MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wmf | 2025-06-11 03:25:51+00:00
It's extremely likely that Starlink will meet the requirements of the 100 Mbps tier of RDOF and thus it was improper for the FCC to rescind their funding. The map problems don't really impact Starlink since it serves the entire US and any subsidies they get would likely be passed on to all customers (as slightly lower prices) rather than allocated to specific locations.

This is all obsolete anyway since RDOF's problems have been overshadowed by BEAD's newer and much bigger problems.
by imgabe | 2025-06-11 03:26:07+00:00
We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years?

Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.
by missedthecue | 2025-06-11 03:27:07+00:00
I was short the stock of a company called Novocure, and my thesis was based on the science. Novocure developed a literal helmet you wear on your head. It's designed to generate alternating electric fields at specific frequencies and blast them into your brain. I was skeptical, because biotech frauds are a dime a dozen, and nothing I could read in their literature made sense to me as a mechanism of action against GBM.

The randomized, double-blind phase 3 trials came out and it turns out the helmet almost triples 5 year survival rates. For "high compliance" patients (i.e. those that followed their directions and wore the helmet in accordance with the treatment plan), 5 year survival rates jumped 6x. They're selling $600mm of these helmets a year now. Progress is uneven but it's always coming!
by vonunov | 2025-06-11 03:27:28+00:00
>Something happened! :(

Yes, I love it. How helpful! I'm so lucky to have such a meaningful error message to Google. Now I only have to blindly try a list of 50 possible fixes before I discover that I couldn't save a replay on my XBox One because the disk was full.

Naturally, the stock counterpoint is that this happened because users thought real error messages were too scawy! :(

Counter-counterpoint: Oh well
by refulgentis | 2025-06-11 03:27:32+00:00
There hasn't been a non-preview Gemini since...November? The previews are the same as everyone else's release cadance, "preview" is just a magic wand that meant the Launchcal (google's internal signoff tool, i.e. "wave will never happen again) needs less signoffs. Then it got to the point date-pinned models were getting swapped in, in the name of doing us a favor, and it's a...novel idea, we can both agree at the least.

I bet someone at Google would be a bit surprised to see someone jumping to legalese to act like this...novelty...is inherently due to the preview status, and based on anything more than a sense that there's no net harm done to us if it costs the same and is better.

I'm not sure they're wrong.

But it also leads to a sort of "nobody knows how anything works because we have 2^N configs and 5 bits" - for instance, 05-06 was also upgraded to 06-05. Except it wasn't, if you sent variable thinking to 05-06 after upgrade it'd fail. (and don't get me started on the 5 different thinking configurations for Gemini 2.5 flash thinking vs. gemini 05-06 vs. 06-05 and 0 thinking)
Show HN: InstaAmp – Supercharge Instagram Web
by wryonik | 2025-06-11 03:28:16+00:00
Hey hackers – I made a small but powerful Chrome extension called InstaAmp.

Features: - Background reel playback - Reel speed up - Auto-scroll reels

Why? Instagram’s web version is intentionally underpowered. I wanted to fix that for myself. Live here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/instaamp/cnamdmnlha...

Would love critiques, feedback, or upvotes
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-11 03:28:22+00:00
> what would that even mean?

Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".

Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.

There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.
by ath92 | 2025-06-11 03:29:43+00:00
Weird take. Norway has about the same gdp per capita as the USA with stricter regulations than France. Ireland’s GDP per capita is higher than that of the USA, with less bureaucracy than France but more than the US. Not to mention that all of these are before adjusting for PPP. Almost as if GDP per capita is not a good measurement of productivity.
by jemmyw | 2025-06-11 03:30:31+00:00
I still don't understand about the t-shirt thing. Companies spend their money on all kinds of things that are apart from their core offering. Like lavish office buildings, on-sites, big paychecks for executives, charity donations. I don't think I could buy anything from anyone if I needed to go line by line through their accounts to make sure I approved of everything.

> replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me

... like, ok. But now I'm confused. You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. With kagi I can use chatgpt, claude, others. But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is.

Kagi is not for you - fine, I'd have no problem with that. But the way you've written your comments is that you do like the service but you didn't like what the company did in other ways... not a moral objection but that it wasn't, in your view, an efficient use of their time. And I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant which is why I've asked questions about it.
by bschwindHN | 2025-06-11 03:30:48+00:00
> Just browsing the source I see Porter Duff blend modes. Really, in 2025? Have fun dealing with alpha compositing issues on this one.

What should we be using in 2025? I thought pre-multiplied alpha is essentially what you go for if you want a chance of alpha compositing ending up correct, but my knowledge is probably outdated.
by sota_pop | 2025-06-11 03:31:45+00:00
Not sure what you mean by “not trained to saturation”. Also I agree with the article, in the literature, the phenomenon to which the article refers is known as “catastrophic forgetting”. Because no one has specific knowledge about which weights contribute to model performance, by updating the weights via fine-tuning, you are modifying the model such that future performance will change in ways that are not understood. Also I may be showing my age a bit here, but I always thought “fine-tuning” was performing additional training on the output network (traditionally a fully-connected net), but leaving the initial portion (the “encoder”) weights unchanged - allowing the model to capture features the way it always has, but updating the way it generates outputs based on the discovered features.
by privatelypublic | 2025-06-11 03:33:28+00:00
Knowing several deep hardware people: they're incredibly dismissive of vulnerabilities. Direct quote (as best I can remember) "Some PhD student can figure out theoretical power attacks. They're not relevant to actual products"

Same person thinks I'm literally paranoid for splitting home, IoT, and Security cameras into separate networks... despite the cameras and dvr being the banned/recalled costco ones.
by pj_mukh | 2025-06-11 03:34:11+00:00
Kind off and the potentially low marginal cost of everything housing construction related (due to AI and robotics) really creates a lot of space for creative business plans here.

The municipality can’t take away the land (most of the value here) and putting the house on top will be relatively cheap, given the low total labor costs.

If the whole affair is revenue neutral, that's a huge win.
by onion2k | 2025-06-11 03:37:12+00:00
more of the money will come from the corporations

If there was a decent chance that private investment by corporations in cancer research would turn a profit then they'd be doing it already, and paying researchers far more than universities can afford in order to recruit the best people.

The fact that isn't happening should tell you that profiting from fundamental cancer research is too high risk for the market to bare. Consequently government or charity are the only available options.
by achamian | 2025-06-11 03:38:48+00:00
You're right about the Cambrian explosion - we're all experimenting!

A couple weeks back, I was building a "second brain" using Claude Desktop + filesystem + Neo4J. During a family emergency, I fell back on XP pairing practices - thinking aloud. While comparing memory systems using parallel agents (CN and CF), they immediately adopted different perspectives on the first prompt - one strategic, one tactical - without being asked to differentiate. Engaging both simultaneously produced noticeably better results.

This led to systematic experiments with multi-perspective thinking. The patterns were consistent enough that I documented them: https://github.com/achamian/think-center-why-maybe

Key discovery: HOW we engage matters as much as WHAT we prompt. The strategic/tactical split was just the beginning.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-11 03:38:57+00:00
Our 'math' will work under any of our conditions (as far as we can observe), but who's to say they can't have 'math' in another universe that will work under any of their conditions, yet still be different from ours?

That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.
by nicbou | 2025-06-11 03:39:35+00:00
From Canada to Germany. I went for an internship in university, never came back. That was a decade ago.

As a student, the internship visa or student visa are great options. It's a lot easier because of all the help you get from university. There is a lot of infrastructure in place to welcome and integrate students.

I run a website about migrating to Germany: https://allaboutberlin.com
by roenxi | 2025-06-11 03:42:06+00:00
A man who burns his own house down may understand what they are doing and do it intentionally - but without any further information still appears to be wasting his time and doing something stupid. There isn't any contradiction between something being a waste of time and people doing it on purpose - indeed the point of the article is to get some people to change what they are purposefully doing.

