MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-04 15:59:14+00:00
Or "[diffusion-based] generative inpainting of incomplete Euclidean distance matrices of trajectories generated by a fractional Brownian motion". The context:

> One of the most widely used experimental techniques for examining how DNA molecules are folded in space is fluorescence microscopy [...] such data is inevitably fragmentary. [...] "Once you know the distances between a sufficient number of genes, determining the remaining distances for which there is no experimental data takes the form of a mathematical problem with a specific solution", the principal investigator of the study, Assistant Professor Kirill Polovnikov from Skoltech Neuro, commented. "We have shown for the first time that generative models are capable of solving such problems. This is an unconventional application of the kind of AI usually employed for more "creative" tasks - generating images and text based on a user prompt. At the same time, this is a new approach to the study of chromatin structure, where polymer physics has historically reigned supreme"

What is not clear is, "how can that be reliable".

They write «Our dataset reveals that, in the regime of low missing ratios, data imputation is unique, as the remaining partial graph is rigid, thus providing a reliable ground truth for inpainting». And «our findings indicate that diffusion behaves qualitatively differently from simple database searches, allowing for generalization rather than mere memorization of the training data».

But in this context, the space for failure, the possibility of sneaky errors, is what counts...
by lambdasquirrel | 2025-06-04 15:59:46+00:00
The AI I use at work can’t set up IAM correctly, didn’t even know it needed to, let alone associate said IAM principal with the correct k8s RBAC groups. I do appreciate that it ground through a lot of boilerplate, but I’m concerned that it’s like buying a new Sony or Leica camera as a beginner photographer. As with your non-coder VBA friend, it might make them think they’re a lot more skilled than they really are. And this is specifically why I’ve never touched VBA.
by monknomo | 2025-06-04 15:59:50+00:00
I have no expertise and am prepared to be quite wrong, but I wonder if llm's would be good at listening to a session, and/or a doctor dictating, and putting the right stats in the right place, and the dictated case history into a note.

I think llm's are alright at speech recognition and that sort of unstructured to structured text manipulation. At least, in my corner of the customer success world I've seen some uses along those lines
by zevon | 2025-06-04 15:59:55+00:00
Are you seriously somehow annoyed by other people volunteering and working together on something they care about because of moral and/or other reasons and talk about it? How much time of your day do you spend in a bad mood about churches, the red cross, volunteer firefighters, your desktop environment of choice or all those other contexts where humans do that?!

And if you really insist on continuing with the metaphor: Whenever I lived in certain big cities, the situations before and after football matches most definitely had a more drastic impact on daily life than a slightly soggy straw.
Show HN: GPT image editing, but for 3D models
by zachdive | 2025-06-04 16:00:52+00:00
Hey HN!

I’m Zach one of the co-founders of Adam (https://www.adamcad.com). We're building AI-powered tools for CAD and 3D modeling [1].

We’ve recently been exploring a new way to bring GPT-style image editing directly into 3D model generation and are excited to showcase this in our web-app today. We’re calling it creative mode and are intrigued by the fun use cases this could create by making 3D generation more conversational!

For example you can put a prompt in such as “an elephant” then follow it up by “have it ride a skateboard” and it preserves the context, identity and maintains consistency with the previous model. We believe this lends itself better to an iterative design process when prototyping creative 3D assets or models for printing.

We’re offering everyone 10 free generations to start (ramping up soon!). Here’s a short video explaining how it works: https://www.loom.com/share/cf9ab91375374a4f93d6cc89619a043b

We’d also love you to try our parametric mode (free!) which uses LLMs to create a conversational interface for solid modeling as touched on in a recent HN thread [2]. We are leveraging the code generation capabilities of these models to generate OpenSCAD code (an open-source script based CAD) and are surfacing the variables as sliders the user can toggle to adjust their design. We hope this can give a glimpse into what it could be like to “vibe-CAD”. We will soon be releasing our results on Will Patrick's Text to CAD eval [3] and adding B-rep compatible export!

We’d love to hear what you think and where we should take this next :)

[1]https://x.com/zachdive/status/1882858765613228287

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774990

[3]https://willpatrick.xyz/technology/2025/04/23/teaching-llms-...
by KineticLensman | 2025-06-04 16:00:59+00:00
> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could produce a better text than a historically great author, which was the original line of thought. Or is there a specific modern text that you have in mind that proves the point?
by hedora | 2025-06-04 16:01:25+00:00
Later, they claim 15 hours per dev per week. It’s almost like the numbers are completely made up!

Also, why rewrite perl code in python? Those two languages have basically the same set of problems, assuming the perl code is doing banking stuff and not orchestrating GPUs.

