MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-06-11 23:31:00+00:00
I was going to report how it runs on an old CPU but after fussing with it for about 30 minutes, I can't even get it to run.

Listing the issues in case it helps anyone:

- It doesn't work with Python 3.13, luckily `uv` makes it easy to build a venv with 3.12

- It said numpy 1.26.4 doesn't exist. It definitely does, but `uv pip` was searching for it on the pytorch repo. I passed an `--index-strategy` flag so it would check other repos. This could just be a bug in uv, but when I see "numpy 1.26.4 doesn't exist" and numpy is currently on 2.x, my brain starts to cramp up.

- The `pip install chatterbox-tts` version has a bug in CPU-only mode, so I cloned the Git repo

- The version at the tip of main requires `protobuf-compiler` installed on Debian

- I got a weird CMake error that I can't decipher. I think maybe it's complaining that the Python dev headers are not installed. Why would they be, I'm trying to do inference, not compile Python...

I know anger isn't productive but this is my experience almost any time I'm running Somebody Else's Python Project. Hit an issue, back up, hit another issue, back up, after an hour it still doesn't run.
by Ray20 | 2025-06-11 23:31:17+00:00
>Same for not being able to employ children. Same for being made to employ women and other minorities.

I don't quite understand your worldview. So they want to employ children, but not women and minorities?

>Regulations get passed, society benefits.

A very doubtful statement. Especially if you look at the growth of wages compared to the level of labor productivity.
by stirfish | 2025-06-11 23:31:33+00:00
In my high school (Massachusetts, USA), almost all the students went by their last names, or something related to their last names. Ashley Milford was Milf, Samantha St. Paul was Saint Paul, Ryan Leonard was Lenny, Kevin Doo was Kevin Doo, for example. I'm still my surname in my head.

I learned later that we had a reputation for being a jock school though, because we all had to play a sport each semester.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-11 23:33:10+00:00
Not the original commenter, but I've read through half a dozen post-mortems about this kind of thing. The answer is: yes. There's challenges and sometimes downtime and/or breaking changes are inevitable.

For one, if your IDs are approaching the 2^31 signed integer limit, then by definition, you have nearly two billion rows, which is a very big DB table! There are only a handful of systems that can handle any kind of change to that volume of data quickly. Everything you do to it will either need hours of downtime or careful orchestration of incremental/rolling changes. This issue tends to manifest first on the "biggest" and hence most important table in the business such as "sales entries" or "user comments". It's never some peripheral thing that nobody cares about.

Second, if you're using small integer IDs, that decision was probably motivated in part because you're using those integers as foreign keys and for making your secondary indexes more efficient. GUIDs are "simpler" in some ways but need 4x the data storage (assuming you're using a clustered database like MySQL or SQL Server). Even just the change from 32-bits to 64-bits doubles the size of the storage in a lot of places. For 2 billion rows, this is 8 GB more data minimum, but is almost certainly north of 100 GB across all tables and indexes.

Third, many database engines will refuse to establish foreign key constraints if the types don't match. This can force big-bang changes or very complex duplication of data during the migration phase.

Fourth, this is a breaking change to all of your APIs, both internal and external. Every ORM, REST endpoint, etc... will have to be updated with a new major version. There's a chance that all of your analytics, ETL jobs, etc... will also need to be touched.

Fun times.
by seanssel | 2025-06-11 23:33:49+00:00
Ah yeah I love the concept of these small fantasy computers. I’m familiar with them because of Celeste, but never played with one.

I’m interested in traditional roguelikes these days (Tales of Maj’Eyal, Qud, Brogue). Ofc the dream is to make something with wider appeal, like Balatro, and get out of the rat race all together.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-06-11 23:35:00+00:00
A few years back I had a long back and forth (and productive) email exchange with an older engineer (in his 50s, like I was at the time) on a matter of a particular old computer. He lives in a former soviet state. At some point he mentioned job prospects in his country are limited and was willing to relocate. He had excellent English and as a fellow nerd who loves getting into the low level details, I thought he might be a fit at my large & successful US-based company that has offices all over the world. I said I'd be happy to forward his resume to my employer.

