MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paradox460 | 2025-06-11 21:14:42+00:00
They have a few interfaces that you can trigger an AI answer through

The first, and most useful to me, is when you just append a ? to your query. This pops up the answer in an info box at the top of a search, and then shows related results below

The second is the assistant mode, which pops up either when you use the continuing link at the bottom of an info box, or trigger it directly via the assistant URL. This is the standard conversational interface
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-11 21:16:36+00:00
> I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east

I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way.

Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-11 21:16:49+00:00
> "A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a university doing clinical trials using stem cells to repair the heart. It seemed really promising. Unfortunately, they are in Germany, and they only accept German residents. So that wasn’t an option."

It's not that tough to gain German residency. There's even a "Freelancer Visa" that gives you a residence permit. If you pay an immigration consultant a few thousand bucks, and don't have a criminal history, it can be done rather quickly.
by bgirard | 2025-06-11 21:17:07+00:00
I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project.

Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.
by nipah | 2025-06-11 21:17:27+00:00
"most people I show them too have issues understanding them, and in fact I had issues understanding them" ??? those benchmarks are so extremely simple they have basically 100% human approval rates, unless you are saying "I could not grasp it immediately but later I was able to after understanding the point" I think you and your friends should see a neurologist. And I'm not mocking you, I mean seriously, those are tasks extremely basic for any human brain and even some other mammals to do.
by gassi | 2025-06-11 21:17:34+00:00
What fortunate timing! Our next release will including a new, local-only "API" that uses Launchbox's GamesDB (https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/) as the metadata source. The entire database is loaded into Redis and games are matched on exact file names, so no data is ever sent to any cloud providers.

https://github.com/rommapp/romm/pull/1515
by robocat | 2025-06-11 21:17:36+00:00
Exactly: we need an easy way to increase the tappable area of the vote buttons. You can't just add a invisible tappable wide border because the tap zones must not overlap. It is hard to design to be contained within a component. I had to use customised elements/CSS because the tappable area depends upon where a control/component is placed next to another control/component.

I also recall an obscure fix necessary for Mobile Safari. If you wanted something clickable near an <input> you needed to take care how you designed it because otherwise the <input> would steal the click. You could add an onclick handler (Mobile Safari has a bunch of heuristic hacks where onclick= will cause differences to touch behaviours when a touch is on an element that has a click handler. You could also use a button which might or might not be more accessible depending on needs and design. I recall I needed a lot of fiddling depending on each control.
by ninininino | 2025-06-11 21:17:40+00:00
I woke up during my wisdom teeth extraction and remember the sound of crunching as they hammered or chiseled or something but luckily I couldn't feel anything or don't remember pain, just psychological distress. Googling the experience it appears to be a fairly common thing enough to read similar stories.

In my opinion, it would be a good idea to explain to a patient what is going to happen so if they do wake up they can know what is going on and be less alarmed by the procedure.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-06-11 21:18:49+00:00
This invalidates your thesis that Apple is behind on AI because they can't hire talent. And that they can't hire talent as they don't innovate and publish papers.

xAI doesn't innovate, doesn't publish papers, and started literally a decade later than Apple into AI, and yet they're ahead of Apple in AI.

So the high order bit is something else. Apple seems consumed by its legacy dependencies, structures... people even. There's no one on top with focus. I'm not even saying "with vision" or "with competence" or "with expertise". I'm just saying "with focus". If Tim Cook wanted an LLM he'd have a top of the line LLM running in 6 months with the resources he has. He doesn't.

His focus is on making lots of the things he wants to sell, and he doesn't care, or understand what those things are. This is why they have warehouses full of unsold Vision Pro inventory now. He's a logistics guy. Blind to the rest.

And Apple was doing great with someone like him at the top for years. But now the backlog of products is over and they keep shipping duds, while their software work is nosediving.

