MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2025-05-22 06:56:50+00:00
Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process

One friend and I had a competition who could make the smallest kernel configuration still functional on their hardware. I remember that at some point we could build it in ten minutes or so. This was somewhere in the nineties, I was envious of his DX2-50.

Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.

One of the really huge benefits of S.u.S.E. in Europe in the nineties was that you could buy it in nearly every book shop and it came with an installation/administration book and multiple CD-ROMs with pretty much all packages. Since many people did not have internet at all or at most dial-up, it gave you everything to have a complete system.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-22 06:57:13+00:00
> Currently, the LSP implementation is partially closed-source, primarily for the sake of development speed convenience -- it heavily depends on parts of IntelliJ, Fleet, and our distributed Bazel build that allows us to iterate quickly and experiment much faster, cutting corners and re-using internal infrastructure where it helps. After the initial stabilization phase and defining the final set of capabilities, we will de-couple the LSP implementation from the internal repository and build pipelines and open source it completely

The full quote ...

Instead of working on this behind closed doors for the next year or so and then open sourcing everything, they are releasing some open source now with the intention to open source the rest later. I see no problem with that. Seems pragmatic. More companies should do that.

Bottom line, you are getting free stuff now. Some of it OSS now. All of it OSS later. No need to get upset.
by rebolek | 2025-05-22 06:57:50+00:00
Again, technically, it is. But ear isn't scientific device, neither is your amplifier. What I was describing is more than an agreement than some precise measurement. 3dB is more or less double the volume but different frequencies have different responses so I really wouldn't want to have some "perfect" way of measuring loudness as it would be so needlessly complicated that it would be useless.
by the_third_wave | 2025-05-22 06:58:16+00:00
MAHA - Make Android Holo Again because screen space is an awful thing to waste, because the 'trans pride colour scheme' is unappealing (I assume the colour scheme is configurable, yes?), because mobile devices are not soft fluffy baby toys, because it just looks better - probably subjective but so be it. Just like Fisher-Z declared in "One Voice" there's a new generation that's sick of (the UI equivalent of) "Blowing in the wind". Be gone, squircly bubbles, you're not welcome anymore.
by timewizard | 2025-05-22 06:58:51+00:00
> That said, I don’t know how to pronounce “3e5”

"Three to the exponent of five." Or "Three Exponent Five." Or "Three Exp Five."

> Seeing this, some madman decided that 1 bel should always describe a 10× increase in power, even if it’s applied to another base unit. This means that if you’re talking about watts, +1 bel is an increase of 10×; but if you’re talking about volts, it’s an increase of √10×

This is power vs. amplitude. This is the specific reason the dB is so useful in these systems.

> the value is meaningless unless we know the base unit and the reference point

No you just need to know if you have a power or a root-power quantity. Which should generally be obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_root-power,_and_field_q...
by namaria | 2025-05-22 06:59:15+00:00
I really don't understand what is going on. I try to, I read the papers, the threads, I think about it. But I can't figure this out.

How can it be that people expect that pumping more energy into closed systems could do anything else than raise entropy? Because that's what it is. You attach GPU farms to your code base and make them pump code into it? You're pumping energy into a closed system. The result cannot be other than greater entropy.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-22 06:59:31+00:00
I think in some ways science has been co-opted by careerists who try to minmax output to accelerate their careers. Being idea obsessed is part of this. It’s much easier to get a paper published that’s on the hype train as opposed to a paper that challenges some idea. Publications justify grant money, grant money justifies more people and more power, more power justifies promotions. And if you talk with early career scientists they all will say they are only doing it until they get a permanent position. Then they will become more curious. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I have many older colleagues who are quite curious compared to their younger counterparts. but I believe rewarding ambition at the expense of curiosity is somewhat anti intellectual. It’s sad because I think science should reorganise as the current structure of departments into disciplines may be dated and restructuring could help alleviate this a lot since interdisciplinary work may leverage curiousity over ambition as curiosity will be rewarded with high impact work. But who knows. I can arm chair my way into anything.
by znpy | 2025-05-22 06:59:48+00:00
You can run whatever you want in containers. You don't even need root permissions. Red Hat's podman can launch containers without the need for root privileges.

> Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.

Fedora today is what RHEL will be tomorrow. They quite literally freeze a Fedora release to use as a base for RHEL's next release. If you like Fedora today you're gonna like Fedora tomorrow.
by znpy | 2025-05-22 07:01:48+00:00
> But when Linus created Linux, he didn’t do it for money, and RH just seems corporate to me like the Microsoft of Linux, way back before Microsoft had their own Linux. I want my Linux free-range not cooped.

You seem to forget that Red Hat has funded a lot of the development of the Linux ecosystem. There would be essentially no modern linux environment without Red Hat.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-22 07:02:26+00:00
That's just about a yearish or more. The trendline I'm talking about is the past 15 years.

But that being said, I would say the trendline is the same. LLMs were just an exponential and existential jump in progress that dwarfed anything in the last 15 years. The inevitable slow down after the blip just makes you feel as if it's become much shallower. But in reality, it's the same, and we'll have more and more break throughs.
by Flemlo | 2025-05-22 07:03:15+00:00
But plenty of companies already do this for a decade and more

Having old shitty code base and not retaining the people who built it.

I have done that too despite the creator sitting only 100km away. Code was shit as hell tons of c&p different logic in different endpoints for logging in.

Finally it's worth it to have adrs and similar things.
by Mortiffer | 2025-05-22 07:03:44+00:00
The R community has been hard at work on small data. I still highly prefer working on on memory data in R dplyr DataTable are elegant and fast.

The CRan packages are all high quality if the maintainer stops responding to emails for 2 months your package is automatically removed. Most packages come from university Prof's that have been doing this their whole career.
by ggm | 2025-05-22 07:04:30+00:00
Do a deep dive into audio vu Meters and how they got calibrated. Without being 100% sure, it's basically a totally subjective model, where back in the 1920s the BBC and some US company decided to assert "like us" and two models persist which have been retconned into some BIPM acceptable ground truth but it basically was "test it against the one we made which works"

The hysteresis in the coil-magnet meter response turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
by jhayward | 2025-05-22 07:05:03+00:00
I don't think your conclusion of "hitting the wall on intelligence" is warranted.

It makes more sense to believe that scaling has hit the wall on available text data to train on, and that to continue scaling, along with whatever emergent properties arise they need much more data than exists as text.

There are orders of magnitude more data as video, audio, and images and this is what they intend to use to continue scaling.
by microtonal | 2025-05-22 07:05:13+00:00
To be pedantic, yum was not from Yellow Dog, it is Yellow dog Updater Modified after all. It was a rewrite of the Yellow Dog Updater by people at Duke University. (Yellow Dog Linux was based on Red Hat.)

There was a lot of competition around package managers back then. For RPM, there were also urpmi, apt-rpm, etc.
by geoffpado | 2025-05-22 07:06:55+00:00
Really? It has a whole bunch of unstructured data, and there was no linkage between the child's relationship and his name. A basic search wouldn't have (and didn't) found this easily. This was something that was able to ingest a ton of emails, *understand the context* of them, and respond to a natural-language query. Just 3 years ago, this would have seemed like magic.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-22 07:07:02+00:00
No. That amount of gravitational force is not realizable yet.

The human brain is on earth and exists.

>Stocks are obviously a pretty bad example for your claim, because they are a clear counterpoint (in formal logic, which you appealed to, that's enough to call it a proof that trendlines do not ensure any future outcome).

No they aren't I told you stocks are different. There are many trendlines in the world WHERE scientists use to predict things. So the fact that it's used as a statistical model makes your point completely false. Stocks have one of the most volatile movements.

>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.