A few weeks later HR contacted me: Uh, that was really painfully awkward. The HR person had called to phone screen him and called him "Vlad" or whatever in greeting. The prospective employee went on a rant and said he had never been so disrespected, and it made a terrible impression of how unprofessional my company was by being so cavalier by using his first name.

Needless to say that was the end of the interview process, and I never heard from the guy again. Even if he was a technical fit, the cultural fit was off the charts wrong.
by debbiedowner | 2025-06-11 23:35:21+00:00
Assuming 200 acres is 0.57x0.57 miles. If you fly at 15 mph you can do 15 lines in 30 mins. The lines would be 200 feet apart, and you'd move 22 feet per second. 15MP images would be 10 pixels per foot and motion blur with 240fps would be 1.1 inches.

Anything wrong with that?
by coliveira | 2025-06-11 23:35:33+00:00
Well, do the calculations of how long it takes for all mass to move around in the initial moments of the big bang. You'll realize that the closer one gets to the singularity, the slower time passes due to time dilation, which means that you'll get the whole eternity to reach the singularity. It only looks like a few seconds from our point of view, looking at the big bang.
by cryptonector | 2025-06-11 23:36:13+00:00
> Okay, then this makes it inconvenient to deal with readers that could possibly but infrequently become writers. They have to do a second read under a lock to write.

Well, first of all reads are real cheap, so that's not a big concern. In some systems readers don't ever turn around to write, so that's ok, and in others they don't modify the current value. E.g., in one system I've built we use TinyCDB files and when new files are renamed into place we open those and set the handle on one of these thread-safe variables -- no read-modify involved here.

> And if one chooses a data structure for which copy isn't a cheap operation, this can be slower than classic RCU.

Either way it's RCU. It's best to publish immutable data with RCU and design data structures where copy-on-write modifications don't have to copy the whole data structure but rather just small parts of it. E.g., in a tree you should only have to copy the interior nodes from the one you're modifying to the root.

One can always build a hash table where each cell is one of these thread-safe variables (or plain old RCU), though one would have to make these thread-safe variables lighter weight to make having lots of them realistic (currently my implementation has a pthread_key_t per variable, which does not scale).

In TFA ArcSwap is essentially indistinguishable from a read-only hash table published on something like one of my thread-safe variables, and for TFA this worked better than the available alternatives in spite of the copy-on-write burden.

BTW, I built this thing originally to allow global configuration to be shared with otherwise-shared-nothing threads and allow the service to be reconfigurable at run-time. Without something like this (or plain old RCU) your options are limited to things like using read-write locks (which are way worse than anything you can imagine being bad about RCU used with immutable data structures). I was very displeased with read-write locks when I needed to solve this particular problem at Sun, but I didn't build this thing until after I left Sun (Oracle).

Nowadays RCU-ish libraries are pretty widely available. OpenSSL 3.3 (or was it 3.4?) has something like this after the threaded performance debacles of 3.0. In particular OpenSSL has an RCU-ish hash table. You might be interested in it. IIRC (but it's been a while since I looked) it uses one hazard-pointer-per-thread to acquire a stable reference to a key or value long enough to then incref a refcount -- pretty clever, and that's essentially the way to make a "thread-safe variable" light-weight enough to be able to use one for each slot in a hash table.
by kurthr | 2025-06-11 23:37:34+00:00
I don't know what you're saying either, because not only is it completely at odds with the measured data presented in a lumber university textbook, but you seem to be unclear on how moisture is even measured.

Please reread the section about fsp and measured MC, because it explains clearly why wood does not expand beyond it's fsp ~30%. Then look at the simplified MC% vs RH% table and read data for shrinkage vs MC for various wood types. No pay walled university papers required, it's not that complicated.

If your wife's door is 2" out of square you probably have a house framing issue not door expansion due to indoor humidity.