They need someone who understands "product" stat. Someone with holistic instincts. Someone like Jobs. I mean at least a bit like him.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-11 21:19:31+00:00
Np, I actually have values. It's difficult to believe, most of the people around you apparently have none. First off, my own organs are spare parts for those in my family who are younger than I am... children, nieces, nephews, etc. They're never to donate to anyone in a generation older than them (lateral's sometimes ok). And I wouldn't accept donor organs from someone not in my family. I've got other people to think about than myself, so staying alive at any cost (financial or moral) isn't a consideration at all. Not saying I wouldn't hesitate if facing the end, but I've thought about this alot over the years and I've already made the choice.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-06-11 21:19:53+00:00
I went to school in a very bad neighborhood. Once I was sent to the office because my math teacher asked me what I was reading about that was soo much more interesting than our textbook. I happened to be reading "A Brief History of Time", so I answered "black holes."

At the time I couldn't understand why my dad laughed about that particular phone call from the principal.
by majoe | 2025-06-11 21:20:02+00:00
If time were running against the arrow of entropy, nobody could perceive or measure it, right? Remembering something is per se an increase in entropy, so the universe could run in negative time direction, but we would simply forget, what had happened.

That said, I personally think such thought experiments are futile and the nature of time has to be understood by its connection to causality and information.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-11 21:20:07+00:00
I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.

Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.

If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.
by dmarcos | 2025-06-11 21:20:15+00:00
A-Frame is an entity component system on top of THREE.js that uses the DOM as a declarative layer for the scene graph. It can be manipulated using the standard APIs and tools that Web developers are used to. Initial target was onboarding Web devs into 3D but found success beyond. The super low barrier of entry (hello world below) without sacrificing functionality made it very popular for people learning programming / 3D (part of the curriculum in many schools / universities) and in advanced scenarios (moonrider.xyz ~100k MAUs (300k MAUs at peak) most popular WebXR content to date is made with A-Frame)

One of the Spark goals is exploring applications of 3D Gaussian Splatting. I don't have all the answers yet but already compelling use cases quickly developing. e.g photogrammetry / scanning where splats represent high frequency detail in an appealing and relatively compact way as you can see in one of the demos (https://sparkjs.dev/examples/interactivity/index.html). There are great examples of video capture already (https://www.4dv.ai/). Looking forward to seeing new applications as we figure out better compression, streaming, relighting, generative models, LOD...

A-Frame hello world

<html> <head> <script src="https://aframe.io/releases/1.7.1/aframe.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <a-scene> <a-box position="-1 0.5 -3" rotation="0 45 0" color="#4CC3D9"></a-box> </a-scene> </body> </html>
by gyomu | 2025-06-11 21:20:55+00:00
Heh that’s overstated. As a non Asian foreigner*, you get a lot of leeway for making mistakes when speaking Japanese, as it is somehow ingrained in the subconscious here that Japanese is very special and very complicated and a foreigner trying to speak it is already doing something near impossible.

If your Japanese is near flawless except for the honorific register that would strike people as weird, but then what did you do to end up speaking flawless Japanese without ever properly internalizing honorific Japanese?

*(If you are an Asian foreigner, you are subject to many other layers of prejudice unrelated to your language ability)
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-06-11 21:21:30+00:00
"Proving anything" is kind of fuzzy. We've got very solid evidence that some sort of big bang happened. We can see the galaxies flying away from a common point, and since we can count backwards, we can know roughly when they probably would've been in the same spot. The how and why, and the what happened before, those are very unknown, although we've got a surprising amount of knowledge of what the first few seconds were probably like.
by neilv | 2025-06-11 21:22:52+00:00
> Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can and cannot run to do their jobs, that's an absurd level of micromanagement.

I'm usually on the side of empowering workers, but I believe sometimes the companies do have business saying this.

One reason is that much of the software industry has become a batpoop-insane slimefest of privacy (IP) invasion, as well as grossly negligent security.

Another reason is that the company may be held liable for license terms of the software.

Another reason is that the company may be held liable for illegal behavior of the software (e.g., if the software violates some IP of another party).

