MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exDM69 | 2025-06-11 12:23:24+00:00
This is correct but the numbers are off by an order of magnitude. The annual movement of wood is maybe 2% width wise and almost negligible lengthwise.

This is for wood that is dried and stabilized, the shrinking is a bit more from green wood to seasoned lumber (but not an order of magnitude more).

You can use online calculators such as this one for estimates based on the species of wood and your location: https://kmtools.com/pages/wood-movement-calculator

The numbers here match my experience, a 600mm wide spruce table top shrunk and expanded by about 12mm during a year of being outdoors but under a roof at temperatures from -25C to +30C. The structure had sliding dovetails to allow growth but keep it flat.
by nextn | 2025-06-11 12:23:48+00:00
In case it saves a life, some papers report Fenbendazol cures some cancers.

https://x.com/MakisMD/status/1845353670407233817

https://x.com/skymeds_store/status/1919695848222687548

https://vigilantnews.com/post/the-overlooked-miracle-drug-fo...
by Teever | 2025-06-11 12:24:09+00:00
The industrial revolution brought about the development of fabulous innovations like the mass production of standardized and interchangeable parts which has been instrumental in achieving the level of economic production, scientific advancement and quality of life that we enjoy.

But I think that there are limitations on these kinds of techniques and we can see them with the changing economics of our most advanced technologies -- semiconductors. Improvements have slowed, capital investments have increased and cost per transistor have plateaued and are now starting to rise.

At the same time the way that we extract energy from our environment is not sustainable and is causing great imbalances in our atmosphere which are having cascading effects on the environment and this is all due to the fact that our energy systems are not closed loop.

If we're going to take manufacturing and industry as a whole to the next level just like the industrial revolution did we're going to need to take cues from biology. The next manufacturing revolution will be a merger of the ideas from the industrial revolution, the digital revolution and biological systems like the ones you describe above.

Self replicating systems that can heal, source their parts from the environment around them, and that can scale exponentially through processes akin to cellular division are inevitable.

They will allow us to offload the burden of mineral extraction and refining to the moon and asteroids, and will allow us to massively scale up the production of products on scales previously unimaginable and of goods full of elements like platinum or gold we consider obscenely expensive due to their relative rarity on Earth.
by tilne | 2025-06-11 12:24:45+00:00
> But perhaps most importantly, debuggers are an intricate piece of the puzzle of the design of a development platform—a future I become more interested in every day, given the undeniable decay infecting modern computing devices and their software ecosystems.

I agree with this sentiment, yet still I’m wondering if it’s fully justified. There has never been more bad software than right now, but there has never been more good software either, no?

It’s not super relevant to the main contents of the article. Just a bit that caught my attention with regards to how it made me think.
by tomhow | 2025-06-11 12:25:10+00:00
You could just vouch these comments and they'd be visible right away. Much faster than typing these accusatory messages :)

Both of them were auto-killed due to very normal system mechanisms that have been in place for years. But the whole reason we have the vouch system is so that when people see a killed comment that should be visible, they can click the link and it should appear immediately.

Failing that you could email us. This is much more reliable than an @mention, which isn't an official or reliable way to contact us (the only reason I saw your comment was that somebody else emailed us about it).
by npteljes | 2025-06-11 12:25:47+00:00
That's a cool setup! I didn't know about Heads.

And yes, getting back to the original topic, I believe that against petty criminals, even a full disk encryption is plenty defense. They won't go about installing anything to the EFI partition just to get to the data.

This Coreboot + Heads setup I'd trust to protect against even the more involved.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-11 12:25:50+00:00
You cannot stop people from making the world worse or better. The best you can do is focus on your own life.

In time many will say we are lucky to live in a world with so much content, where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor.

And though most will no longer make a living doing some of these content creation activities by hand and brain, you can still rejoice knowing that those who do it anyway are doing it purely for their love of the art, not for any kind of money. A human who writes or produces art for monetary reasons is only just as bad as AI.
by cardanome | 2025-06-11 12:26:55+00:00
There is lots of work no ones wants to do in their free time. That is why you pay people money.

