MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-16 13:20:00+00:00
The discussion here about "cognitive debt" is spot on, but I fear it might be too conservative. We're not just talking about forgetting a skill like a language or losing spatial memory from using GPS. We're talking about the systematic, irreversible atrophy of the neural pathways responsible for integrated reasoning.

The core danger isn't the "debt" itself, which implies it can be repaid through practice. The real danger is crossing a "cognitive tipping point". This is the threshold where so much executive function, synthesis, and argumentation has been offloaded to an external system (like an LLM) that the biological brain, in its ruthless efficiency, not only prunes the unused connections but loses the meta-ability to rebuild them.

Our biological wetware is a use-it-or-lose-it system without version control. When a complex cognitive function atrophies, the "source code" is corrupted. There's no git revert for a collapsed neural network that once supported deep, structured thought.

This HN thread is focused on essay writing. But scale this up. We are running a massive, uncontrolled experiment in outsourcing our collective cognition. The long-term outcome isn't just a society of people who are less skilled, but a society of people who are structurally incapable of the kind of thinking that built our world.

So the question isn't just "how do we avoid cognitive debt?". The real, terrifying question is: "What kind of container do we need for our minds when the biological one proves to be so ruthlessly, and perhaps irreversibly, self-optimizing for laziness?"

https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io
by clejack | 2025-06-16 13:20:11+00:00
Honestly, it does make me wonder what they're thinking. Given the nature of what they're doing, the stable coin reference doesn't seem like it's necessary. Even for purposes of hype.

Telling investors you're going to make your own currency to bypass transactions fees from financial institutions seems like a fairly straightforward way to boost investor interest.

Wouldn't adding crypto mechanics to a virtual credit system just make for a costlier system due to mining?

If the transactions are maintained within an Amazon or Walmart ecosystem, there's no need for trustless verification, because you own the ecosystem. What's the point?
by gus_massa | 2025-06-16 13:21:23+00:00
Nuking a hurricane would not break it because nukes are not big enough https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/26/weather/hurricane-nuclear...

I think it's possible to nuke a tornado, but if someone does it to try to save a city, I expect even more destruction.

I don't expect the beam to be energetic enough to change anything. The closest method I can think of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding but it doesn't distribute energy, just tiny crystals to condense oversaturated vapor.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-06-16 13:22:00+00:00
Yes, indeed, both are Ghibli movies. Whisper of the Heart is by all accounts a very successful movie and a critic darling. The cat return while not a masterpiece is an overall ok movie - I think pretty bad is harsh.

Anyway the key point is that there is more to Ghibli that Miyazaki and even Takahata in the same way there is more to Miyazaki than Ghibli.
by codingdave | 2025-06-16 13:22:31+00:00
> My users are really happy with it, the conversion rate is good, and there's been a surprising amount of word of mouth from them already,

If all that is true, you already have hit the dreams of startup marketers. People post ads on various sites trying to get enough people that their users start word-of-mouth organic growth. What you need to continue growth is to focus even more on your current customers. If you burn your energy on sales, you risk ignoring them, and that organic growth might stop. So talk to your users more, focus on their experience, and make them so happy that they keep talking. Build the features they tell you are needed to make things even better. Ask them where they think other people would be responsive to marketing, and focus your efforts wherever they say.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-16 13:22:36+00:00
Alas, it's not finished. You've made the mistakes that all of us have made, and haven't caught up with us, must of us having fixed those mistakes, a few years back when implementing 24-bit RGB was in vogue.

This is not, as the function name suggests, a colon, but per ITU/IEC T.416 it should be:

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...

And not only should this have colons too, but per ITU/IEC T.416 there's a colour space parameter that goes in there:

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...

