can search the web (using a traditional search engine as a RAG datastore), and it's also true that o4-the-llm is not a go-out-and-find-external-truth search engine. I'm more sympathetic to the original point because many people do misunderstand what LLMs are and what they're capable of, and it's worth dispelling those myths (though it's valuable to do it precisely specifically to avoid this sort of confusion).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-28 18:27:31+00:00
> LLMs are only implementing a limited aspect of meaning: mostly association and "some extension".

> Whenver an LLM appears to partake in more aspects of meaning it is only cheating: it is using familiarity with families of associations to overcome its disabilities.

I'm not convinced there's anything more to "meaning" - we seem to be defining concepts through relationship to other concepts, and ground that directly or indirectly with experiences. The richer that structure is, the more nuanced it gets.

> Like the idiot savant who appears to know all hollywood starlets, but is discovered eventually, not to realise they are all film stars. We routinely discover these disabilities in LLMs, when they attempt to engage in reasoning beyond these (formally,) narrow contexts of use.

I see those as limitations of degree, not kind. Less idiot savant, more like someone being hurried to answer questions on the spot. Some associations are stronger and come to mind immediately, some are less "fresh in memory", and then associations can bring false positives and it takes extra time/effort to notice and correct those. It's a common human experience, too. "Yes, those reserved words are 'void', 'var', 'volatile',... wait, 'var' is JS stuff, it's not reserved in C..." etc.

Then, of course, humans are learning continuously, and - perhaps more importantly - even if they're not learning, they're reinforcing (or attenuating) existing associations through bringing them up and observing feedback. LLMs can't do that on-line, but that's an engineering limitation, not a theoretical one.

I'm not claiming that LLMs are equivalent to humans in general sense. Just that they seem to be implementing the fundamental machinery behind "meaning" and "understanding" in general sense, and the theoretical structure behind it is quite pretty, and looks to me like a solution to a host of philosophical problems around meaning and language.
by noleary | 2025-05-28 18:28:24+00:00
(I'm the other cofounder of Tesseral).

Yeah, this is a line I wrote and could probably improve the clarity on. It's worth distinguishing the Tesseral concept of a User from the sense in which we might colloquially refer to a user. Some other people call the equivalent of a Tesseral User a Member or something similar.

An individual human being who wants to log in can be represented by multiple Users in Tesseral, each of which belongs to exactly one Organization.

That is, there's support for a given person with a given email address to participate in different workspaces, but each workspace will have a different instance of a User.
by password4321 | 2025-05-28 18:28:52+00:00
I don't have a link but I vaguely recall some criminal being tracked down because they cashed out the exact same value of Monero they received for their crime in a single transaction. I believe this falls under item 1 in the article but the reference link does not even discuss Monero.

I am interested in any references to tracking Monero in criminal court cases. So far it seems to be one of the most effective ways to "keep getting away with it".
by andrepd | 2025-05-28 18:28:58+00:00
Your premise is wrong. Most pick up drivers don't even use it more than once a year.

Either you do need a truck for work and then you get an actual work vehicle and not a tough guy cosplay like a dodge ram, or you don't and you shouldn't get one, or at least you should pay out of your ass for the increasing danger, road damage, pollution, etc.

https://www.strategicvision.com/nves
by layer8 | 2025-05-28 18:29:08+00:00
It’s normal for one-time purchases to come with a limit on updates (for desktop applications). A subscription would mean that you can’t continue using the functionality after the subscription is cancelled/expires, but you can continue to use a one-time purchase forever.

One criticism of mobile app stores is that they don’t provide the option of paid major updates, and thereby strongly push adopting a subscription model.
by specialist | 2025-05-28 18:29:22+00:00
David Roberts' Volts podcast covers decarbonization technologies (and policies).

Thermal batteries, thermovoltaics, district heating, advanced geothermal, electrolizers, catalysts, etc.

Roberts interviews the doers. Great intros for anyone who wants to learn more.

https://volts.wtf

Its nods towards "AI" are practical, like machine learning (power grid optimization efficiency) and discovery (new molecules) vs vibes and AGI hype.
by terhechte | 2025-05-28 18:31:16+00:00
You can run the 4bit quantized version of it on a M3 Ultra 512GB. That's quite expensive though. Another alternative is a fast CPU with 500GB of DDR5 RAM. That of course, is also not cheap and slower than the M3 Ultra. Or, you buy multiple Nvidia cards to reach ~500GB of VRam. That is probably the most expensive option but also the fastest
by jmclnx | 2025-05-28 18:31:39+00:00
stupid is as stupid does.

Well this will make China and Europe real happy since this will speed up the US brain drain. Off to obscurity the US goes.

We will be like Ireland was in the 70s, people go to Univ. then leave Ireland for better pastures. Now people in the US will be begging to go to Ireland, I know a couple of Irish people who came to the US in the 80s, now they are back home.
by anjc | 2025-05-28 18:31:41+00:00
It seems that people can't grasp the exponential rate of developments here. They're stuck in the GPT2 LLM narrative. Even with the amazing Veo 3 videos this week, people are still nitpicking and seemingly unable to remember the state of the art 2 weeks ago, 6 months ago, 1 year ago, etc.

