MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by genewitch | 2025-06-30 19:29:09+00:00
The one we use is "I always pay my taxes"

and as far as synthetic vs real data, there's a lot of gaps in LLM knowledge; and vision models suffer from "limited tags", which used to have workarounds with textual embeddings and the like, but those went by the wayside as LoRA, controlnet, etc. appeared.

There's people who are fairly well known that LLMs have no idea about. There's things in books i own that the AI confidently tells me are either wrong or don't exist.

That one page about compressing 1 gig wikipedia as small as possible implicitly and explicitly states that AI is "basically compression" - and if the data isn't there, it's not in the compressed set (weights) either.

And i'll reply to another comment here, about "24/7 rolling/ for looped" AI - i thought of doing this when i first found out about LLMs, but context windows are the enemy, here. I have a couple of ideas about how to have a continuous AI, but i don't have the capital to test it out.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-30 19:29:19+00:00
I guess I misunderstood "needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes..." as suggesting we could have different screens for indoor and outdoor.

I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.

Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
by alnwlsn | 2025-06-30 19:29:26+00:00
Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart the broken one - I recall taking apart around a dozen, but some of those were already broken and found in the trash.

Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.
by spauldo | 2025-06-30 19:29:36+00:00
I'm writing some quick and dirty software to locate Hirshmann switches, read their SNMP to determine what's connected to each port, and build a map of how the switches are connected. Hirshmann sells software to do this, but my company doesn't buy it.

It gives me my once-every-five-years reminder of why I dislike .NET.
by int_19h | 2025-06-30 19:29:49+00:00
Some non-Apple headphones can pair to more than one device, but there's usually a hard limit, and it's fairly small. And you have to set each up separately.

Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".

Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-30 19:30:00+00:00
I didn't know the A-series had caught up so much. For single-core performance the A18 Pro sits between the M3 and the M4. Multicore is more complicated, but it's sitting around M1 performance, which isn't too bad for an inexpensive compute-light laptop (I'm assuming they price it correctly, they probably won't). Not a device for developers or certain compute-intensive work, but more than adequate for most people.

I'm wondering if this move is due to a surplus of A-series chips, or if it's to avoid having an entry level device tied to an "old" chip like the M1 or M2. The A18 was released last year so they can bill this as a recent enough chip (sufficient for basic laptops) instead of offering people a 4 or 5 or however year old M-series.

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
by perching_aix | 2025-06-30 19:30:39+00:00
Yeah, there's a similar comment in another subthread a bit below.

The way I like to frame it, and this will almost certainly not be mathematically rigorous, is that every number a float (as in, the formats defined in IEEE-754) can hold can be sufficiently described as at most a rational, though they cannot represent all rationals, and cannot represent anything "higher" than rationals. That's why I prefer to say they're representing rationals. It's in the sense that they're all representing some rational, not any arbitrary rational.

To do that would require infinite space. E.g. for one third, you'd need infinite binary digits (or even infinite decimal ones, as you say). It's just not how IEEE-754 floats work, as you mention.

This launched me into a research on "perfect numerical accuracy" a while back, and there I did find schemes where you store the numerator and the denominator separately, freeing you from this specific problem. It's a fun topic.
by Hasz | 2025-06-30 19:30:59+00:00
Certified Pre-Owned programs.

I am surprised they are starting with Laptops. IMO, it makes more sense to start with servers. They are car-priced assets, and stand much more to gain from a multi-point inspection versus a laptop. They are also less likely to suffer from long term damage damage, such as water damage.

Slap another 5 years of hardware support on it and resell for 20% above the used market. Many small and medium size enterprises will happily take you up on that offer. For example, typical dell hardware support is 5-7 years, the systems are still usable for several years after hardware support ends.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-30 19:31:13+00:00
I don’t doubt that it happens, but most doctors and other qualified practitioners are hesitant to authorize placards without a valid reason (and in many cases they are hesitant even with a valid reason).

Unlike signing a letter stating that someone needs an emotional support animal, there are real consequences for a doctor authorizing too many. The DMV in many states does actually investigate handicap parking fraud.

In the states where chiropractors can authorize placards, they can and do lose their licenses for exaggerating or inventing conditions.

