MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by relaxing | 2025-06-06 01:23:10+00:00
I realize that probably sounds insurmountable, but the practical upshot of that factoid is you can jam GPS with a handheld transmitter. Military jammers can be much, much bigger. As big as a 5,000,000x Loran transmitter even!

I think in reality, it’s easier to put little star trackers on your boats and planes.

And it’s way easier to launch another cruise missile at the rebuilt LORAN site.
by radpanda | 2025-06-06 01:24:46+00:00
> You could look at this as an abitrage opportunity where a business throwing out bulk waste has to pay for it, but if you distribute it to individual citizens whose trash bin still has a bit of room in it, you can throw it out for free.

Yeah, that’s what I figured was going on here. Reminds me of pizza delivery (in the US anyhow), which relies on pizza delivery guys not paying attention to the cost of vehicle wear-and-tear and proper insurance so your pizza is cheaper than if every pizza place owned properly maintained and insured vehicles.
by DrammBA | 2025-06-06 01:25:47+00:00
Try this "absolute mode" custom instruction for chatgpt, it cuts down all the BS in my experience:

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered - no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
by tejtm | 2025-06-06 01:26:19+00:00
Curious that.

The English did force the French population out of there and down the Mississippi to become Cajuns.

And the children of the native Abenaki population were sent to English Schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-06-06 01:26:27+00:00
Dialyzer is easy to intentionally or accidentally mislead, so it's only as good as the quality of human-authored typespecs (which are sometimes absent from major mainstream Hex packages) and the inference is simultaneously more open-ended and unhelpfully precise than most people are accustomed to if they have prior experience with something like Rust or TypeScript. People also frequently struggle to accurately interpret its output.

I still find dialyzer to have non-zero value, but it's not uncontroversial and it's not usefully integrated with the vanilla language tooling. Mix/elixirc is not generally going to throw you a bone if you violated a syntax-correct type spec. It's an opt-in secondary tool and that diminishes its utility a tad.
by al_borland | 2025-06-06 01:27:54+00:00
I don’t think I will ever calculate this stat again.

I used it several years ago to justify the need to prioritize a certain project at work, saying it took 3 FTEs working around the clock for this one thing that could be fully automated. Based on my math this was true, but it’s not like anyone was only doing this one thing, it was mixed in throughout their day of doing other stuff as well.

My intent was to get this mind numbing work automated so these people could do more useful and interesting work; there was plenty to do. Fast forward to when the work was rolled out… they laid off 3 people. I had no idea that was coming, and yelled at management over it when I found out. I felt responsible. A lot of trust was broken all around with that move.

What I’ve done more recently has saved hundreds of thousands of hours of human time. Management isn’t bringing up that stat (at least to me) and I’m not going to put it in their head. They’re likely to lay off whole departments.
by opan | 2025-06-06 01:28:56+00:00
Reading the article, I think I can do what the author can't, but I also think he probably imagines what he lacks to be more clear/detailed than it is for people without the issue. I can recall specific events from many years ago from my perspective, but it's tidbits, and the info feels lossy. The question he struggled with about past challenges is difficult for most people, I'd guess, but I do not think his issues are fake/normal because of that.
by physicles | 2025-06-06 01:31:12+00:00
> Then she adds some spatial information, like "it's on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station" and suddenly I'm transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly.

This works for me too. Let’s say I run into someone I met once a couple months ago. Maybe I recognized them, but I might not remember their name, and certainly don’t remember what we talked about. As soon as I can get details about where in the city the venue was, or where we were sitting in the room, then it all comes back.

I don’t have aphantasia, just a sometimes frustratingly inadequate memory.
by mattigames | 2025-06-06 01:31:41+00:00
The diminished muscles in our jaws are one of the direct causes we have bigger brains, source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4817-early-humans-swa...

Humans evolved Wesker muscles to gain brain mass, source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/140527-br...
by stevev | 2025-06-06 01:34:23+00:00
It’s still too expensive. Their voices are very similar to Disney voices in quality; not surprising since they recently worked with them.

With such a potential backing, their margins are probably going to actors voices and rights; thus why it’s expensive.

Chatterbox an open source free version is very close. Hume ai is a close second and much more affordable. OpenAI tts is also 10x cheaper.
by viccis | 2025-06-06 01:35:01+00:00
Half the time when people describe aphantasia, I want to say something like "you realize that most people don't 'see' things in their mind as clear as open eye visuals, right?" but I keep quiet because I know that the worst thing you can do with something like this is make them feel as though you've invalidated something that has become a core pillar of their identity by that point.
by vel0city | 2025-06-06 01:35:22+00:00
I've actually driven many thousands of miles with level 2 ADAS. There is no "not paying attention" in the system I'm using. If you even spend a few seconds too much gazing out the sides the system will beep at you and eventually pull over. If I take a few too many sips from my cup it'll beep at me and eventually pull over. I have to actively be shifting my gaze around out of the front, constantly being attentive to the cars to keep it in level 2.