He's proposing alternatives he thinks are superior. He might well be right too, although I don't have a horse in the race but LORA seem like a more satisfying approach to get a result than retraining the model and giving LLMs tools seems to be proving more effective too.
by theamk | 2025-06-11 03:42:14+00:00
My answer is clear "yes" to most of those.

Yes, machine translations are AI-generated content - I read foreign-language news sites which sometimes has machine translation articles and the quality stands out and not in a good way.

"Maybe" for "writing on paper and using LLM for OCR". It's like automatic meeting transcript - if the speaker has perfect pronunciation, it works well. If they don't, then the meeting notes still look coherent but have little relationship to what speaker said and/or will miss critical parts. Sadly there is no way for reader to know that from reading the transcript, so I'd recommend labeling "AI edited" just in case.

Yes, even if "they give the AI a very detailed outline, constantly ask for rewrites, etc.." it's still AI generated. I am not sure how can you argue otherwise - it's not their words. Also, it's really easy to convince yourself that you are "ruthless in removing any facts they're not 100% sure" while actually you are anything but.

"What if they only use AI to fix the grammar and rewrite bad English into a proper scientific tone?" - I'd label it "AI-edited" if the rewrites are minor or "AI-generated" if the rewrites are major. This one is especially insidious as people may not expect rewrites to change meaning, so they won't inspect them too much, so it will be easier for hallucinations to slip in.
by fifilura | 2025-06-11 03:42:58+00:00
Thank you for your reply.

For me I think a personal handout would also serve as a kind of apology. I guess this is what I am after.

"We purposefully infringed your privacy by breaking the law. And made a sh*tload of money because of that violation. Here is the money back with some extra compensation. We are sorry. We promise to never do it again."
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-11 03:43:11+00:00
Youtube just allows straight up promoting Hitler by fairly large channels:

https://youtube.com/shorts/aud2GosmonM?si=vkmrInIC8ICt1kcI https://youtube.com/shorts/6jIqU1BKkUI?si=eOGqzeQRNUjmm06R https://youtube.com/shorts/ePJZsdNlVQE?si=hHhwuDZsHcs-VbcR
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-06-11 03:43:11+00:00
All four of your examples are situations where an LLM has potential to contaminate the structure or content of the text, so in all four cases it is clear-cut that the output poses the same essential hazards to training or consumption as something produced "whole cloth" from a minimal prompt; post-hoc human supervision will at best reduce the severity of these risks.
by linguaz | 2025-06-11 03:44:03+00:00
> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.

Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:

https://b79.net/fields/about

https://earthdirections.org/links/

Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.
by vgeek | 2025-06-11 03:44:08+00:00
Maybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs.

Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
by derefr | 2025-06-11 03:46:30+00:00
> So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low.

Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? That isn't negligible.

...I say that, but I do note that I live in a coastal city with a temperate climate near a mountain watershed, and I literally do have unmetered water. I suppose I pay for the OpEx of the infrastructure with my taxes.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-06-11 03:48:13+00:00
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here to your point about sharing other's work. Some (many?) sell their tricks. So assuming that you've spent time developing a new trick and some portion of your living depends not just on presentation, but also selling the trick or training.... I could see some getting upset.

Otherwise, I don't think the issue is spoiling it for audiences as the craft and presentation style count as much or more than the trick itself.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-11 03:48:36+00:00
I bet sam used chatgpt to write this. There are some tell tale signs including hyphens.