If you read up on it, it’s not as easy as you might think—especially if you want more than a temporary 6 month placard. There are scores of people complaining about how it took them a decade or longer to get one.
by layer8 | 2025-06-30 19:31:32+00:00
This needs to be generalized however. For example, if you present an AI with a drawing of some directed graph (a state diagram, for example), it should be able to answer questions based on the precise set of all possible paths in that graph, without someone having to write tooling for diagram or graph processing and traversal. Or, given a photo of a dropped box of matches, an AI should be able to precisely count the matches, as far as they are individually visible (which a human could do by keeping a tally while coloring the matches). There are probably better examples, these are off the cuff.

There’s an infinite repertoire of such tasks that combine AI capabilities with traditional computer algorithms, and I don’t think we have a generic way of having AI autonomously outsource whatever parts require precision in a reliable way.
Show HN: Audiopipe – Pipeline for audio diarization, denoising and transcription
by nullwiz | 2025-06-30 19:32:09+00:00
Audiopipe is a one-liner for denoising, diarization and transcription with demucs + pyannote + insanely-fast-whisper. Made it to transcribe podcasts and Dungeons And Dragons sessions, figured it could be useful. It also has a wasm UI to load transcriptions and audio. Feel free to contribute! Feedback appreciated.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-06-30 19:32:36+00:00
I'm cynical in general, but this type of stuff always sticks out. "I'm sorry for your loss" from one nameless headless stranger to a different nameless headless stranger feels as sincere as an AI bot, and that's to say it absolutely isn't.

Same as people saying things like "Don't say no one loves you, because I love you <3" but it's in a forum like this, or on Reddit. You don't know them. you don't love them.
by nipponese | 2025-06-30 19:32:53+00:00
After all these years, people still aren’t accepting the basics of this argument.

Using nation-backed currencies, inflation can speed up rapidly — and often does. Money becomes cheaper, and it can lead to economic growth if done well, or economic destruction if done poorly.

In a Bitcoin-dominated world, the supply rate slows down as programmed, so it ends up being deflationary and winners take all.

So the only factor that decides if Bitcoin is a bubble is whether we take policy action to ban it as an investment product and method of exchange, or we let it replace money on a macro level.

To the Americans here: given recent inflation and increasing deficits, the time to decide is NOW. In my view, if you care about 1) national sovereignty or 2) income inequality, the answer is clear that we must take a much stronger step towards censoring Bitcoin on a banking and financial sector level.
by lossolo | 2025-06-30 19:33:12+00:00
I wrote about it around a year ago here:

"There weren't really any advancements from around 2018. The majority of the 'advancements' were in the amount of parameters, training data, and its applications. What was the GPT-3 to ChatGPT transition? It involved fine-tuning, using specifically crafted training data. What changed from GPT-3 to GPT-4? It was the increase in the number of parameters, improved training data, and the addition of another modality. From GPT-4 to GPT-40? There was more optimization and the introduction of a new modality. The only thing left that could further improve models is to add one more modality, which could be video or other sensory inputs, along with some optimization and more parameters. We are approaching diminishing returns." [1]

10 months ago around o1 release:

"It's because there is nothing novel here from an architectural point of view. Again, the secret sauce is only in the training data. O1 seems like a variant of RLRF https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14238

Soon you will see similar models from competitors." [2]

Winter is coming.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40624112

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41526039
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-30 19:33:49+00:00
> From the authentication systems perspective, what exactly is the difference between an employee and 3rd party auditor?

Might require different authentication providers.

> From the authorization system, why would it care who they work for, as opposed to the permissions assigned to them?

Take the case of the accountant in the parent company. Either you create a user for that accountant in each of the child companies and manage access individually for each company, or you have a single user which has access to different child companies through separate permissions or something like that.

If you do it the first way, it's more like a regular B2C case, but not exactly because you still gotta do things like automatically disable those child-users when the accountant quits the parent company.

We've hit these scenarios as customer requirements in our B2B product, YMMV.
by gregbot | 2025-06-30 19:34:34+00:00
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/143W...

This paper doesn’t really attempt to compare a 100% nuclear grid to a 100% renewable grid. It defines a Business as Usual (BAU) energy mix and compares 100% renewable to that. It largely relies on large estimates of the social cost of carbon to conclude that renewables are cheaper than BAU but nuclear is also carbon free so that analysis doesnt apply
by BeetleB | 2025-06-30 19:35:03+00:00
I believe you're missing the GP's point.

Just as some people are enraged by folks violating "no dogs" signs, there are people enraged by folks not following traffic regulations (including the speed limit).