Every piece of software might expose the company to these risks. And maybe disproportionately so, if software is being introduced by the "I'm gettin' it done!" employee, rather than by someone who sees vetting for the risks as part of their job.
by bakkoting | 2025-06-11 21:23:48+00:00
> Apparently it has now finally arrived in ES2026

ES2017 [1]. The MDN docs always link the latest version of the spec; the year in the link doesn't correspond to the version where it was added. The proposal was already mostly done at the time of the incident [2]

[1] https://tc39.es/ecma262/2017/#sec-string.prototype.padstart [2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-string-pad-start-end
by gardnr | 2025-06-11 21:24:26+00:00
Previously, on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44120204

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44144155

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44195105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44230867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221910

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145564
by echelon | 2025-06-11 21:24:33+00:00
I have immense respect for astrophysicists, but the data we're dealing with is extremely far away and relies on a lot of interlocking assumptions.

I stumbled upon this paper [1, 2] last night that challenges the CMB, and thus the underpinning of much of our understanding about the age and evolution of the universe. As a layperson, I don't know the impact factor of the "Nuclear Physics B" journal - if this is just junk or if this is a claim that will pan out.

My point is that it feels like we're building on a lot of observations that are all super indirect. I know I'm just a layperson, but that feels weird when reading assertions about these things.

Our understanding of the universe is relatively new. We don't have a lot of energy or resolution in our observations. The fact that we can sniff the molecular spectra of exoplanets is so amazing and that part feels totally concrete and rock-solid. But I get skeptical when I see claims that we know how the universe began or how it will end. Is our evidence that good? Are our models? Are we basing everything on assumptions?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04687

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb69yPNgX-Q
by ramchip | 2025-06-11 21:25:17+00:00
Right. I don't treat the LLM like a colleague at all, it's just a text generator, so I partially agree with your earlier statement:

> it's like reviewing a PR with no trust possible, no opportunity to learn or to teach, and no possibility for insight that will lead to a better code base in the future

The first part is 100% true. There is no trust. I treat any LLM code as toxic waste and its explanations as lies until proven otherwise.

The second part I disagree somewhat. I've learned plenty of things from AI output and analysis. You can't teach it to analyze allocations or code complexity, but you can feed it guidelines or samples of code in a certain style and that can be quite effective at nudging it towards similar output. Sometimes that doesn't work, and that's fine, it can still be a big time saver to have the LLM output as a starting point and tweak it (manually, or by giving the agent additional instructions).
by chasd00 | 2025-06-11 21:25:37+00:00
> This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.

one thing about LLMs used as a replacement for search is they have to be continually retrained or else they become stale. Lets say a hard recession hits and all the AI companies go out of business but we're left with all these models on huggingface that can still be used. Then, a new programming language hits the scene and it's a massive hit, how will LLMs be able to autocomplete and add dependencies for a language they've never seen before? Maybe an analogy could be asking an LLM to translate a written language you make up on the spot to English/other language.
by conscion | 2025-06-11 21:25:54+00:00
The US should really nationalize their rail infrastructure; only the rails themselves, not the railroad companies. The railroads should be treated as transportation infrastructure the same way that the highway system is.

With nationalized rails, the US could set standards for rail-sharing which could help passenger rail and invest in improved rail connections between cities which would improve both freight and passenger rail service.

Currently, each railroad company gets to maintain their own little fiefdoms in certain parts of the US

https://public.railinc.com/about-railinc/blog/who-owns-railr...
by nipah | 2025-06-11 21:26:10+00:00
I have a very simple question with like, 5 lines at best, that basically no model, neither reasoning or simpler could grasp. For obvious reasons I'm not disclosing it here (because I fear data contamination in the long run), but it basically breaks the "reasoning" of those things. Unfortunately, I still can't try the o3-pro because the API version is not easily available, and I'm certainly not willing to pay for it in pro mode, but when it comes to the plus version (if it comes) I'll try. To this date, because of this question (and similar ones) I stand very unimpressed with those models, the marketing is a thousand times larger than reality, and I suspect people in general are surprisingly less capable of detecting intelligence than they think.

