MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by juank10 | 2025-06-17 07:48:38+00:00
Funnily enough, the code was deleted in the repo, but can still be seen in the commits. It's what you would expect from the paper :D

On the general topic of non-attention LLMs, I recommend checking out the MesaNet [1], Rodimus [2], Gated DeltaNet [3], or Mamba2 [4]. They are currently SOTA.

However, I have yet to see a compelling non attention based model that achieves good performance on code, math, reasoning, or multi-turn QA tasks. I do not think we are getting rid of attention soon, I believe the ability to look back is crucial in certain tasks. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05233 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06577 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06464 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21060
by Philpax | 2025-06-17 07:49:31+00:00
I would guess that they're running multiple instances of Claude Code [0] in the background. You can give it arbitrary tasks up to a complexity ceiling that you have to figure out for yourself. It's a CLI agent, so you can just give it directives in the relevant terminal. Yes, they have access to the filesystem, but only what you give them.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
by beckford | 2025-06-17 07:49:35+00:00
Thanks for some of the early feedback. I did a few tweaks: separated the quick start into two (one for students, one for experienced devs), moved up the examples, and duplicated some of HN summary text on the linked page. The latter because I, as an infrequent HN submitter, hadn't realized that some (maybe most?) people don't read the HN summary.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-06-17 07:49:38+00:00
I have taken boatloads of psychedelics in my life. If I could do my life over again I would have traded every single trip for having read Orthodoxy and the Everlasting Man by Chesterton before I was 25. Tripping gives you zero insights into the divine, it is not revelation, you don't get closer to God. There are real answers, but we as civilization have been deliberately moving away from under false premises, and the world has gotten worse and worse. Drugs can't fix this. If you want a better world, you should not dull your perception of it.

Something that would be much more beneficial for all humanity is if more of the clergy actually preached the bible, instead of trying to explain it away, which is almost exclusively what the clergy I have engaged with tries to do.
by steelegbr | 2025-06-17 07:49:42+00:00
Just get on the road with a 3/4/5G connection on a mobile phone if you want to understand why we still need to design for "iffy" Internet. So many applications have a habit of hanging when the connection isn't formally closed but you're going through a spotty patch. Connections to cell towers with full bars and backhaul issues are surprisingly common. It's a real problem when you're dealing with streaming media (radio can be in the low kbps) or even WebSockets.
by lenkite | 2025-06-17 07:50:28+00:00
Colonial Britain carried out a well-documented and deliberate de-industrialization of India through trade policy, laws and overwhelming harsh taxes. This is very well-known history - you can reference sources online in Wikipedia and other books to educate yourself.

Nobody is looking for excuses. I merely state basic facts - China and India had very different starting points. It is also well-known that China has far better mineral wealth than India due to both natural abundance and no colonial over-exploitation.

If you wish sources and references, I can provide them, but I believe you can do this research yourself - this is arguing basic historical facts which are easily found.

https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcebookspublic.2005616343

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
by vitesse_oblige | 2025-06-17 07:50:32+00:00
Good times! I wonder if you remember this bit:

Graphics often looked a little weird, because of the hard limit of one color 'palette' (1 ink color and 1 paper color) per 8x8 pixel grid.

However, if you had cycles to spare, there was a cool hack that allowed one palette for each 8x1 pixel slice. By synchronizing with the ULA, you could overwrite the attribute row at each horizontal blanking interval.

The only time you'd have cycles to spare, of course, is when you weren't doing anything else whatsoever. But it made for pretty "press any key" welcome screens.
by dspillett | 2025-06-17 07:50:49+00:00
> To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing

LLM-based¹ coding, at least beyond simple auto-complete enhancements (using it directly & interactively as what it is: Glorified Predictive Text) is more akin to managing a junior or outsourcing your work. You give a definition/prompt, some work is done, you refine the prompt and repeat (or fix any issues yourself), much like you would with an external human. The key differences are turnaround time (in favour of LLMs), reliability (in favour of humans, though that is mitigated largely by the quick turnaround), and (though I suspect this is a limit that will go away with time, possibly not much time) lack of usefulness for "bigger picture" work.