Just as someone may think it's weird that someone goes on a very, very angry rant about people driving 63 mph on a 60 mph zone, lots of people find it weird when people go on a rant about dogs.

This is exacerbated by the fact that one of these is much deadlier than the other.

So when you go on a rant about dogs, just keep in mind a lot of people are viewing you in a way people view those who complain about people going above the speed limit (regardless of the lane you're in).

Anti-disclaimer: I hate dogs. Would never date someone who had one because I don't want to be around one, and also because I wouldn't want to deprive someone of one.
by alwa | 2025-06-30 19:35:10+00:00
(2017)

Also worth a nod toward @mitxela’s gorgeous and absurd Precision Clock series, the latest of which pretty much nails the 7-segment elements TFA references…

https://mitxela.com/projects/precision_clock_mk_iv

Discussed here 1 month ago, 532 points, 130 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44144750)
by bitwize | 2025-06-30 19:35:13+00:00
Graphics-stack developers have known that in order to keep pace with Windows and macOS, X needed to be replaced, since the 90s at the latest. The only question was with what. The Xorg developers came up with a solution: Wayland. The hackers who wrote Xorg are in unanimous agreement that X is obsolete and you should be using Wayland instead. The next step, now ongoing, is to coordinate with DEs and distros to remove X support altogether.

You should use Wayland because it's what's supported. It's what all future Linux graphical software will be ported to. In a few years, it'll be impossible to get an X version of even a recent web browser. The best time to abandon X was 30 years ago. The second best time is now.
by joseonjok | 2025-06-30 19:36:03+00:00
I'm puzzled as to why this area is constantly seeing reinventing the wheels? I can name a few very mature (20 years in teh making) open source projects that pretty much lets you self host everything you might possibly need to handle all sorts of authentication schemes

It seems like if its not written in Javascript people have aversion to it and this "keep everything typescript" really makes no sense to me especially when you deal with the missio n critical nature of backends.
by bri3d | 2025-06-30 19:36:23+00:00
> Most of those boards have a separate physical JTAG connector (at least in development kits, this article indicates JTAG over USB is disabled in production systems anyways so no difference there

There's generally an entire phase of prototyping where engineers will be using production boards but still need JTAG, which is why it's fused and why these kinds of features exist. It's a lot easier to have your lower-level software team (drivers/BSP, perf, etc.) sitting with production-ready units provisioned with engineering keys and debug enabled than to have them having to use some kind of case-off JTAG header setup, cost aside.
Show HN: Bard – An Experiment in Robot Poetry
by stankot | 2025-06-30 19:36:49+00:00
Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun.

I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one.

Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed.

It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic as I was experimenting a lot and never cleaned it up. A blog post about the CSS glitch effect[2] even gained some traction on HN.

I'd like to turn this into a proper talk, mostly because it was so much fun to make and touched a lot of different areas - language models, rhymes and poetry, pixel art (which is a pain do to on web), speech synthesis, CSS animations... I gave an internal presentation at my company and got very positive feedback.

So let me know what you think and if you have any questions about BARD, please shoot.

[0] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/bard/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221907

edit: link formatting
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-30 19:36:56+00:00
You’re suggesting a french nutritionist would _encourage_ eating a baguette with butter as a healthy meal? That’s surprising to me. I suppose it _can_ be OK for a person who’s in good health already, but i wouldn’t purposely choose it and feel healthy about it lol. I can think of many alternatives that actually offer nutrition too. Like a banana, or baguette with a small side of sautéed peppers or mushrooms.

I certainly wouldn’t suggest it to someone that’s already sick with diabetes or obesity for example.

I have in-laws in paris, and i will say they walk as much as NYers. In other words, they are not sedentary like most americans. Portions sizes vary a lot too.

I agree with you that sugary things that are new and trendy do a lot of damage!
by te_chris | 2025-06-30 19:37:08+00:00
We used them for years in broadcast radio outside broadcast (I.e live concert) recordings, first as source, then as backup for unreliable computers. Not anymore, but they had a pretty long run into the 2000s in parts of the pro world.

Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for multitracks.
by LeFantome | 2025-06-30 19:37:13+00:00
Wayland was written by the Xorg dev team.

What people do not seem to get is that Wayland is what they wanted Xorg to be. A lot of what Wayland could not do were things they did not think it should do.