>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.

That's not a feedback loop. People aren't looking at the valuation of the company and trying to bet low or high based off of other peoples attempts to do the same thing.

In stocks people literally LOOK at trendlines and bet based off of that. They both influence the trendline and they take the trendline as input into their own trading algorithm. AI is not doing this at all.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-22 07:07:20+00:00
>This assumes constant progress

It assumes the trendline, as it's constant. Any other assumption is lower probability.

>. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.

5 years is a little speculative. 10 is not. At least for me, whenever I call a taxi, it's always an AI taxi. I no longer have human drivers drive me anywhere. So... that's another trendline for you to follow.
by timewizard | 2025-05-22 07:07:24+00:00
> I am not sure what leads you to answer this way

Knowledge of facts and history.

What leads people such as yourself to start a response this way? "I'll respond to you but first I'm going to feign ignorance of how you could even say that in a way that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion." I perceive this as exceptionally rude. Am I alone in that?

> does inherently allow undetected tampering by any middleman.

Yes. And did I describe methods by which you can hijack connections to /become/ the middleman? Perhaps you missed the subtle detail.

> That's the very essence of MITM attacks.

The popularized attacks you're describing became popular because they were done with the techniques I described in places like Starbucks and other businesses with open Wifi networks. Here it is, literally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep
by Nevermark | 2025-05-22 07:07:24+00:00
I wouldn't keep downplaying sleep hygiene. It is real:

1. Lots of people are doing obvious things that clearly prevent them from getting good sleep: Alcohol, no exercise, or exercise to close to bedtime, bright screen time right before bed, drinking too much water and waking up, no regular bed time so body is always confused, not actively doing something with stress they take to bed with them, bedroom too warm, ... on and on.

2. Lots of people have benefited from not doing these unhelpful things.

You might frame things as:

-----

Poor sleep undermines almost everything we do, reducing motivation, lowering cognitive performance, and interfering with our social and professional lives. Poor sleep contributes significantly to both mental and physical health issues, and reduce lifespans.

It is fair to say, that widespread sleep problems not only hold millions of individuals back, but society as a whole.

Current wisdom is useful, as far as it goes. But it hasn't been enough.

Sleep hygiene is great at removing barriers to good sleep, but our modern world bears little resemblance to the habitats and habits our bodies evolved to thrive in. All that complexity makes perfect hygiene impossible. And even with great hygiene, many people still have trouble getting quality sleep.

But our team has had a profound insight, that we couldn't walk away from. There are other ways to help sleep than simply avoiding sleep disrupters or sleeping in late.

Our team's unique vision is to pro-actively assist the body as it sleeps. To improve sleep quality, independent of sleep duration problems or other issues.

This is a promising new, and complementary, approach to improving sleep.

Our team has been engaged in fascinating work, developing a better understanding of the practicalities our brains deal with as they perform their vital sleep duties. But we are even more excited that those revelations are helping us design potential therapeutic interventions that can actively assist our brain to help us.

And most of all, we are thrilled that those potential interventions in sleep quality, already in the works, may benefit individuals and society so profoundly.

Are we being audacious or too earnest to say we have a dream? Well we do! We have a dream.

-----

So, being complementary to sleep hygiene is a plus, not a minus. Two pronged attacks on problems are MUCH more powerful and promising, if they are complementary, than solutions that are just substitutions.

Also, downplaying established wisdom is a flashing red sign pointing at cooks and scams.

Einstein didn't downplay Newton's theory of gravity when he replaced it. Newton's theory was a great improvement over what existed before. Einstein wouldn't have had is own insights without it. All wisdom is a stepping stone to new wisdom, not an impediment.

Knowing that sleep hygiene, despite being helpful, is widely recognized as not enough was surely and impetus for you own insights. It wasn't competition, it helped you, and it will still help people, as far as it goes. You may find the certain kinds of hygiene magnify the benefits of your work.
by vitorgrs | 2025-05-22 07:08:17+00:00
For light theme, their default color... The grayish combined with the UX in general feels for me very Windows 2000 or so.