And why wouldn't someone be happy working on X11? It is an open source project, it is high impact work. I would jump at it instantly if someone paid me a competitive wage to do it. Or honestly even a bit under my normal expectation. Not every person wants to work on some ego-driven rewrite of a rewrite. Some people are fine working with legacy code.

Also there is a counter example right above my post. Someone was so motivated to work on it, they even forked it: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Granted the fork seems weirdly ideologically motivated but anyway, case in point.
by ben_w | 2025-06-11 12:27:47+00:00
> This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.

Kinda. They're good, and I like them, but I think of them like a power tool: just because you can buy an angle grinder or a plasma cutter from a discount supermarket, doesn't mean the tool is safe in the hands of an untrained amateur.

Someone using it to help fix up a spreadsheet? Probably fine. But you should at least be able to read the code to the level you don't get this deliberate bad example to illustrate the point:

#!/usr/bin/python3 total_sales = 0.0 def add_sale(total_sales, amount): total_sales = total_sales + amount print("total_sales: " + str(total_sales))

Still useful, still sufficiently advanced technology that for most people it is (Clarketech) magic, but also still has some rough edges.
by conartist6 | 2025-06-11 12:27:54+00:00
> But in the long run, our tools also shape our culture. If software makes people feel more empowered, I believe that’ll eventually change people’s preferences.

I'm really curious to see how the overlap with BABLR plays out. In many ways we're doing the same experiments in parallel: we're both working on systems that have a natural tendency to become their own version control, and which try to say what the data is without prejudice as to how it might be presented.

In particular BABLR thinks it can narrow and close the ease-of-use gap between "wire up blocks" style programming and "write syntax out left to right" style programming by making a programming environment that lets you wire up syntax tree nodes as blocks.

It's still quite rough, but we have a demo that shows off how we can simplify the code editing UX down to the point where you can do it on a phone screen:

https://paned.it/

Try tapping a syntax node in the example code to select that node. Then you can tap-drag the selected (blue) node and drop it into any gap (gray square). The intent is to ensure that you can construct incomplete structures, but never outright invalid ones.
by epistasis | 2025-06-11 12:28:26+00:00
The article and I agree that treatments have been improving. Certainly detection is improving results too, but that can't explain all the improvements we are seeing.

As far as your "systemic" comment, sure there is greater risk of cancer with aging due to the accumulation of mutations and dysregulation. But that's why customized treatments show so much promise. What I described is not a "conventional" treatment, I was talking about custom treatments designed for each cancer.
by tecleandor | 2025-06-11 12:28:57+00:00
I had two development devices, one was the Geeksphone Peak, and the other one (IIRC) was the Geeksphone Keos. One of them developed battery problems quickly (or something like that) and I think I didn't get to test v2 in the other one.

I have to check if I still have it around...
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-11 12:29:28+00:00
I'm struggling a bit to understand the difference between the reported results in the blog post and the examples in the Github.

The blog states:

> "Alpha Writing demonstrates substantial improvements in story quality when evaluated through pairwise human preferences. Testing with Llama 3.1 8B revealed:

72% preference rate over initial story generations (95 % CI 63 % – 79 %) 62% preference rate over sequential-prompting baseline (95 % CI 53 % – 70 %) These results indicate that the evolutionary approach significantly outperforms both single-shot generation and traditional inference-time scaling methods for creative writing tasks."

But in all of the examples using Llama 3.1 8B on the Github that I could find, the stories with the top 5 highest final 'ELO' are all marked elsewhere as:

"generation_attempt": null

Where the 'variant' stories, which I take to be 'evolved' stories, are marked:

"generation_type": "variant", "parent_story_id": "897ccd25-4776-4077-a9e6-0da34abb32a4"

IE - none of the 'winning stories' have a parent story; they seem to have explicitly been the model's initial attempt. The examples seem to prove the opposite of the statement in the blog post.

Perhaps 'variants' are slightly outperforming initial stories on average (I don't have time to actually analyse the output data in the repo), though it seems unlikely based on how I've read it (I could be wrong!) and this might be borne out with far more iterations.