If you’re going to pay for a rewrite, at least get some sort of high level improvement, like richer static typing.

I’d guess the goal is “python devs are cheaper than perl devs”? How long is the return on investment vs. site-licensing Learning Perl?
by balfirevic | 2025-06-04 16:01:32+00:00
If you're not looking for random person's advice feel free to ignore :-)

> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.

Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.

Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
by SideQuark | 2025-06-04 16:01:34+00:00
A many hash tables use PRNG sequences for collision resolution by moving around to other buckets. That PRNG seed comes from the hash value. PRNGs are chosen for good uniform spread and repeatable sequence and speed.

The naive collision resolution ideas start like this: chained items (slow, memory costs), linear probing (results in clustering), quadratic probing (better, still has problems), double hashing (good), PRNG sequences with good properties (so any item hitting the same spot checks the same seq of overflow slots. One can alternate linear and PRNG or other combos.

Start with the basic wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table, check through many of the modern has table types linked from there.
by karmakaze | 2025-06-04 16:02:44+00:00
Exactly. I grew up with these magazines as that's all there was. The covers were often odd (and fun now) but I never paid attention to them, it was the contents, and the new things constantly being advertised that was the draw. That Smalltalk cover is memorable though so it must have made an impression but maybe because Smalltalk itself is impressive.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-06-04 16:02:46+00:00
Large generators are fuel-injected, which requires a microcontroller with software.

In the 1990s that software was write-once, non-upgradeable, and bug-free because it was trivial. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. "Fuel injection requires software" turned into an exploit vector for feature creep.
by abxyz | 2025-06-04 16:02:56+00:00
That’s not how software engineering works. Management doesn’t know what a feature will cost to add so they defer to engineers who produce estimates which are used to forecast and plan. Engineers estimate based on their own preferences (whether for cynical self-serving reasons or not). You estimate a feature will be delivered in 2 months but it takes 4, that’s 4 months of pressure you could have avoided by rejecting the feature.

Some features are annoying to work on, some have long term implications for how much and what type of work will need to be done. Some just don’t fit with what the engineers want to work on. I know which features are going to take endless stakeholder meetings and which aren’t. I know which are going to require overtime and being on-call. I know which are going to kill off my pet project.

The most self-serving action a software engineer who doesn’t want to work more than the bare minimum can take is to reject as much as possible as being too difficult or bad or some other excuse.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-04 16:03:08+00:00
>> Even in developed countries with free vaccinations we are suffering from measles outbreaks in 2025.

> Are those really developed countries? A decent free public school education is a requirement for a nation to be considered developed.

Here's some data:

In 2025 1, 2,755 measles cases (2,429 confirmed, 326 probable) and 0 rubella cases have been reported in Canada. [0] Education in Canada is for the most part provided publicly, funded and overseen by federal, provincial, and local governments. [1] Medicare is a term that refers to Canada's publicly funded health care system. Instead of having a single national plan, we have 13 provincial and territorial health care insurance plans. Under this system, all Canadian residents have reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and physician services without paying out-of-pocket. [2]

Sources:

[0] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Canada

[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-healt...

You are welcome.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-04 16:03:19+00:00
Here is the bill for consumer electronics: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1483&Year=202...

Text as passed (for pasting into LLM :)): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...

I wondered what it would mean for small manufacturers and they are not exempt however o3 believes "in practice, your duty is limited to providing whatever service manuals, firmware-pairing utilities, and spare parts you already possess (or have made for warranty work) and making them available at cost, digitally for free."

EDIT: as people below have posted, o3's "at cost" is misleading, the text actually says "at costs that are fair to both parties"
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-04 16:03:40+00:00
>The AI I use at work can’t set up IAM correctly

Can you? :D

Based on my favorite quote from the I, Robot(2004) movie with Will Smith when he got roasted by a robot:

W.S.: "You are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?* Robot: "Can you?"

Which I think applies to a lot of anti-AI sentiments. Sure, the AI doesn't know how to do X, Y, Z but then most people also don't know X, Y and Z. Sure, people can learn how to X, Y and Z, but then so can an AI. ChatGPT couldn't initially draw anime, now they trained it to do that and it can. Similarly it can also learn how to set up IAM correctly if they bother to train it well enough for that task. But for now, like you discovered, we're far away form an AI that's universally good at everything but I expect specialisation will arrive sooner than later.
by pastamania | 2025-06-04 16:03:58+00:00
What the CEO says company wide and what the CEO says to middle management and gets them to do are often two very, very different things.