I've sawn enough timber and built enough decks out of them that I know wood moves.
by apwell23 | 2025-06-11 23:37:38+00:00
you didn't share what exactly the miracle was in your case so let me pick the most common form of cancer.

What is the breakthrough for prostate cancer ?

LU-177? Abiraterone/*Lutamide?

> when they do a biopsy now you get incredible detail about the subtype of cancer/cells and details that help target treatment.

There is no such thing for prostate cancer. Yes you can target BRCA with olaprib but that only works for little bit. But median OS is an improvement of only 4 months ( 15 vs 19). Sure you can live extra 4 months with heavily compromised blood definciency but hardly a breakthrough.

> We will have thousands of breakthroughs for these myriad of cancer types.

Not sure what makes you say this? We've only had improvements in survival for prostate cancer for early detection. All other improvements have been marginal at best. Chemo and hormone supression therapy are still the mainstay since the 70s. Like you are literally getting the same treatment for prostate cancer that ppl were getting 50 yrs ago.
by ninjin | 2025-06-11 23:38:02+00:00
It really is rather peculiar to me. They frame it like this (emphasis mine):

"With the preliminary publication of this dataset, we further seek to establish a community-led process to grow, improve, and use institutional data in ways that strengthen the knowledge ecosystem and assert the importance of ongoing stewardship of training data from the originating knowledge institutions themselves. To this end, we are experimenting to find the best way to release this data in a manner that facilitates collaboration. We encourage input on this process to guide the full publication of this and future dataset dataset releases, beginning with the following decisions:

* At preliminary launch, we have published the metadata, including experimental metadata, in full for anyone to access and use.

* At preliminary launch, we have published the dataset including OCR-extracted text under a noncommercial license, and with a 'click-through' that requires users to accept this license, additional terms of use, and to share basic contact information with us so that we can engage the community in its early use.

* At preliminary launch, we have chosen to postpone the release of the raw scan images, though we will share them liberally with researchers and libraries who wish to review them. While we know AI developers and researchers are eager for more raw materials, we believe this minor friction can help build the relationships and norms necessary to grow a collaborative community."

It is the fruit of their labour (well, the digitalisation is), so it is up to them to license it as they see fit. But it feels odd to me that they seem to want to be in control to this degree. In open source and my own research field, the pattern we tend to follow is to release freely, observe, and then build relationships rather than holding a "license gun" towards the head of potential collaborators.

Lastly, I have only skimmed the pre-print, but I noted no commitment to a final license either. Not even a direction for it. Thus, as a natural language processing researcher I will stay clear from this dataset for the time being and hope the licensing situation improves.
by bettercaust | 2025-06-11 23:38:24+00:00
Not difficult to find? Maybe, maybe not. Effective public health solutions for obesity for which there is political will to implement them seem difficult to find to me. At the individual level, if you can manage to cut out ultra-processed food, exercise a few times a week, and get any comorbid medical conditions treated you're probably in the clear. All that is to say, it is relatively easy to identify at least some of the determinants of obesity for solutions.
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-06-11 23:38:24+00:00
AI-directed bombings of persons are already known to have occurred on a large scale, in Gaza.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
by susiecambria | 2025-06-11 23:38:27+00:00
Oh, AAA.

My husband and I were driving a camouflaged CUCV (military bronco) from VA to WV around Thanksgiving. Towing a trailer full of stuff and had four large dogs.

The truck died. In Virginia, one mile from the WV line. Someone picked me up and dropped me off at the first gas station so I could call AAA. I had to talk with several CSRs; the last one told me the closest tow truck was in Charlottesville, hours away from where we were on I64. I was beet red, smoking like a chimney, and making up curse words.

Once we kinda agreed that there was likely a closer alternative, the young woman asked how the tow truck driver would identify the truck since it was camo. I told the men, they chuckled, and I told her it was CAMO, it was not covered by a cloaking device. I hung up.