However, a really important part of creative writing as a task is that you (unfortunately) only get to tell a story once. The losing variants won't ultimately matter. So, if I've read it correctly, and all the winning stories are 'not evolved' - from the initial prompt - this is quite problematically different from the blog's claim that:

> "we demonstrate that creative output quality can be systematically improved through increased compute allocation"

Super interesting work - I'd love to be told that I'm reading this wrong! I was digging through in such detail to actually compare differently-performing stories line-for-line (which would also be nice to see - in the blog post, perhaps).
by randomtoast | 2025-06-11 12:30:56+00:00
The linux kernel essentially provides everything a modern operating system needs, including all the necessary device drivers. Unless you offer a significant selling point, something radically different, or a substantial improvement over, say, Linux or FreeBSD, I don't see a compelling use case for Xeneva OS. That said, don't get me wrong, I think it's a great project to experiment with and take my upvote.
by dtnewman | 2025-06-11 12:31:03+00:00
Looks like you might've found that magical thing which is product-market fit. I'm rooting for you.

$200 is a really nice entry-price point. If I'm being honest, I'm marginally interested in this, but doubt that I'd actually use it too much. But the price point is justifiable for someone who is just interested in it from a learning point of view (if I bought this, used it a few times and learned a bit more about AI as it relates to robotics, it'd have paid itself off easily).

Rooting for you to succeed.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-06-11 12:32:18+00:00
I often give ChatGPT simple tasks and it gets them wrong. Yesterday I took a picture of a video game and told it I was stuck, only to be given instructions that lead down a bad path in-game.

I also often retest new models with tasks old models failed, and see some improvements. I really liked “format this SQL generated by my ORM and explain it” last week.

I honestly have no insight on if the tasks it is failing to do are right around the corner or if they are decades away.
by growse | 2025-06-11 12:32:31+00:00
So with the plethora of people who care about progress and its success, and the army of people willing to work on it for a competitive wage, we should be seeing lots of activity on the project, right?

> Give me an option to donate directly to X11 development and I am gonna support it.

> I would jump at it instantly if someone paid me a competitive wage to do it

You guys should meet up.
by exDM69 | 2025-06-11 12:32:39+00:00
A good mental model for wood is that trees are a bunch of stacked cones (growth rings) on top of each other.

In the spring it fills with water and the diameter grows but the tree does not get longer because it needs to support a large mass on top and the lengthwise fibers are not able to grow and shrink (they need to be stiff to carry the weight).

Because of this, the circumference of the outermost growth rings need to grow more than the inner ones.

Now cut a board out of it and look at the end grain. Think what happens when the rings closer to the outside need to shrink more than the inner ones for the same humidity change. For a flat sawn board, you will always see it cup so that the concave side is on the outside.

This doesn't explain why boards twist or bow but cupping is the most prevalent wood movement in typical flat sawn boards.
by conartist6 | 2025-06-11 12:33:18+00:00
> In time many will say we are lucky to live in a world with so much content, where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor.

Man, you are talking about a world that's not just much worse but apocalyptically gone. In that world, there is no more art, full stop. The completeness and average-ness of stimulation would be the exact equivalent of sensory deprivation.
by nicoburns | 2025-06-11 12:33:42+00:00
> With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. I think the development approach we took was the wrong one. We were too in a hurry and that ended up neglecting Desktop. I believe we should have engaged potential partners way later, with a better, more finished and more QAed product.

I think this is basically correct.

I also think:

- Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales)

- It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.
by bettercaust | 2025-06-11 12:33:46+00:00
Nah, that's is just an artifact of an conflated claim made by RFK Jr. and others and the more complex reality that needs to be underlined to refute it. If the claim is "no vaccine products on the market were tested against a saline placebo", that is untrue because new first-in-class vaccines were. If the claim is "no vaccine classes on the market were tested against a saline placebo", that is untrue because as far as I can tell all classes were tested against a saline placebo at some point. If the claim is "some vaccine products on the market were not tested against a saline placebo", that would be true and it would not be a problem if those vaccine products were of vaccine classes that were previously tested against saline placebo.

How are you qualifying this strategy as "ultra-high risk"? How well do you understand the new drug and vaccine regulatory process in the US? An "unsafe" (vague) vaccine will be discovered via postmarketing surveillance (e.g. Rotashield). If two unsafe vaccines are trialed comparatively and the adverse event rate is unusually high for both groups than what was previously reported, that's not going to go unnoticed even if it appears like there's no significant difference between the two statistically. Your concern also assumes that because the first approval was erroneous that all subsequent ones will be too, which is an unfounded assumption.