It's really not inhuman levels of constant vigilance, not anymore than actually driving the car regularly. I just don't have to actively be keeping the pedals just right to maintain the following distance myself and I don't have to constantly fight the wheel.
by workworkwork71 | 2025-06-06 01:36:34+00:00
Of course there is waste in the federal gov but somehow I think Elon ripping food from starving children and torching the agencies that regulate his businesses isn't actually going to solve that problem.

People who proudly attached their names to doge will go down in the history books as the people responsible for hundreds of thousands (or millions, in time) of deaths and the outright larceny of structure & privacy from the American people.

Nothing could be more shameful.
by bckr | 2025-06-06 01:36:55+00:00
Claude has been adding PYTHONPATH to test commands, and for some reason, the “don’t ask again” doesn’t stick for these types of commands. So I’ve been trying to get it to use make commands, which can modify the environment, and don’t trigger the same permission issues. Just now I finally put it in CLAUDE.md “always use make commands to run tests”. Haven’t seen yet whether it will stick.
by the_af | 2025-06-06 01:37:12+00:00
Interesting.

Let me see if I follow: once the snake population has the warning coloration, and predators know not to eat them, then individual snakes being successful at eating poisonous newts is unrelated to the snakes living long enough to pass their genes (i. e. being successful in terms of natural selection). So a snake which has the right colors will be successful, regardless of its diet.

I wonder, is there a point where mimicry can fail? Can predators at some point start to eat the mimics?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-06 01:37:35+00:00
>So, basically, you think all the pro-AI folks are "bad," and defensive because they feel like anti-AI folks are attacking the thing that makes them not bad?

I break the pro-AI crowd into 3 main categories and 2 sub categories:

1. those who don't really know how to code, but AI lets them output something more than what they could do on their own. This seems to be what the GP is focused on

2. The ones who can code but are financially invested to hype up the bubble. Fairly self explanatory; the market is rough and if you're getting paid the big bucks to evangelize, it's clear where the interests lie.

3. Executives and product teams that have no actual engagement with AI, but know bringing it up excites investors. a hybrid of 1 and 2, but they aren't necessarily pretending they use it themselves. It's the latest means to an end (the end being money).

and then the smaller sects:

1. those who genuinely feel AI is the future and is simply prepping for it and trying to adapt their workflow and knowledged based around it. They may feel it can already replace people, or may feel it's a while out but progressing that way. These are probable the most honest party, but I personally feel they miss a critical aspect: what is used currently as the backbone for AI may radically change by the time it is truly viable.

2. those who are across the spectrum of AI, but see it as a means to properly address the issue of copyright. If AI wins, they get their true goal of being able to yoink many more properties without regulations to worry about.

>People who are hyper-competent/elite-skill in their domain who achieve force multiplication with gen-AI understand this,

are their real examples of this? The main issue I see is that people seem to judge "competency" based on speed and output. But not on the quality, maintainability, nor conciseness of such output. If we just needed engineers to slap together something that "works", we could be "more productive".
by numeri | 2025-06-06 01:38:50+00:00
I think you're assuming more people are like you than actually are.

This is part of the classic debate around aphantasia – both sides assume the other side is speaking more metaphorically, while they're speaking literally. E.g., "Surely he doesn't mean he literally can't visualize things, he just means it's not as sharp for him." or "Surely they don't literally mean they can see it, they're just imagining the list of details/attributes and pretending to see it."
by mythz | 2025-06-06 01:39:55+00:00
Because the pricing when creating an instance shows me the cost for the entire month, then works out the average hourly price based on that. This is just creating a GPU VM instance, I don't see how to see the cost of different NVidia GPUs without it.

If you wanted to show hourly pricing, you would show that first, then calculate the monthly price from the hourly rate. I've no idea if the monthly cost includes sustained usage discount and what the hourly cost is for just running it for an hour.
by mkfs | 2025-06-06 01:40:06+00:00
To some degree, mind's eye clarity is an illusion, with many overestimating the fidelity of their mental imagery. One of the better, more recent examples is the "draw a bicycle" experiment: https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...

Granted, many can't draw at all, but people's inability to reproduce from memory an object of some complexity that they see (and likewise, use) every day is telling.