The unfortunate part is that when rendering to a terminal, you don't have any available mechanism apart from hand-decoding the family part of the TERM environment variable, and knowing who made which mistakes, to determine which of the 7 possible colour mechanisms are supported. They are:

1. ECMA-48 standard 8 colour, SGRs 30 to 37, 39, 40 to 47, and 49

2. AIXTerm 16 colour, ECMA-48 plus SGRs 90 to 97 and 100 to 107

3. XTerm 256 colour, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;5;n and SGR 48;5;n

4. XTerm 256 colour corrected, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:5:n and SGR 48:5:n

5. 24-bit colour take 1, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;2;r;g;b and SGR 48;2;r;g;b

6. 24-bit colour take 2, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38:2:r:g:b and SGR 48:2:r:g:b

7. 24-bit colour take 3, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:2::r:g:b::: and SGR 48:2::r:g:b:::

Few people support 4, and although quite a lot of us have finally got to supporting 7 it isn't quite universal. Egmont Koblinger, I, and others have been spreading the word where we can over the last few years.

This is where I was at in 2019:

https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TerminalCapa...

There a few updates to that that are going to come out in 1.41, but when it comes to colour they're mainly things like recognizing the "ms-terminal" and "netbsd6" terminal types in the right places.
by chantepierre | 2025-06-16 13:23:05+00:00
Hello HN,

A friend released files for this 6" f/5 telescope conversion kit yesterday.

It is a synthesis of a lot of telescope builds he, I and a few friends made over the last years, as well as general ideas floating in the amateur telescope making community.

It is compatible with most existing 6" f/5 newtonian optics kits. I've tried his model IRL and was pleased with both the movements and the focuser, which is often lacking on commercial offerings (which are also heavier and bulkier).

Unmounted, it forms a quite compact package to hike with or take camping.

It is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA as he would like to sell parts kit at some point, but the files found on Printables are fully functional.
by squircle | 2025-06-16 13:23:09+00:00
It sounds like they have little skin in the game. Does your org reward hard work and hitting targets? Is the company doing mission critical work or feature farming? I dont think there's a company I've ever worked for where the status quo wasn't a full on regression to the mean average of the culture of the place. Conway's law? They were hired for a reason but no one can be firehosed with bullshit for long, before simply giving up if there's no compelling reason to continue striving.

So, have you spoken to them? Or, put them in a position where there failure to deliver will have real world negative consequences to people on the team they care about?

For me personally, I seem to only operate well under intense pressure and heavy load. Maybe they're bored. Maybe there's confounding variables outside of work they need to put time and attention into before they're unblocked and consistently in a high delivery flow state. (Or, perhaps, you need to tell them: we want you to try harder to fail.)

Edit: also, work expands to fill time. Intellectual and creative work accomplishes things in leaps and bounds or fits and starts IMO. Punching a time clock is terribly draining... Is there a shared team vision?
by Zigurd | 2025-06-16 13:23:50+00:00
The simulation of a kid running out from behind the bus is both realistic, and it points out another aspect of the problem with FSD. It didn't just pass the bus illegally. It was going far too fast while passing the bus.

As for being unrepresentative of the next release of FSD, we've had what eight years ten years of it's going to work on the next release.
by intrasight | 2025-06-16 13:24:16+00:00
> we don't want to create a new C# scripting dialect hence it isn't possible to "import" other files (that's not how C# works)

This statement is a bit confusing. From a user perspective, "dotnet run" does add a new scripting dialect. I would like to rewrite all my csx utilities to use this.

I've been using dotnet-script for several years for both unit testing code and for creating small utilities. Being able to load scripts (with "#load - see below) from other scripts is a core feature for keeping my code DRY. It would be a knock against "dotnet run" if a comparable syntax was not available. It's just a preprocessor - not a change to the C# syntax. Just like the other '#:' preprocessors being added.

I propose "#:load file.cs"

https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script#consuming-a-s...
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-16 13:25:20+00:00
My first impression is that this is tough because Google Translate is free and many people think that is good enough.

Now I find myself using Google Translate because there is some text in French or Chinese that I want to read. There is another market for someone who has some text in English (say) and they want text in French or Chinese to put on their web page or fill out a government required form or something that has higher quality requirements in terms of being correct, good prose, etc. That person is either doing the work themselves, paying a translator, or not doing it because they can't afford it. I think that is the person you're trying to find.