If there's a difficult, unpopular decision to be made, C-suite types often can't just come out and talk about it openly because the very act of doing that will maximise the amount of ill will and damage that decision will cause throughout the business unnecessarily. So the role of middle management is to be the 'bad cop' and pass that message on in a limited way to the affected people, who then blame them for it.

Just because the CEO isn't the one saying it, it doesn't mean it's not coming from the CEO. Part of being a middle manager, maybe even the biggest part, is being the messenger whose paid to get shot.
by more_corn | 2025-06-04 16:04:09+00:00
The counterpoint to this is quite important. Sure, maybe nothing matters without someone there to make it matter. We are the only creatures in the known universe who believe in abstract universals (love, hope, truth, beauty, meaning as well as the negative abstract universals). Which means things only matter insofar as they matter to us. But obviously things matter to us.

If/when we disappear, meaning itself might get erased from the universe. In that sense nothing means anything.

In another sense, if we are the only source of meaning that’s potentially the most rare and precious thing imaginable.

Giving a shit is literally our superpower. So give a shit about something because meaning only exists when we bring it into being. And it only exists as long as we make it exist. Far from being depressing this might be the most uplifting thought possible. Because it makes you fucking matter. As much as you want to matter. (And as little)
by hosh | 2025-06-04 16:04:11+00:00
Hacker News is not really the venue for this.

I'll just say this based on what I think is your thesis here:

"Those old societies all revolved around the idea of having druids, shamans, witches or other cosmic bridge roles in their tribal structures."

- Shamans originated out among the Mongolian and Manchu people, and not the universal role that anthropologists like to make it out to be. While their role does include being a cosmic bridge, they do have practices working with wrathful spirits that they send to kill their enemies.

- "Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches" may or may not be a reliable source, but it does present an idea of witchraft and its purpose that makes the most sense to me: a remnant of a role that then evolved as a way to fight against patriarchial tyranny and oppression.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"

I don't think it is that simple.

I couldn't find your contact info on your profile, and there's a lot more to engage. Feel free to email me sometime.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-06-04 16:04:15+00:00
Maybe that's why the current administration is pushing so hard to bring back low end manufacturing.

If you're a SWE, Accountant, Marketer, HR person, etc. put out of work by AI, now you can screw together iPhones for just over minimum wage. And if we run out of those jobs, there's always picking vegetables now that all the migrants are getting deported.

It would not surprise me one bit if the Tech CEOs see things this way.
by DangitBobby | 2025-06-04 16:04:31+00:00
Stack traces are not so long that you can't find the information you need in them, and actually just like go in some languages you can elect to add context to your stack trace (e.g. in python by raising an error from another error).

My experience in go was opposite of yours. The original devs (who were long gone) provided no information at all at the error site and I felt lucky even to find the place in the code that produced the error. Unfortunately the "force you to handle errors" idea, while well intentioned, doesn't "force you to provide useful error handling information", making it worse than stack traces by default.
by taylodl | 2025-06-04 16:04:38+00:00
In the United States, approximately 1,100 children under the age of 13 die each year in motor vehicle crashes. Not that it matters, because you're still making a utilitarian argument, and the majority of people, including Americans, reject that kind of reasoning.

More importantly, utilitarian arguments rarely persuade lawmakers. Policy decisions are driven by public sentiment, political incentives, and moral framing - not abstract cost-benefit calculations.
by rmah | 2025-06-04 16:05:19+00:00
This article is full of guesswork and supposition unsupported by evidence. I don't understand why people upvoted it.

Further, the author doesn't seem to understand that "the state", with its institutions, legal systems, etc as we understand it simply did not exist in Europe during medieval times. Or even during the Roman empire era. For example, he writes "taxes were voluntary". It's just laughable. Moreover, during that era, "tax" was synonymous with "rent". It's where the term "landlord" comes from, after all. Even concepts of ownership were somewhat different from today.

Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.
by gladiatr72 | 2025-06-04 16:05:22+00:00
A good blog post for bootstrapping a tight nftables config. It comes with useful examples and a list of references and for-further-reading links. All links but one (the first listed at the bottom of the page) are alive. The one dead link is available via archive.org.

To quote the blog's author: As it should be considered as the-way-of-managing-Netfilter since 2016, I was pretty frustrated not to find any “hardening” guide for it on the Web, so here is one!

Originally from 2020 with updates in 2023. It is still the best in show in 2025 if you are looking for a non-hello-world introduction to nftables.