Also the well-documented inaccuracy of eye-witness testimony.
Ask HN: Who's Using the Origin Private File System?
by ChadNauseam | 2025-06-06 01:41:25+00:00
I think the OPFS [0] is just awesome. (For the uninitiated: each website gets a directory that only it can access, and it can write to & read from that directory at near-native speed.) Adobe uses it for the web-version of photoshop, to allow it to work with files that can't fit in browser memory [1].

I love it. I have the impulse to use it for basically everything that I don't use localStorage for. I first used it when writing an in-browser vector database, for which it was pretty much perfect. (I liked it so much I wrote an abstraction layer for it so I could write code once and have it work natively, in the browser, or in memory.) OPFS can be used from web workers and has a nice async API. But I very rarely hear anyone else talking about it. I wouldn't be surprised if most web devs don't know it exists. So I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone else is using it.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API/Origin_private_file_system

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/how-photoshop-solved-working-with-files-larger-than-can-fit-into-memory
by stephen_g | 2025-06-06 01:42:15+00:00
I'd have to think for a few minutes to really come up with good examples because it's basically going over a huge number of random memories and re-categorising them into a framework that's completely different to how they're stored in my memory. This is even with me having (I believe) pretty good autobiographical memory with not really any of the deficiencies talked about in the article.

Off the top of my head without really stopping and thinking for a while I can often only come up with some boring and generic examples.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-06 01:42:28+00:00
>as organizations that mandated AI usage will start to fall behind their non-AI mandating peers.

You're assuming organizations are operating with the goal of quality and velocity in mind. We saw that WFH made people more productive, and had higher quality of life. companies are still trying to enforce RTO as we speak. The productivity was deemed not worth it compared to other factors like real estate, management ego, and punishing the few who abused the priveledge.

We're in weird times and sadly many companies have mature tech by now. They can afford to lose productivity if it helps make number go up.
Show HN: A Simple Tool to Copy Special Characters and Symbols Easily
by sagasu007 | 2025-06-06 01:42:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool to make it easier to find and copy special characters, symbols, and text decorations—things like arrows, math symbols, stars, or aesthetic unicode styles (ℯ ).

The idea came from frequently searching for the same symbols (like →, , or ) when writing documentation or blog posts. Most existing tools either had too many distractions or weren’t very fast to use.

This tool is: • Focused on speed and minimal UI • Fully client-side (no tracking or login) • Grouped by type (arrows, currency, emoji-like, etc.) • Mobile-friendly

You can check it out here: https://special-characters.aitoolshubs.com/

I’d love feedback—especially on anything that feels unintuitive or if you think something’s missing. Thanks!
by adriand | 2025-06-06 01:44:08+00:00
I suspect I'm close to the SDAM side on the autobiographical memory spectrum, since reading this my immediate thought was, wow. But you make a good point. So I have a question for you, which is, do you remember acquaintances from a few years ago who you haven't seen since?

I have these jarring social experiences where I encounter people who readily recognize me, refer to me by name, etc., and I have no idea who they are. Usually (although not always) they look vaguely familiar, so that I know I must have known them at some point, but they have essentially been erased from my mind. I cope with this by greeting them warmly and just faking it.

I am also absolutely terrible at remembering personal details from other people's lives, although I have great recall of scientific facts, figures and dates.

In general I feel like my past is about about three or four years long. I'm in my mid-forties and everything from before the pandemic feels like it happened a century ago. But I have no gauge on whether that is normal.
by BugsBunny1991 | 2025-06-06 01:44:56+00:00
I would hang in there and get in touch with a therapist or a friend that you know to have good judgment before you take action. Hopefully they will be able to assess your thinking and point out any blind spots.

I would advise even more caution when considering actions that are not easily reversed like quitting.

Lastly, I would try to get some distance from your thoughts and feelings, to get out of them temporarily so you can view them with some skepticism. It could help you see other causes that are feeding into your situation. Hard physical exercise might help here.
by khuey | 2025-06-06 01:46:57+00:00
The answer is clearly yes IMO. We probably wouldn't have nuclear fission if it weren't for Shinkolobwe, which by sheer luck had uranium ore at a concentration far greater than any uranium ore ever found anywhere else on earth. Surely there are other technologies we're missing out on simply because we don't (or didn't at the time) have the raw materials.
by credit_guy | 2025-06-06 01:47:34+00:00
There are multiple causes of that fumbling around, and many/most irrational. But in the end Chernobyl and Fukushima really did happen. Now, even with that, there should be a learning curve for the additional technology due to the increased safety. We just never had a chance to climb that curve. And by "we", I meant the West. China appears to be making huge strides.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-06-06 01:47:49+00:00
I've always attributed this to feeling that I truly don't care about some moments or scraps of information. Holding onto them is an entirely pointless chore for the mind, so we forget them by default. Mapping of physical space must be a very different form of memory, however. This doesn't seem to degrade very much over decades and decades of time.
by cstrahan | 2025-06-06 01:47:49+00:00
I often can’t remember what I did the previous week / weekend before that. I’m 36, and this is how I’ve been for as long as I can remember (our high school had alternating daily class schedules, and I very often forgot if the day before was an A schedule or B schedule, as I could recall some random moments in class from the past handful of days but I couldn’t tell if one recollection was of yesterday or the day before, or the day before that — it’s all a jumble).