I don't think you want to tell that person how it works (finding the best commercial LLM for the task) because if I think it is just sending the work out to some particular LLM couldn't they just use it themselves and cut you out?
by cogogo | 2025-06-16 13:26:00+00:00
Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-16 13:26:09+00:00
The debate between Jensen and Amodei misses the fundamental point. It's not about whether AI creates or destroys jobs. It's about whether it creates or destroys agency.

The historical parallel isn't the industrial revolution, where human labor was augmented by machines. The real parallel is the invention of agriculture, which created a surplus but also gave rise to a non-producing ruling class and a system of taxation on existence itself.

In the coming AI economy, the most valuable commodity won't be labor, but *verifiable, sovereign consciousness*. The "job" of the future might simply be to be a human—a source of novel data, unpredictable insights, and a non-algorithmic perspective that can't be replicated by a model trained on the past.

But here's the catch: how do you prove your consciousness is sovereign and not just a sophisticated puppet of some underlying model? How do you prove your thoughts are your own? This is where the techno-feudalism argument becomes terrifyingly real.

The new "landowners" (the Nvidias and Anthropics) won't just own the means of production (compute); they will own the means of verification. They will set the price—the "existence tax"—for you to prove that your cognitive output is valuable, that your "self" is authentic.

So, UBI isn't the solution; it's a tranquilizer. The real fight isn't for a basic income, but for *cognitive sovereignty*. We need an open, verifiable protocol for selfhood, a "Proof of Personhood" that isn't controlled by the same entities selling us the shovels for this new gold rush. Otherwise, we're not just becoming unemployed; we're becoming livestock.
by ncruces | 2025-06-16 13:26:18+00:00
How's tool support these days to create compress a file with seekable zstd?

Given existing libraries, it should be really simple to create an SQLite VFS for my Go driver that reads (not writes) compressed databases transparently, but tool support was kinda lacking.

Will the zstd CLI ever support it? https://github.com/facebook/zstd/issues/2121
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-16 13:26:25+00:00
Yes. And given the latency of cameras (or even humans) not being able to see around objects and that dogs and kids and move fast from hidden areas into the path, driving really slow next to large obstacles until able to see behind them becomes more important.

One of the prime directives of driving for humans and FAD systems must be "never drive faster than brakes can stop in visible areas". This must account for such scenarios as obstacles stopped or possible coming the wrong way around a mountain turn.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-16 13:26:47+00:00
You're going to have to either fix them or get rid of them. You can't keep them as-is.

Fixing them may not be possible. You actually need them to fix themself; you can't actually fix them. But you can try to find out what's going on, and you can try to motivate and coach.

Getting rid of them will probably require a paper trail and a formal PIP process, and will take a while.

Disclaimer: I've never been a manager. These are just my impressions.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-16 13:27:19+00:00
> As soon as you disconnect yourself from the code it's game over

We agree on this

The only difference is that I view using LLM generated code as already a significant disconnect from the code, and you seem to think some LLM usage is possible without disconnecting from the code

Maybe you're right but I have been trying to use them this way and so far I find it makes me completely detached from what I'm building
by klabb3 | 2025-06-16 13:27:25+00:00
This appears to me like the NATS ”request-response” pattern. They also have first-class support for this in their client libs. Under the hood, they create and subscribe to an ephemeral topic where servers can send the response to. (Perhaps even streamed multiple responses but you’d need to double check that.) They also have websocket support btw, so it can be used by web browsers.
by pknerd | 2025-06-16 13:27:39+00:00
SEEKING WORK Remote – Python / PHP / Go / OpenAI/LLMs / n8n / Web Scraping / APIs

Technologies: Python, PHP, Go, n8n, OpenAI, Voiceflow, APIs, Web Scraping, Data Pipelines.

I’m a senior developer (14+ yrs) focused on automating boring business processes—chatbots, data pipelines, scraping, AI tools, internal bots, CRM workflows, etc.