But talking about real UI/UX, I do guess it's just about everything. It feels like the UI/UX was developed by programmers. It feels unpolished.

Border radius, paddings... A lot of things there being square and not round... The default icons. The context menu being to square, again. Even the default close/minimize buttons.

Like, UI wise, Finder and Nautilus is just way ahead than Dolphin for me.

Libadwaita apps also feel very consistent. I can find most of my apps with basically same consistent design on gnome.

UI wise I find gnome beautiful, their problem it's with UX and the excess of simplicity, like removing real features from Nautilus...

But at the same time I guess, KDE made the mistake of being too much complex UI wise. Even their screenshot tool it's a little insane hahahah

Maybe I just find it KDE ugly because I got super used by Gnome, macOS and Windows 10/11 UI? Likely.
Show HN: I made an app collecting rental deals from FB groups in one feed
by michaldolnik | 2025-05-22 07:08:33+00:00
I made an app which collects data from various real-estate related Facebook groups from certain location (currently Bali, Bangkok, Phuket) and shows them in one simple feed. So you don't need to have opened dozens of tabs, now you have it in one place with many other features.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-22 07:08:38+00:00
I have the same thing, it feels like your ear is clogged with water, or when you shift in altitude, then like a high pitched sound for ten seconds and then everything is normal again. Every few months or so this sporadically happens.

Funny thing is every time I mentioned this IRL there's always someone who has experienced it too, like some sort of common mystery condition
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-22 07:08:53+00:00
Decibels make sense and it’s usually only laymen who use only „dB“. I’d be surprised if you’d find „-45 dB“ as the specification for a microphone. Here’s two random examples:

Sensitivity at 1 kHz into 1 kohm: 23 mV/Pa ≙ –32.5 dBV ± 1 dB

Sensitivity: -56 dBV/Pa (1.85 mV)
by netsharc | 2025-05-22 07:10:16+00:00
Well duh... what I'm portraying is someone faking a human conversation, but who's actually just an output device for an LLM. A bit like pick-up artists going through a routine. What you're portraying is someone reciting Wikipedia, which would obviously be dull. And from that you're extrapolating that someone robotically reciting what an LLM is whispering would also be dull.

What I'm saying is, have a little bit more imagination and imagine someone seemingly in natural conversation, who is actually an LLM. Could they be engaging? IMO quite a bit more engaging compared to someone reading Wikipedia out loud. Would it be artificial? It still is. But would the conversation partner notice? Maybe not for a while. Would I hate it? Of course...
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-22 07:15:03+00:00
Generally people are on fixed rates that are updated yearly. Its pretty "new" to get variable rates here.

https://agilebuddy.uk/historic/agile

has some historic prices. We still use gas for heating, so there isn't so much seasonality for consumption. (there is, but not in the same way).

What does affect price is wind. you can see in december there were both record high prices and record low. The more wind we have the cheap power becomes. so in winter its generally quite cheap, but then also it can flip and become very expensive, because gas imports are expensive.
by atoav | 2025-05-22 07:15:13+00:00
But dB is not a unit, it is a multiplier. dB on its own is unitless and if we say "X is reduced by 6 dB" you know that the value of X is half of what it was before (×0.5) if something is amplified by 6 dB it is double of what it was before (×2.0)¹

Note that the unit only starts to play a role when you reference your dB value to some absolute maximum, e.g.:

dBV which is referenced to 1V RMS dBu which is referenced to 0.775V RMS (1mW into a typical audio system impedance of 600 Ohms) dBFS which is referenced to a digital audio maximum level (0dBFS) beyond which your numeric range would clip (meaning all practical values will be negative) dBSPL which is refrenced to the Sound Pressure Level that is at the lower edge of hearing (0 dBSPL), this is what people mean when they say the engine of a starting airplane is 120dB loud

Now dB is extremely useful in all fields where your values span extremely big ranges, like in audio engineering, where the ratio between high and low values can easily have a ratio of 1:10 Millions. So unless you want people to count zeroes behind the comma, dB is the way to go.