To expand on that: questions about travel are my Achilles heel when it comes to dating. “So, where have you been, and what did you do while there?” Well, I took a trip to Iceland with my ex-girlfriend, and I’ve been all over the place with my family, but… I don’t remember the names of the places, and I don’t remember all that much of historical sites and such. Probably doesn’t help that I’m not all that engaged with the names of places / things to start with (vs simply experiencing the thing itself), so that’s in one ear and out the other. What I do recall is conversation and feelings of connectedness, and a couple snapshots of particularly picturesque scenery. But which cities? Which museums/sites/regions? What did I do while there? No idea. I actually rehearse such scenarios before dates to avoid an awkward first impression.

I’m great at remembering how things are connected, why something is the way it is, and how things work. But I couldn’t remember individual facts (names, numbers, the chronological order of independent experiences, etc) to save my life. But most of life is made up of individual, isolated details — which then means that most of life isn’t very memorable for me.
by jsnell | 2025-06-06 01:49:11+00:00
Yes, many people believe that, but it doesn't seem to be an evidence-based belief. I've written about this in some detail[0][1] before. But since just linking to one's own writing is a bit gauche and doesn't make for a good discussion, I'll summarize :)

1. There is no point in providing paid APIs at negative margins, since there's no platform power in having a larger paid API share (paid access can't be used for training data, no lock-in effects, no network effects, no customer loyalty, no pricing power on the supply side since Nvidia doesn't give preferential treatment to large customers). Even selling access at break-even makes no sense, since that is just compute you're not using for training, or not selling to other companies desperate for compute.

2. There are 3rd-party providers selling only the compute, not models, who have even less reason to sell at a loss. Their prices are comparable to 1st-party providers.

3. Deepseek published their inference cost structure for R1. According to that data their paid API traffic is very lucrative (their GPU rental costs for inference are under 20% of their standard pricing, i.e. >80% operating margins; and the rental costs would cover power, cooling, depreciation of the capital investment).

Insofar as frontier labs are unprofitable, I think it's primarily due to them giving out vast amounts of free access.

[0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165521
by drdeca | 2025-06-06 01:50:28+00:00
It was “Club Penguin”.

The forum was primarily about the “Penguin Client Library” (or “Penguin Client System”, I think they went back and forth about the name?), which allowed writing PHP scripts to interact with the game servers.

Why PHP? I think maybe it was originally so people could use it to make web forms where people could put in their username and password and it would e.g. give them whatever item, but that kind of cheat was blocked very quickly, and I think it just remained in PHP for historical reasons, so instead you had a bunch of people running PHP on their local machine to run a bot doing normal game actions (but combined in unusual ways). Or maybe it was just the language the devs were most comfortable with, idk.
by catskull | 2025-06-06 01:51:33+00:00
I have a very very strong episodic memory.

I have a very hard time "selling myself". I've added solid stuff to my resume in the last year simply recalling what I've done from an outsider's view. From my perspective, I was just messing around. From another perspective, I was building "impressive" "successful" things.

Learning to give myself credit for my accomplishments is what I think made me the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer, as silly as that sounds.
by NoPicklez | 2025-06-06 01:51:53+00:00
This is a fairly normal aspect of recall where our minds need some help to recall further memories.

It's why if you forget something you were thinking or going to do, go back to where you were and do the thing that lead to that thought and often it will come back to you.

Aphantasia I think is different, because this type of thing you describe happens for all types of recall not just visual imagery.
by stephen_g | 2025-06-06 01:52:47+00:00
Hard to tell though - I don't have aphantasia, but I can't visualise images very vividly. I'm happy to accept that many people can "see" their visualisations much more vividly than I can though, because I can visualise sound, voices and music almost as well as actually hearing them, and maybe that comes at the cost of not being able to visualise images as well as others can (but visualising sound better perhaps).