Past work includes:

* Scraping millions of records weekly at a California startup * Ticket analysis bot using LLMs (cause, accountability, delay reasons) * Internal bot reading from CRM, ticketing, and brand guides * Chat transcript → lead → auto-sync to GoHighLevel * Voiceflow/OpenAI tools with ChatGPT-style frontend

Currently lead AI automation at a LA-based agency. I build full-stack AI tools and workflow automations (code/no-code).

Let’s build something useful:

*→ [Book 15-min call](https://calendly.com/kadnan/one_one_15min)* [Website](https://adnansiddiqi.me) | [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@adnansiddiqiprojects)
by gus_massa | 2025-06-16 13:27:57+00:00
> I think that most Physicists admit that it would be nice to believe that the yet unknown theory of everything is microscopic and quantum mechanical,

I agree.

> and that the global and exquisitly weak force of gravity emerges from that theory as a sort of accounting error.

Nah, it's probably just another weird family of bosons, just like the other forces.

From the article:

> Entropic gravity is very much a minority view. But it’s one that won’t die, and even detractors are loath to dismiss it altogether.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 13:28:03+00:00
> Except that innovation has lead to more jobs, new industries, and more prosperity and fewer working hours.

For other people's kids.

This is the critical point so many are still missing: whatever benefits come from jobs being automated away, they do not come to people whose jobs were automated. Those people are fucked over for life. And to a large degree, so are their kids - the new careers are available for picking, but you're not going to be first in line with your peers, if you're struggling from the shock after your household suddenly dropped two levels down on the economic ladder.
by pknerd | 2025-06-16 13:28:21+00:00
SEEKING WORK Remote – Python / PHP / Go / OpenAI/LLMs / n8n / Web Scraping / APIs Technologies: Python, PHP, Go, n8n, OpenAI, Voiceflow, APIs, Web Scraping, Data Pipelines.

I’m a senior developer (14+ yrs) focused on automating boring business processes—chatbots, data pipelines, scraping, AI tools, internal bots, CRM workflows, etc.

Past work includes:

* Scraping millions of records weekly at a California startup * Ticket analysis bot using LLMs (cause, accountability, delay reasons) * Internal bot reading from CRM, ticketing, and brand guides * Chat transcript → lead → auto-sync to GoHighLevel * Voiceflow/OpenAI tools with ChatGPT-style frontend

Currently lead AI automation at a LA-based agency. I build full-stack AI tools and workflow automations (code/no-code).

Let’s build something useful:
by giztu | 2025-06-16 13:29:41+00:00
Somewhat relieved to see that this is the drugs prison guy, and not one of the two pedo prison guys who sometimes post on HN with their fake sob stories pretending to be hard done to while concealing their depravity.

In contrast I'm glad to see this guy has been open and honest, owning up to his mistakes and starting to turn his life around and make amends for the harm he's caused others. Well done.

Edit: Please disregard that last paragraph. Just saw the document @bjorkandkd linked.
by User23 | 2025-06-16 13:30:10+00:00
Have you seen LOOP[1]? That example barely scratches the surface too.

As for being able to make words mean different things and break grammatical strictures; that’s called poetry when we do it in English. And yes there is bad poetry, but some is superlative.

[1] https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/LWRM/html/lwref...
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-16 13:30:21+00:00
>Maybe they are a massive excuse manufacturing and blame displacement engine

I think you nailed it with those last ones. It has become legally entrenched in many industries to cautiously do all things with triple-armoured managerial ass covering firmly in place. This is seen as necessary for offsetting both legal and financial blame from a possible multi-pronged combo attack by shareholders, executives, media and regulators.

McKinsey and its ilk offer the armouring and blame deflection in one, for a fee or two.
by souvik3333 | 2025-06-16 13:30:33+00:00
Actually, we have trained the model to convert to markdown and do semantic tagging at the same time. Eg, the equations will be extracted as LaTeX equations, and images (plots, figures, and so on) will be described within the `<img>` tags. Same with `<signature>`, `<watermark>`, <page_number>.