The young man at the gas station/coffee shop called a local tow truck and we were dropped at Gate 3 of fair grounds in Fairlee, WV.

Ended up that the camo/cloaking device paled in comparison to the later challenge: It was the first day of hunting season and most garages were closed during the week of Thanksgiving.

I hate AAA.
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-06-11 23:38:50+00:00
Image rendering to achieve data exfiltration during prompt injection is one of the most common AI application security vulnerabilities.

First exploits and fixes go back 2+ years.

The noteworthy point to highlight here is a lesser known indirection reference feature in markdown syntax which allowed this bypass, eg:

![logo][ref]

[ref]: https://url.com/data

It's also interesting that one screenshot shows January 8 2025. not sure when Microsoft learned about this, but could have taken 5 months to fix - which seems very long.
by russellbeattie | 2025-06-11 23:38:50+00:00
Audible has already flooded their store with generated audio books. Go to the "Plus Catalog" and it's filled with them. The quality at the moment is complete trash, but I can't imagine it won't get better quickly.

The whole audiobook business will eventually disappear - probably within the decade. There will only be ebooks and on-device AI assistants will read it to you on demand.

I imagine it'll go like this: First pre-generated audiobooks as audio files. Next, online service to generate audio on demand with hyper customizable voices which can be downloaded. Next, a new ebook format which embeds instructions for narration and pronunciation to be read on-device. Finally, AI that's good enough to read it like a storyteller instantly without hints.
by oluwaseunfunmi | 2025-06-11 23:39:54+00:00
I’m building SymbolCast, a gesture input engine that lets you draw shapes with a trackpad, mouse, or VR controller and map them to OS-level commands.

It’s written in C++ with Qt and ONNX Runtime. Current capabilities include input capture, symbol labeling and export, and early VR gesture recording. The goal is to create a minimal but powerful layer for gesture-based interaction — particularly for accessibility and expressive computing.

Still early-stage, but open to contributors. Feedback welcome. Discord: https://discord.gg/hshnx264
by rawgabbit | 2025-06-11 23:40:07+00:00
I am not sure about that. I am a low level employee and I address the CEO and the occasional board member I meet on a first name basis.

I grew up in Texas with its culture of sir and ma’am. After leaving the military, I make it a point to address everyone on a first name basis. Doctor Dan. Father Frank. Nurse Nancy.

On the other hand, old habits are hard to shake. When someone is extra nice to me, I often address them as sir and ma’am even when I am much older than they are. I also get irritated when a young salesman addresses me by my first name and attempts to upsell me.
by Akcium | 2025-06-11 23:40:08+00:00
Thanks for your comment. Yeah, I posted it mainly because I liked the artistic side of it - the landing itself is quite complicated (a lot of interactions), but I really enjoyed the creativity.

I'm also diagnosed with ADHD. Unfortunately, there are no ADHD meds available in my country at all. :(

I'm not exactly sure what ADHD feels like for me, but there’s one thing I’ve noticed. I used to take methylphenidate, but the effect was pretty small. In order to get it, I had to fly to another country, which was expensive. So I eventually gave up on that idea.

Now it’s been a year without stimulants, and I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence or not, but for the first time in my life I’ve ended up in debt, with almost zero productivity, no finished projects, and so on.

It doesn’t matter whether I sleep well or not — over the past 12 months I’ve had different conditions (good sleep, bad sleep, good diet, bad diet, etc.), but overall, my focus has stayed close to zero.

By the way, I’ve never tried nicotine patches. I’m pretty sure I won’t find them here, but at least I can probably order them.
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 23:40:47+00:00
> i took 2 jabs at that start of covid vaxinations, fcked my life up to be honest.

Literally WHAT PROOOOF do you have of this? Do you not understand how unbelievably fucking complicated health is? Hm?

I got cancer in my 20s, do you know what caused it? No fucking idea. There's literally thousands of things that could have caused it, take your pick. I don't know, my doctor doesn't know, nobody fucking knows.