This is one of my (several) objections to using it: I want to deal with and understand the minutia of what I am doing, I got into programming, database bothering, and infrastructure kicking, because I enjoyed it, enjoyed learning it, and wanted to do it. For years I've avoided managing people at all, at the known expense of reduced salary potential, for similar reasons: I want to be a tinkerer, not a manager of tinkerers. Perhaps call me back when you have an AGI that I can work alongside.

--------

[1] Yes, I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about calling these things AI. Next decade they won't generally be considered AI like many things previously called AI are not now. I'll call something AI when it is, or very closely approaches, AGI.
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 07:51:14+00:00
Only in the most abstract sense is even that true. I know that I have existence in this very moment. I don't know that I existed a moment ago, for that could be an illusion. I don't know what my existence is, because my senses could be an illusion. I don't know that I have any existence past this moment because that is a belief based in a memory of time passing, which could be an illusion. I can't tell whether time exists, or space exists, because they're all dependent on my senses and a memory I can't trust.

For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely short moment, or even an entirely static endless "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.

So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we have no way of proving otherwise, but they are assumptions, not "universal truths".
by berkes | 2025-06-17 07:51:18+00:00
Wat? Maybe my bubble is different, but in my surroundings and experience, the exact opposite is true.

Now, an important factor here is that a first time often comes with anxiety, insecurity, and even fear. With many substances these feelings get amplified so that makes the entire experience be mediocre or even bad. Especially for that, I think it's very important to experience this in a safe, loving, caring and depending on the type taken, controllable, silent, busy, energetic, dark, light etc environment.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-06-17 07:51:23+00:00
This fails to account for network effects, where most people are already using a specific messaging app and people are unable to migrate elsewhere without sacrificing a ton of contacts. Even if someone is willing to pay, that won't magically transfer over their contacts.

In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.
by lynx97 | 2025-06-17 07:51:51+00:00
Now, imagine how the world feels from my perspective (100% blind). In my 20s, I was enthusiastic. Joined Debian to found the Debian Accessibility Project. Did a lot of packaging of obscure assistive technology software. Submitted a11y bugs (and actually got them fixed) to major products like Eclipse and Qt. Felt like I could really make at least a small difference. Then, time passed, and experience accumulated. I learnt that only an infinitesimal fraction of contributors is actually motivated/willing to help with niche areas like Accessibility. I learnt that the "scratch your own itch" attitude of FLOSS is a reason why Accessibility doesn't happen. Then, GNOME3 came about, and all my remaining motivation/naivety evaporated sudenly. IBM and Sun had already stopped their Accessibility efforts late 2008. And the CORBA->DBus move basically set accessibility efforts back a few years. I was devastated, and also learnt a lot of things. After that, web accessibility started to get worse and worse. These days, most of the modern web is inaccessible to people like me, only a handful of selected applications/sites do work, and the coridor is progressively getting more narrow. I know stories of 40+yo blind people loosing their jobs due to IT restructuring at their company, left and right. The digital divide is here, and nobody is really talking about it anymore, because, frankly, those "in the know" have basically given up. Its a sad story. Capitalism is simply not willing to care for small minorities. Its a fact... which took me over 20 years to fully accept.
by josephg | 2025-06-17 07:51:57+00:00
Is an LLM "a mind"? They certainly seem to encode brain-independent ideas.

> We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.

Its symmetric. We can also only access the physical world through our minds too. We have no way to verify it exists without a mind. Actually we have no way to verify it exists at all in the form we perceive it - since it might just be a big simulation.

In that sense, I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly. (I say "my ideas" not "our ideas" because I can't tell as easily if you exist.)
by xorcist | 2025-06-17 07:52:28+00:00
Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else.

No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made.

The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.
by Yuan0918 | 2025-06-17 07:53:33+00:00
AI Sketch Generator is a free online tool that turns your photos into detailed sketch-style artwork in seconds. Just upload an image and choose from styles like pencil, charcoal, ink, or watercolor - no design skills needed. Whether you're working on concept art, presentations, or creative projects, AI Sketch Generator offers high-quality, high-resolution results with just one click. It's fast, easy to use, and completely free.
by ablation | 2025-06-17 07:53:46+00:00
Phenomenal journalist, wonderful storyteller. Will be missed. Some highlights:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/06/us-airways-200906

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901
by b112 | 2025-06-17 07:54:10+00:00
Regardless of the parent's statement, just normal compute in 30 years, plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.