NOTE: presumes existing knowledge of linux networking/routing bits
by atoav | 2025-06-04 16:05:31+00:00
You and the post you commented on display both a valid point. If we're talking about using assembly as a broad general purpose programming environment that would be a mess (which is precisely why it has no broad adoption). When we talk about assembly as a niché special purpose solution we would come to a different conclusion, coincidentally this is where assembly is still used today: environments where we need highly optimized code.

Your point about education is orthogonal to the point made. I agree with you that learning assembly can be a good way to teach people how computers work on a low level, but that has nothing to do with whether it is useful as a skill to learn.

As someone teaching similar things at the university level to a non-tech audience I have to always carefully wheigh how much "practically useless" lessons a typical art student can stomach. And which kind of lesson will just deter them, potentially forever.
by monknomo | 2025-06-04 16:05:47+00:00
your ai boss isn't going to bend rules for you, and isn't going to advocate for you. You can see how an ai boss would go by looking to amazon warehouses and drivers, or call centers, and how those folks are managed. It's already by computer, they already uses machines learning to detect when people are deviating from expected rails, and you can decide for yourself if that looks appealing
by dangoor | 2025-06-04 16:05:59+00:00
I don't know if publishers manage to get better deals from Amazon, but Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing has an annoying aspect that the ebook royalty rate falls from 70% to 30% after $9.99, which gets very awkward for a tech book you'd like to sell for, say, $19.99.

Also, piracy is rampant and Amazon doesn't do much about it. Publishers have more resources to stay on top of it, I suspect.
by zach_miller | 2025-06-04 16:06:05+00:00
Ultimately it seems the question ought to be “is the code they wrote with AI buggier than the code they would have written without”, not “is the code they wrote with AI 100% bug free”. I doubt that any team doing a significant refactor from a language they don’t know could make bug free code on any reasonable timeline, AI or not.

If the question is the former, though, unless it’s horrendously buggy then I wonder if the speed increase offsets the “buggier code” (if the code even is buggier) because if they finish early they can bug bash for longer.
by jmclnx | 2025-06-04 16:06:11+00:00
Many people think this will hurt the old the most, but in reality, as an old person, it will hurt our children far more more than old people.

Once again we are proving the US is just "I got mine, the rest of you can suffer" Country.

Examples are research on ALS, Childhood Diabetes and Cancer and many more issues too numerous to list. Already funding has been cut for ALS and Cancer research.

Welcome to depending upon China and Japan for ground breaking treatments. From what I have read Japan has been doing a lot and I think China is ramping up quickly.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-04 16:07:32+00:00
> What laws are you referring to other than Terms of Service which are entirely artificial constructs whisked into existence by service/platform providers? Which will, admittedly, be as draconian and onesided as the courts will allow.

There are two main ones.

The first is the CFAA, which by its terms would turn those ToS violations into a serious felony, if violations of the ToS means your access is "unauthorized". Courts have been variously skeptical of that interpretation because of its obvious absurdity, but when it's megacorp vs. small business or open source project, you're often not even getting into court because the party trying to interoperate immediately folds. Especially when the penalties are that scary. It's also a worthless piece of legislation because the actual bad things people do after actual unauthorized access are all separately illegal, so the penalty for unauthorized access by itself should be no more than a minor misdemeanor, and then it makes no sense as a federal law because that sort of thing isn't worth a federal prosecutor's time. Which implies we should just get rid of it.

The other one, and this one gets you twice, is DMCA 1201. It's nominally about circumventing DRM but its actual purpose is that Hollywood wants to monopolize the playback devices, which is exactly the thing we're talking about. Someone wants to make an app where you can watch videos on any streaming service you subscribe to and make recommendations (but the recommendations might be to content on YouTube or another non-Hollywood service), or block ads etc. The content providers use the law to prevent this by sticking some DRM on the stream to make it illegal for a third party app to decrypt it. Facebook can do the same thing by claiming that other users' posts are "copyrighted works".

And then the same law is used by the phone platforms to lock users out of competing platforms and app stores. You want to make your competing phone platform and have it run existing Android apps, or use microG instead of Google Play, but now Netflix is broken and so is your bank app so normal people won't put up with that and the competition is thwarted. Then Facebook goes to the now-monopoly Google Play Store and has "unauthorized" third party Facebook readers removed.

These things should be illegal the other way around. Adversarial interoperability should be a right and thwarting it should be a crime, i.e. an antitrust violation.

> The problem is that FAANG have turned the concept of general computing on it's head by making every bloody handset a playground for the programmer with no easily grokkable interface to the user to curtail the worst behavior of technically savvy bad actors.

But how do you suppose that happened? Why isn't there a popular Android fork which runs all the same apps but provides a better permissions model or greater visibility into what apps are doing?