So what the fuck do you mean the COVID vaccine ruined your life? Did you eat McDonald's between now and then? So then how do you know it isn't the McDonald's?

Or, I'll do you one better: how do you know it wasn't COVID itself?
by godelski | 2025-06-11 23:42:33+00:00
> As a little thought exercise, you can take two minutes and come up with some ways businesses can 'fix' markets for lemons and make a profit in the meantime. How many can you find? How many can you find already implemented somewhere?

This sounds exactly like what causes lemon markets in the first place. Subtle things matter and if you don't pay attention to them (or outright reject them) then that ends up with the lemon market situation.

Btw, lemon markets aren't actually good for anyone. They are suboptimal for businesses too. They still make money but they make less money than they would were it a market of peaches.
by rendx | 2025-06-11 23:42:34+00:00
Isn't identity exactly defined as what one perceives as part of oneself? Food becomes me as soon as I dis-member it to make it to be part of myself. Other food becomes you. This doesn't make food not within my sphere of perception a part of me; before digestion, it stays separate, like a virus doesn't become part of me -- the immune system acts a biological discriminator between what is part of me, and what is not. You are not me, and I am not you; we are physically attached to different matter. I understand people play mind games based on varying definitions of identity, but ultimately you will find that you have control over certain things comprised of physical matter, which then together with your mind makes up "you", and you're not in control of other things, which make them "not you". That's how I would say it is defined, after all. I am not in the entire food chain, because my perception and control simply doesn't reach that far. If I could control objects with my mind, it would be reasonable to say that they are a part of "my body", which makes them a part of me. If you use these language constructs differently, we lose the ability to communicate over them?
by bitbasher | 2025-06-11 23:42:45+00:00
This is exactly what I ran into-- it's something you learn by experience/living through it. Unfortunately, no amount of text books can really prepare you for that.

It's weird. I knew thousands of kanji. I could conjugate like the best of them. I could read and discuss classic Japanese literature. I could read and explain classic Japanese grammar and the root of modern grammar.

What I couldn't do? A simple social situation.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-06-11 23:43:46+00:00
Yeah I was referencing the event horizon as the most meaningful measure of size.

And whether the density is fixed over time or not doesn't affect the question. Let's take the universe at its current average mass/energy density - whatever the "true" measure of that is.

To the best of our understanding, at large scales the density is uniform. So if we consider a suitably large spherical volume of space within our (presumably infinite) universe.. that volume will have an average mass/energy content greater than the threshold amount for a black hole of that apparent volume (again, using the external event horizon frame).

So that suggested to me that either we live in a finite universe, or we must be on the inside of an event horizon. It seems like an unavoidable conclusion.
by hugs | 2025-06-11 23:44:33+00:00
congrats on the launch. i started selling robots for $100/each back in 2012. (tapster). realized over time, it's hard to stay in business at that price point if that's all you're selling. my bots are now closer to $10K/each. you can probably keep the price low if you have some other part of the business model to fill the gap (consulting or some hosted service or an ai/data play). since you're a yc company, i assume that's the case.
by lenadroid | 2025-06-11 23:45:18+00:00
I spent 3 days at AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco, with three thousand of the world's best AI engineers, Fortune 500 CTOs, and founders.

I chatted with engineers, architects, and founders in companies like Open AI, Pydantic, Microsoft, etc. to get their thoughts on some of the relevant questions on the future of work with AI.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-06-11 23:45:53+00:00
For me the big problem was how hard Hoverboard was to use - they built nicer tooling around it eventually but getting onboarded took weeks to months, getting GPUs usable enough to do LLM training would be nigh-impossible, an _extremely rigorous_ dedication to customer security meant transferring any data into and out of it for analysis was a major pain....

I remember being in the office when GPT2 dropped and thinking the entire Alexa Engine/skill routing codebase became outmoded overnight. That didn't really happen, but now that MCP servers are so easy to build I'm surprised Alexa doesn't just use tool-calling (unless it does in Alexa+?)