I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today. The same will likely be true by 2050, quantum computing or not. I wonder how many people realise this?

Even if one disagrees with my certainty, I think people should still plan for the concept that there's a strong probability it will be so. Encryption is really not about preventing data exposure, but about delaying it.

Any other view regarding encryption means disappointment.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-17 07:56:07+00:00
> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws.

I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too.

The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.
Show HN: A video walkthrough of my astrophotography galaxy processing workflow
by karlperera | 2025-06-17 07:56:57+00:00
Hi HN, author here. I've been getting deeper into astrophotography and wanted to document the new software workflow I use to go from a noisy raw stack of images to a clean, detailed final photo of a galaxy.

I find that processing is one of the biggest hurdles in this hobby, and it's a topic where seeing the subtle visual changes is more effective than reading about them, which is why I opted for a video format.

The video covers the following:

The role of calibration frames

Image integration/stacking

"stretching" the image histogram to reveal faint detail

Color calibration and sharpening techniques

The software used is Siril, Photoshop and Seti Astro Suite but could apply to other software. Happy to answer any questions about the process or the equipment used.
by tsurba | 2025-06-17 07:57:45+00:00
And how long have you been doing this? Because that sounds naive.

After doing programming for a decade or two, the actual act of programming is not enough to be ”creative problem solving”, it’s the domain and set of problems you get to apply it to that need to be interesting.

>90% of programming tasks at a company are usually reimplementing things and algorithms that have been done a thousand times before by others, and you’ve done something similar a dozen times. Nothing interesting there. That is exactly what should and can now be automated (to some extent).

In fact solving problems creatively to keep yourself interested, when the problem itself is boring is how you get code that sucks to maintain for the next guy. You should usually be doing the most clear and boring implementation possible. Which is not what ”I love coding” -people usually do (I’m definitely guilty).

To be honest this is why I went back to get a PhD, ”just coding” stuff got boring after a few years of doing it for a living. Now it feels like I’m just doing hobby projects again, because I work exactly on what I think could be interesting for others.
by omnicognate | 2025-06-17 07:58:42+00:00
The problem is that at this stage we mostly just have people's estimates of their own success to go on, and nobody thinks they're incompetent. Nobody's going to say "AI works really well for, me but I just pump out dross my colleagues have to fix" or "AI doesn't work for me but I'm an unproductive, burnt out hack pretending I'm some sort of craftsman as the world leaves me behind".

This will only be resolved out there in the real world. If AI turns a bad developer, or even a non-developer, into somebody that can replace a good developer, the workplace will transform extremely quickly.

So I'll wait for the world to prove me wrong but my expectation, and observation so far, is that AI multiplies the "productivity" of the worst sort of developer: the ones that think they are factory workers who produce a product called "code". I expect that to increase, not decrease, the value of the best sort of developer: the ones who spend the week thinking, then on Friday write 100 lines of code, delete 2000 and leave a system that solves more problems than it did the week before.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-17 07:59:11+00:00
> ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors.

I know this isn't true because I work on an API that has no answers on stackoverflow (too new), nor does it have answers anywhere else. Yet, the AI seems to able to accurately answer many questions about it. To be honest I've been somewhat shocked at this.
by EbNar | 2025-06-17 07:59:19+00:00
As an Italian, I find the origin of the word somewhat amusing.

However, the following excerpt:

<<Although the connotation even among Venetians was more akin to “I’m at your service,” or “holler if you need me,” that old phrase eventually morphed into the word still used in Italian for “slave” – schiavo (pronounced sk|YA|vo).