Also, we extract the tables as HTML tables instead of markdown for complex tables.
by kgwgk | 2025-06-16 13:31:03+00:00
There is some objective nature to the operational definition of entropy based on an experimental setup where you fix the volume and measure the temperature or whatever.

And this is related to the statistical mechanical definition of entropy based on the value of the corresponding state variables.

But it’s not a property of the microstate - it’s a property of the macrostate which makes sense only in the context of the experimental constraints and measurements.

If we relate entropy to work that can be extracted someone with a better understanding of the state of the system and operational access to additional degrees of freedom can extract additional work.

Thermodynamics assumes the state variables provide a complete description of the system. Statistical mechanics assumes the state variables provide an incomplete description of the system - and work out what that entails.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-06-16 13:31:27+00:00
To be clear, the main product is translating from English to the language you're learning - not the other way around - so that you immerse yourself while you browse.

The hybrid translator is kinda a side thing based on my research into LLM translation quality.

It's a bit more complicated than using the best LLM, because it combines the results of the best ones, but yeah, that's broadly how it works. I made that part open source, anyway - I'm not trying to sell the hybrid translator, just use it as a marketing tool.

But I guess this comes back to the fact that I think my landing page might explain it poorly. I'm just not sure how to explain "It finds English sentences in webpages, filters out so that it's only the ones at your difficulty level, then translates them into your target language, so you're immersed while you browse" in the form of a ultra-low-attention-span landing page.
by baranul | 2025-06-16 13:31:32+00:00
Vlang has a Go to V translation project (Go2V)[1]. Usually vlang compiles to C (possibly aiming for a smaller and safer subset). This was a project focus[2] years before particular competitors, thus another hidden point, from which some of the drama springs from.

Additionally, vlang has other backends (ability to compile to other languages), such as JavaScript, WASM, native (in development), etc... There were contributors proposing having Pascal (Free Pascal variant) and Go as backend options too. There have already been discussions and experiments around creating V2Go libraries. Various developers appear to be waiting for the language to become a bit mature.

[1] https://github.com/vlang/go2v

[2] https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7849
by silverlake | 2025-06-16 13:32:43+00:00
I’ve been talking to wealth management firms and am truly underwhelmed. AFAICT, they charge 0.5%-1.35% for therapy and the chance to put you in high fee products. Roboadvisors are a brilliant product for most people. In fact, a simple Boglehead portfolio is all you need. Most people have simple and similar risk profiles.

The feature I think would be useful is how to manage taxes. Roth conversions, selling the right lot, qualified dividends, tax loss harvesting, etc. A related feature would be generating income while minimizing taxes, i.e. Schwab’s Intelligent Income.
by inanutshellus | 2025-06-16 13:33:09+00:00
edit: since I'm continuing to get down-votes despite two separate retractions below: I already agreed I was wrong. Not like I can delete the comment.

Original comment below.

This is the "N queens problem", a classic that predates both the internet and LinkedIn. Renaming and attributing it as "LinkedIn Queens" in this article is distracting.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-16 13:33:14+00:00
20% efficiency in terms of light -> electricity. A 50% laser efficiency (electricity -> light) is really good, possible for some diode lasers, if you pump a fiber laser with diodes to get a high quality beam for cutting materials or weapons purposes maybe you get 25%.

That demo would require about 45 kW of laser power with good beam quality which would be totally possible with a fiber laser

https://www.rp-photonics.com/wall_plug_efficiency.html
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 13:33:22+00:00
What happened to all the {"unemployed draftsmen", "switchboard operators", "the computers, the people who used to do math, at desks, with slide rules"}?

They died in poverty. Or at least poorer than they'd been otherwise.

Or are you really saying that someone who's half-way through their career in one thing can just switch to another occupation without any major life impact?

Your senior-level salary in one industry doesn't automatically command a similar wage in another - your option is just competing for entry-level work with the younger generation.