When we think about the connection between analog and digital audio dB is useful because despite you having volts on the one side and bits on the other side a 6dB change on one side translates to a 6dB change on the other, the reference has just changed. If we had no dB we would have to do conversions constantly.

Going from multiplier x to dB: 20×log₁₀(x)

Going from dB to multiplier x: 10^(x/20)

If you use dB to describe the power of a signal that is slightly different (you use 10 instead of 20 as multiplier/divisor)

But you can see, dB is just a way to describe a unreferenced size change in a uniform way or to describe a referenced ratio. And then it would be good to know what that reference is. So if someone says a thing has 40dB you they forgot to tell you the unit.

¹ this is true for the amplitude of a signal and differs when we talk about the power of a signal, where 3dB is a doubling/halving.
by visarga | 2025-05-22 07:15:58+00:00
> An 8GB Macbook could use Gemma 3 4B at 2.5GB+1GB, but this is probably not worth doing.

I am currently using this model on a Macbook with 16GB ram, it is hooked up with a chrome extension that extracts text from webpages and logs to a file, then summarizes each page. I want to develop an episodic memory system, like MS Recall, but local, it does not leak my data to anyone else, and costs me nothing.

Gemma 3 4B runs under ollama and is light enough that I don't feel it while browsing. Summarization happens in the background. This page I am on is already logged and summarized.
by joshjob42 | 2025-05-22 07:16:58+00:00
I have only just begun my road down lisp, from starting to hack some elisp and working with some CL for fun. But structural editing is turning out to rapidly be my favorite feature, to the point that I'm working in my personal time on a lisp (syntax? language? idk haven't exactly decided) on top of Julia (my preferred language) so that I can use structural editing. The ability to just grab and drop entire expressions and advance through code by expression at a given level of the tree or up and down it is just really really nice.

There already is a LispSyntax.jl but it's sort of trying to be a Clojure clone and I don't care for it, haha.
by solarwindy | 2025-05-22 07:17:02+00:00
Agreed, though long before such qualms come to the fore I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that this entire approach to AI is at all capable of formulating mental models of the kind that have enabled humans to produce all the wonderful mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, etc. of the past several centuries.

I see the supposed reasoning tokens this latest crop of models produce as merely an extension of the parlour trick. We're so deep into this delusion that it's so very tempting to anthropomorphize this ersatz stream of consciousness as being 'thought'. I remain unconvinced that it's anything of the sort.

This comes to mind: "It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it."

This latest bubble smacks ever more of being a con.
by bigiain | 2025-05-22 07:17:15+00:00
> > That said, I don’t know how to pronounce “3e5”

> "Three to the exponent of five." Or "Three Exponent Five." Or "Three Exp Five."

Somehow, you need to distinguish between 3^5 (=243), 3 x e^5 (=~445.24), and 3 x 10^5 (=300,000).

I'd pronounce "3e5" and "three times ten to the 5" in most cases.
by friendzis | 2025-05-22 07:17:58+00:00
> During my use of AI (yeah, I don't hate AI), I found that the current generative (I call them pattern reconstruction) systems has this great ability to Impress An Idiot

I would be genuinely positively surprised if that stops to be the case some day. This behavior is by design.

AS you put yourself, these LLM systems are very good at pattern recognition and reconstruction. They have ingested vast majority of the internet to build patterns on. On the internet, the absolutely vast majority of content is pushed out by novices and amateurs: "Hey, look, I have just read a single wikipedia page or attended single lesson, I am not completely dumbfounded by it, so now I will explain it to you".

LLMs have to be peak Dunning-Krugers - by design.