If you want to claim that the medical profession have "routinely lied as a group about many things in the past", you'll have to back that up because I don't agree and will not accept your assertion at face value.
by musjleman | 2025-06-11 12:33:49+00:00
Yes and no.

The GTA SA bug was reading of an uninitialized variable. The value it contained was correct simply by chance as it was placed there by the previous invocation of the function and never overwritten by something else intermittently. Any changes to functions that happened to be called in between these 2 could have changed the value of the stack memory.

The aforementioned check on the other hand is placing random value below the stack pointer. This means that by design it cannot call any external/os/game functions and is basically isolated/"pure" from any interactions with third party code.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-11 12:34:26+00:00
Because Kagi is not a publicly traded company, where anybody can invest.

They raised money in the form of SAFE notes, in which case a venture capital firm is created (you can also call it a legal entity or a juridical person) and each investor owns a part of that firm in proportion to the money they invest. That firm in turn will have a contract with the startup company which details and regulates how the invested funds in the future can be transformed to actual shares.
by zitsarethecure | 2025-06-11 12:34:26+00:00
Four years of air drying may not have been enough, depending on the thickness of the boards and the moisture level in the air. Also the issues of wood movement and grain direction must be considered during the design and manufacturing of furniture with that wood. Home sawn wood will often have knots, randomly curved grain, etc, so it can be more difficult to get predictable results.
by zkmon | 2025-06-11 12:35:01+00:00
Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm, with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got some kind give-aways.

Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor - everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any more.
Show HN: Stratava – CSV files to APIs in seconds
by mbowcock | 2025-06-11 12:35:41+00:00
I’ve worked on a few projects with vendors that had data but no easy way to share that data with external systems. Typically, the story goes, we have this data in an ERP, CRM, Warehousing system, etc. but need an IT project to expose that data. That might include a developer, networking, security, project managers, all the typical project overhead. People on the business will question this and say “I already get this data daily in a report, how hard can it be?” Projects have died due to the overhead, or take months to happen.

As an easier way to share the data that's already available, I built this tool. Drop a CSV file, get an API.

Right now, the public version supports:

* GET Requests for API * Uploads are limited to 1MB * For testing, I’m auto-deleting APIs after 30 days of no use * It’s assumed the first row is a header

For searching, the APIs support basic query filters - greater than (_gt), less than (_lt), and like (_like).

These are some example API’s I’ve created -

Currency Codes - https://stratava.io/api/18e4ab1c

States By Country - https://stratava.io/api/b073da4e

100 Organizations - https://stratava.io/api/ba303cc1 (fake data)

1000 Leads - https://stratava.io/api/3b32c331 (fake data)

To use the search ability -

Return all states where country name = United States https://stratava.io/api/b073da4e?country_name=United%20State...

Return all states where country contains the word United https://stratava.io/api/b073da4e?country_name_like=United

Return all organizations founded after 2000 - https://stratava.io/api/ba303cc1?founded_gt=2000

Features not public but I’m testing -

* POST / PUT / DELETE For APIs * Append mode when uploading * Custom API naming * Additional Filtering Options * Token Based Access Control * Large File Uploads * Ability to Combine Multiple APIs into One Call (you have a customer API and order API, join and return one dataset)

I’d appreciate any feedback!
by SamBam | 2025-06-11 12:35:47+00:00
Indeed. Also the whole thing is just "apply an Evolutionary Algorithm to stories." The only interesting question is whether the LLM that decides the story's fitness rating (which they call Elo, despite seeming to have nothing to do with the actual Elo ranking system) can mimic a human's rating. Given the brief example, it's not clear that it can, since it seems no better.
by roberthahn | 2025-06-11 12:35:48+00:00
I think you’re off by an order of magnitude. With those numbers, a 12” board would expand and contract 1.2”, and an 8’ long board would vary by almost an inch.

Much more reasonable would be 1% across the grain and 0.1% along it. You can confirm this in some of the wood movement calculators found online.

To those learning about wood movement, these ratios are decent but approximate; if you end up caring about these things you’ll want to check the species of the lumber you plan to work with.