I don't mean to say that scores on evaluation metrics will remain exponential but rather the developments, uses, integrations will (e.g., web search in ChatGPT), and people can't conceive or keep track of this, and therefore discussions on the area are always behind the times.

For example, I think it's inevitable now that TV/movie production will not exist as we know it in a short time, except as niche work, like fine art in the age of digital. It's also inevitable that fully personalised media will be predominant. I think this is obvious, but yet people are zooming in on the background of essentially perfect videos to spot minor and irrelevant coherence aberrations.

Nitpicking will also inevitably become a niche hobby, like people who complain about the colour grading on a movie remaster, while the rest of the world just watches the movie and doesn't notice or care about the issues.
by leptons | 2025-05-28 18:31:58+00:00
>15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was.

Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.
by kpw94 | 2025-05-28 18:32:05+00:00
Books have a back cover for that reason: so you can read it before buying.

Long-form articles could have a back cover summary too, or an enticing intro... and some substack paid articles do that already: they let you read an intro and cut before going in the interesting details.

But for short newspapers articles it becomes harder to do based on topic. If the summary has to give out 90% of the information to not be too vague, you may then feel robbed paying for it once you realize the remaining 10% wasn't that useful.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-28 18:32:13+00:00
FYI this is Sahil Lavingia, who has a long history in the tech world and HN. He's definitely not a villain and has done some good things in the tech world over the years.

However, he's also very good at PR and spinning things in his favor. He has a long history of going full hustle-culture on trends as they come along, including everything from NFTs to LLMs and now DOGE. He's very good at wiggling out of difficult situations and rewriting history about himself, and this article is a good example of that.
by sfaist | 2025-05-28 18:33:14+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Stefan, co-founder of superglue. Adina and I started working on automating data pipelines and transformations about a year ago. Folks love our agent for building and maintaining data pipelines, and we thought it would be fun to let another agent do all the work that's left. Our goal here is to make this process as easy and painless as possible, and we'd love to hear how you deal with building and maintaining data transformations right now, and if this is a value add.
by FredPret | 2025-05-28 18:34:24+00:00
Here's Genocide Watch's take: https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages

Stages currently active in SA: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Some people claim that the high murder rate among white SA'ns means they're also in stage 8/9, but actually the murder rate among black SA'ns is even higher.

There's no genocide, but there's a whole lot of red flags and generally terrible things. Just because Trump believes something does not make it wrong.

From elsewhere on that site: "Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of Genocide Watch, warned that early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society, though genocide has not begun."

There are countless examples of early warnings. Here are a couple:

- Former president of SA sings "bring my machine gun" song at ruling party conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFIobjP3xAI

- Same guy singing "kill the Boer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JNc7SLUE1g

Many similar statements have been made by other politicians, among them Julius Malema, who collectively represent a large part of SA's population, over the course of many years.

Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.
by jmye | 2025-05-28 18:34:31+00:00
So… turn it off. Social media is 99% of the firehose, and people adamantly refuse to do anything about it.

There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever.

Turn shit off.

Or drown, I guess.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-28 18:34:55+00:00
This is a thing that predates DEI/wokeism and is pushed by a guy that is clearly a very good salesman.

It’s really quite genius in that all the decision-making comes from people so far removed from the consequences of their actions that they’ll never see whether it works or not. The teachers have to deal with the BS whether they agree with the policy or not. And the negative outcomes get pushed on to someone else, a few years later.

Great gig if you can get it
by goalieca | 2025-05-28 18:35:03+00:00
If you think USA is too politically charged, even under the Biden administration and intelligence communities, then you can look to other countries, scientists, and others that have also come to the same conclusion independently.

The amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and there’s clearly motive for cover up in the governments and organizations since they were involved in funding the research in Wuhan which sent three lab workers to the hospital before the outbreak was acknowledged.
by vindex10 | 2025-05-28 18:35:28+00:00
it was also my first thought on abstractions of abstractions, thanks for sharing :)

could you elaborate a bit more on why HPC world is special when it comes to configuring the environment?

I always feel it is a typical problem in software development, to separate operating system env from the application env.

do you use spack / easybuild on your personal computer, for example if you need to install a package that is not part of the distribution?
by cvburgess | 2025-05-28 18:36:34+00:00
I had the exact same experience and switched from Tauri 2.0 to Electron after a month.

No only were there UI inconsistencies, but Safari lags behind chrome with things like the Popover API and the build/codesign/CD ecosystem for Tauri is incredibly scattered.

When I was using it, IAPs were still not really an option for Tauri or at least I could not find any docs or resources about it.
by srigi | 2025-05-28 18:36:44+00:00
The most funny thing is how synchronicity worked its magic:

Roo Code experimental code indexing using vector DB dropped 3 days ago. Theire using Tree-sitter (the same as Aider) to parse sources into ASTs and do vector embedding on that product, instead of plaintext.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117455
by comrade1234 | 2025-05-28 18:37:16+00:00
I thought this was something else... my cousin has been living in Japan 10+ years in a small town for on the other side of Mt Fuji from Tokyo and I went and stayed with him for a couple of weeks. Every day (maybe twice? I can't remember) loudspeakers on poles around the neighborhood would start playing amateurish announcements - some very old man half-asleep reading a list of events, news, etc. I was hoping they turned it digital and just sent it to your phone. For how peaceful things normally were in this town it was disruptive.