I don't know if gentle is the right word. Maybe Gently face hugger and chest burster is more apt. It's slowly infecting us and eating us from the inside but it's so gently we don't even care. We just complain on HN while doing nothing about it.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-11 03:49:10+00:00
That's fair, and perhaps my example wasn't the best, but my point is that just as the continuum hypothesis is an artifact of the models we use to describe our universe (we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space), more basic properties like "how numbers ought to work" could also be artifacts of our models. In particular, it wouldn't be inconceivable for an alternate universe to be better described by entirely different models from the ground up, which could be fairly described as "different math".
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-06-11 03:49:15+00:00
The Switch 1, despite famously launching with the “better launch title” of $60 Breath Of The Wild instead of $80 Mario Kart, took a month to get to 2.75 million. The PS5, for comparison, took four weeks to reach 3.4 million.

The Steam Deck meanwhile does not have hard numbers, but is widely believed to be under 6 million in lifetime sales.

It is clear at this point that literally nobody cared about any supposed controversies regarding Nintendo or the launch. Nintendo certainly isn’t going to care, as they now have the record for fastest selling console.
by imgabe | 2025-06-11 03:49:27+00:00
We don’t have to figure out a solution to anything in other sovereign nations. Nor, can or should we really impose any functional, non-corrupt government on people who are unable or unwilling to do it themselves, unless you’re willing to go back to full-blown colonialism. The people in the country need to figure it out themselves and decide they want to have a functional government and make it happen. We can’t do it for them.
by anitil | 2025-06-11 03:50:41+00:00
Interesting! I've use the ast library a fair bit but usually for analysis rather than actually modifying the ast. I'd also never realised that slots provided a 'fast-path' for function calls.

Edit: Ooh interesting question at the end about compatibility when upgrading versions. My previous project was around detecting these changes, it's not an easy problem to solve
by keiferski | 2025-06-11 03:51:48+00:00
Well, that’s not my experience at all, and it doesn’t line up with what’s actually happening politically.

With recent government shifts in Poland, Italy, France, Germany, etc. I think you can expect it to become more difficult to move to the EU. It already is becoming more difficult in many countries, and this is pretty obviously going to increase over the next 3-5 years.
by theamk | 2025-06-11 03:52:20+00:00
So IMHO an right thing is to add "AI rewritten" label to your blog.

hm.. I wonder where this kind of label should live? For a personal blog, putting it on every post seems redundant, as if author uses it, it's likely they use it for all posts. And many blogs don't have dedicated "about this blog" section.

I wonder if things will end up like organic food labeling or "made in .." labels. Some blogs might say "100% by human", some might say "Designed by human, made by AI" and some might just say nothing.
by psalaun | 2025-06-11 03:52:51+00:00
> It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here

I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress.

Because as long as the end game isn't defined (and some milestones towards it), we won't have Star Trek, but a sci-fi version of a Dickens or Zola book, or at least an eternal treadmill augmented with marginally less useful innovations.

That's how I project over the next centuries the failed prediction from Keynes about everyone working 15 hours weeks in a near future, in a western world that yet did achieve post scarcity (at least for now)
by o11c | 2025-06-11 03:52:54+00:00
I'm only vaguely aware of how other people do perfect hashing (generators I've used always seem to produce arrays to load from), but dabbled in a purely-arithmetic toy problem recently.

As an exercise for the reader:

There are exactly 32 symbols in ASCII: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~ Taking input in a register, uniquely hash them to the range 0-31. Any other input values may return any number, but must not trap or exhibit undefined behavior. The obvious approach of "just make a 256-element array" isn't allowed. This can be done in few enough cycles that you need to carefully consider if there's any point to including: loads (even hitting L1) branches (even if it fully predicts when it is taken) multiplication (unless just using lea/add/shift) I found that out-of-order only helps a little; it's difficult to scatter-gather very wide in so few cycles. Writing C code mostly works if you can persuade the compiler not to emit an unwanted branch.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-11 03:54:42+00:00
There's a very large gulf between "what makes sense to Google" and "what makes sense to Human Beings". I have so many rants about Google's poor treatment of "customers" that they feel like Oracle to me now. Like every time I use them, I'm really just falling prey to my own misguided idea that this time I won't get screwed over.
by HSO | 2025-06-11 03:55:05+00:00
Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money