The normal o3 also managed to break 3 isolated installations of linux I was trying it with, a few days ago. The task was very simple, simply setup ubuntu with btrfs, timeshift and grub-btrfs and it managed to fail every single time (even when searching the web), so it was not impressive either.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-11 21:27:04+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251900 just thought I would leave this comment here in case it makes you reconsider. Don't let sunk cost fallacy make you commit to something so permanent just yet if it turns out this therapy is within reach after all. Either way... Good luck. Hug your loved ones tight.
by al_borland | 2025-06-11 21:27:10+00:00
> And what do you do when the DNS decides you don't deserve a domain name any more?

This may be my problem in the future. I bought a domain, set it up on Proton, and started moving my email there, slowly but surely. My mistake, it was a .io domain. Now the future of that TLD is uncertain. Maybe it will be fine, but if not, I don’t want to continue tying more to it, so I’ve been divesting.

I went looking for a decent .com and they are of course hard to come by. Several seem like they were bought 20 years ago, parked, and forgotten about… but who knows, they could be running a mail server and nothing more.

My dad has been running his own for about 20 years. Over the years he’s run into various issues. Mail not being delivered, black listed IPs he had to get cleared up, several host migrations. It’s hardly been set it and forget it. At least he has the option to take it with him when a host goes bad, but I wouldn’t expect the average user to go through all of that. Very few people treat email as a hobby.
by jeremyjh | 2025-06-11 21:27:26+00:00
> A "world model" is a model of a data generating process which isn't reducible-to or constituted by its measures. > However the world isnt made out of language, nor coffee made out of thermometers. So a model of the data isnt a mdoel of its generating process.

So is V-JEPA 2 actually generating a world model, as you've defined it here? Its still just sampling data - visual data, tactile feedback etc is all reducible to quantized data. It seems like you could build useful models that seem to generalize without that. For example, a model could learn to stop dropping things without ever developing a theory of gravity.

Probably I'm still misunderstanding too much for this to be useful, but what I've read from you in this thread is way more useful to my understanding than what I've seen before.
by igorbark | 2025-06-11 21:27:26+00:00
i definitely agree that it would've been nice to have images in the book as it was hard to get a sense of exactly how well Boquila was mimicking neighbouring plants!

but in reference to the linked article, i will say that the researchers interviewed in the book (and i got that sense for Zoe as well) were in agreement with you that the research didn't support a vision-based mechanism. but everyone agrees that the imitation is going on. the researchers in the book suggest a gene transfer-based mechanism instead! (mentioned briefly in your linked article)
by timschmidt | 2025-06-11 21:28:28+00:00
I'll drop a link here to the T.A.M.I. Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pdZJ7TkJQU

"T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 concert film released by American International Pictures.[1] It includes performances by numerous popular rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England. The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students. The acronym "T.A.M.I." was used inconsistently in the show's publicity to mean both "Teenage Awards Music International" and "Teen Age Music International"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show

It's stacked with amazing performers, most at the beginning of their careers, including a young Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.
by didibus | 2025-06-11 21:28:47+00:00
Science is a process, not a source of truth. It has a very practical lens, which is very utilitarian, does the knowledge and models allow for invention or prediction that works in our reality for some current need.

The assumption is, you never really know, but if the model in which the theory says X, is able to predict something in the future or some experiment for Y, than that model appears to better approximate reality. Or is that knowledge and model allowing us to now do something we could not before, etc.

Over time, it course corrects to improve its knowledge and models in ways that show better results for prediction or invention.
by pantalaimon | 2025-06-11 21:29:09+00:00
That's what Blowtorch theory predicts, it notes three stages of black hole formation:

- direct collapse after the big bang. Those supermassive black holes now from the center of galaxies and are the earliest and simplest form of how universes reproduced

- stellar collapse, requires the formation of stars, but those can be much more plentyfull than previous supermassive direct collapse black holes, so many more universes will have those

- black holes created by technology. Since black holes are incredibly efficient at converting mass to energy, in a universe that has the capability to form intelligent life, this life will eventually find a way to harness black holes as an energy source. In doing so they would create even more tiny black holes (maybe to power spaceships?), so such universes would form the most offspring.