In some cases, the Wayland team has been dragged kicking to implement things. In other cases, they have stood firm and we will be leaving them behind.
by godelski | 2025-06-30 19:37:22+00:00
> because you as a human have really good intuition about the world.

This is the line that causes your logic to fail.

You introduced knowledge not obtained through observation. In fact, the knowledge you introduced is the whole chimichanga! It is an easy mistake to make, so don't feel embarrassed.

The claim is that one can learn a world model[0] through vision. The patent countered by saying "vision is not enough." Then you countered by saying "vision is enough if you already have a world model."

[0] I'll be more precise here. You can learn *A* world model, but it isn't the one we really care about and "a world" doesn't require being a self consistent world. We could say the same thing about "a physics", but let's be real, when we say "physics" we know which one is being discussed...
by rorylaitila | 2025-06-30 19:37:22+00:00
Yeah, I agree in the async case. What I do there is wrapped the async code in its own global error handler, so to speak. That handler is logging to something that the outer process can get-last-error from.

But I can get away with this also because I don't write async heavy code. My web applications are thread-per-request (Java). This fits 99% of the needs of business code, whose processing nature is mostly synchronous.
by cassianoleal | 2025-06-30 19:38:13+00:00
Feels like a lot. Even 3-4 days does. I'm not judging though!

In my household with 3 adults, we go through maybe a roll every 2 weeks or so. It's almost exclusively used for number 2 business though, so maybe that accounts for some of that difference.

Or, we just use very different types of paper, and yours require more of it for the same effect. :)
by LarsDu88 | 2025-06-30 19:38:24+00:00
If datasets are what we are talking about, I'd like to bring attention to the biological datasets out there that have yet to be fully harnessed.

The ability to collect gene expression data at a tissue specific level has only been invented and automated in the last 4-5 years (see 10X Genomics Xenium, MERFISH). We've only recently figured out how to collect this data at the scale of millions of cells. A breakthrough on this front may be the next big area of advancement.
Ring Convolution Networks – Novel neural architecture achieves 90.1% on MNIST
by bigdatateg1992 | 2025-06-30 19:38:49+00:00
Hi HN! I'm an independent researcher from Uzbekistan, and I've developed a new neural network architecture called Ring Convolution Networks (RCN).

The key idea: Instead of fixed weights, each weight exists in a "ring" of values that create a quantum-inspired superposition. Think of it as giving each weight multiple "perspectives" that combine during computation.

Results: - 10.6% accuracy with random weights (vs 8.8% for standard NN) - 90.1% accuracy after training (v2.0 released today) - Works specifically well on structured data like images

What makes it interesting: 1. No explicit convolution kernels, but achieves CNN-like performance 2. "Smart mirrors" implementation - O(1) memory per weight regardless of ring depth 3. Inspired by quantum superposition but runs on classical hardware

Technical details: - Each weight w becomes {w_center, w-δ, w+δ, ...} - Forward pass: y = 0.5×w_center + 0.25×w_left + 0.25×w_right - Training: gradients propagate through the ring structure

Code: https://github.com/Akbar1992A/ring-convolution-networks Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15776775 PaperV2.0: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15777644

I'd love to hear your thoughts on: - Theoretical explanation for why this works on images - Potential applications beyond computer vision - Optimization techniques for ring structures

This is my first major research project, and I'm excited to share it with the HN community. Happy to answer any questions!
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-06-30 19:38:50+00:00
>In my profile, what is noprocrast?

> It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-30 19:39:55+00:00
Check out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU

https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator

https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

https://www.domesday86.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
by preachermon | 2025-06-30 19:40:06+00:00
M5 Stack sells a nice controller knob if you don't have a used nest handy

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smar...

> As a versatile embedded development board, M5Dial integrates the necessary features and sensors for various smart home control applications. It features a 1.28-inch round TFT touchscreen, a rotary encoder, an RFID detection module, an RTC circuit, a buzzer, and under-screen buttons, enabling users to easily implement a wide range of creative projects.

> The main controller of M5Dial is M5StampS3, a micro module based on the ESP32-S3 chip known for its high performance and low power consumption. It supports Wi-Fi, as well as various peripheral interfaces such as SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, and more. M5StampS3 also comes with 8MB of built-in Flash, providing sufficient storage space for users.

I've build a few HA-compatible systems using M5Stack products; mostly the Atom-S3 Lite connected to various sensors and lights.