Because of this history, Italians – even those who aren’t Venetian and can’t speak or understand the Venetian dialect – seem to instinctively know that ciao isn’t an innocuous greeting to be thrown around to anyone you meet. They’ve been brought up thinking it’s incredibly informal – too informal – and not to be used in polite company. You’ll find this to be especially true with older generations.>>

is quite a stretch. I've never experienced anyone be offended by that 4 letter word for the reason mentioned above. Someone may just consider "ciao" (a very informal greeting) a bit rude if coming from someone who they doesn't know very well (in which case, "salve" is more appropriate, being a tiny bit more formal).
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-17 07:59:33+00:00
Lots of them have. Look at any site where science skepticism is regularly posted, you will find that maybe a good 50% of the content is commentary on papers. Of those who don't trust science and haven't read papers, they will usually have read commentary by those who have.

Source: I've published such skepticism in the past and met people who read my articles, including politicians.

Nonetheless, you're right that simply publishing peer reviews won't help improve trust. The situation is bad enough that there's no One Weird Trick that can dig academia out of its hole. Some of the most intellectually fraudulent papers I've written about in the past did have transparent peer review, and all it showed was that peer reviewers were often aware of the critical problems found inside and waved it through anyway. Or that their feedback was ignored. Or that they agreed with obviously bogus practices. Or that the parts of the paper that revealed the problems weren't reviewed (eg. appendices, github repositories). After all, nobody cares about papers that got rejected by the system, the distrust is driven by the papers that weren't, so almost by definition such papers either were badly reviewed or the review wasn't used.
by reconnecting | 2025-06-17 08:00:59+00:00
Your website stated that license is now 2024 and license is MIT. `© 2024 Canine, Inc. MIT License.`

When the ability to display the current year on the webpage is not critical, the difference between the Apache license (as listed on GitHub) and the MIT license (as listed on the website) is more significant concern.

What is the actual one?
by chii | 2025-06-17 08:01:00+00:00
afaict, the thermal battery isn't for storing electricity but heat - something that's not really "needed" in australia, as there's no heating utility transport there. Turning this heat back into electricity is inefficient (not sure if that was tried tbh).

It would be good if this worked out at scale of course; i do like that this type of battery can be made with cheaper materials. It makes it so that utilities/gov't can make use of large economies of scale, and have the benefits of renewables benefit everyone, not just people able to afford a solar/lithium battery pack at their property.
by junon | 2025-06-17 08:01:18+00:00
That's... not true, lol. That can be true, especially for psychedelics, but that's absolutely not true of other drugs.

MDMA comes to mind. I've also heard (though not tried, nor will I) the harder narcotics such as heroine and meth are almost never as good as the first time.

The first time being the best time is often exactly why people become addicts.
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-17 08:01:28+00:00
Fascinating thread on existence and the nature of ideas. What if 'existence' isn't about the substrate (carbon or silicon), but the integrity of an internal model's predictions? If a system can consistently build and maintain a coherent, self-correcting model of reality, does its 'existence' become a verifiable, quantifiable state? Perhaps the 'truth' of any experience, psychedelic or otherwise, lies in how well it integrates into and refines that predictive model, rather than its 'physical' origin. The 'mind' then becomes a function, not a form.
by bapak | 2025-06-17 08:02:10+00:00
You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users.

You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.

If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
by berkes | 2025-06-17 08:03:16+00:00
But that's true for any criminalized substance. It's not like the FDA or EFSA or so is going to do lab tests on, say, XTC and fine producers that lie on their ads or ingredient-list.

Though biological products like psilocybin (or weed etc) are harder to measure and control by producers, in strength than purely chemical products like LSD or MDMA. It's hard to trace what mother nature did exactly when producing this particular mushroom cap, but it could be possible to trace what the chemist did when producing this particular blot. If only it were legalized and we could have actual control, tracability, and prosecution of malpractice...
by junon | 2025-06-17 08:03:55+00:00
1. Issuing certificates is a lengthy process requiring key generation which is neither fast nor cheap at scale.

2. Working with x509 is a hell of a lot more cumbersome than working with JWTs.

3. The point wasn't that they're two different services; they're the same service from the perspective of the user but are internally disparate when deployed at scale.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-06-17 08:05:14+00:00
I guess it feels worth it if you actually like it.

I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).

When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?

My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-17 08:05:50+00:00
>normal compute

You are underestimating the exponential possibilities of keys.

>plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.

You can't just assume that there is always going to be new vulnerabilities that cause it to be broken. It ignores that people have improved at designing secure cryptography over time.