MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cysteinechapel | 2025-06-30 23:07:05+00:00
Such an advantage that is rare and across such long time scales would be so small on average that it would be effectively neutral. Natural selection can only really act on fitness advantages greater than on the order of the inverse of effective population size, which for large multicellular organisms such as animals, is low. Most of this is really just noisy transcription/binding/etc.

For example, we don't keep transposons in general because they're useful, which are almost half of our genomes, and are a major source of disruptive variation. They persist because we're just not very good at preventing them from spreading, we have some suppressive mechanisms but they don't work all the time, and there's a bit of an arms race between transposons and host. Nonetheless, they can occasionally provide variation that is beneficial.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-06-30 23:07:08+00:00
The industry has attracted grifters with lots of "<word of the day> engineering" and fancy diagrams for, frankly, pretty obvious ideas

I mean yes, duh, relevant context matters. This is why so much effort was put into things like RAG, vector DBs, prompt synthesis, etc. over the years. LLMs still have pretty abysmal context windows so being efficient matters.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-06-30 23:07:28+00:00
My experience mirrors yours wrt Datadog. It's incredible value at low scale, you get a full robust system with great devex for pennies. Once you hit that tipping point though, you are locked in pretty hardcore. Datadog snakes its way far into your codebase, with all the custom tracing and stuff like that. Migrating off of it is a very expensive endeavor, which is probably one of the reasons why they are such a money printing operation.
by owlstuffing | 2025-06-30 23:07:29+00:00
Yep. Using DuckDB against conventional data sources such as JSON and CSV or even Parquet has amazing potential. Paired with manifold[1]--a Java library that makes it all type safe--and it's a game changer.

1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/doc...
by viccis | 2025-06-30 23:07:37+00:00
When I first used these kinds of methods, I described it along those lines to my friend. I told him I felt like I was summoning a demon and that I had to be careful to do the right incantations with the right words and hope that it followed my commands. I was being a little disparaging with the comment because the engineer in me that wants reliability, repeatability, and rock solid testability struggles with something that's so much less under my control.

God bless the people who give large scale demos of apps built on this stuff. It brings me back to the days of doing vulnerability research and exploitation demos, in which no matter how much you harden your exploits, it's easy for something to go wrong and wind up sputtering and sweating in front of an audience.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-30 23:08:06+00:00
> It isn't that long ago.

If it’s before my lifetime it’s not something I’m going to feel responsible for.

I completely agree we should ‘learn’ from history. Even teach what happened in school, but we shouldn’t harp on it forever, or manufacture grudges based on it.

At least, not in the way that’s currently happening in Japan anyway. The crux of the issue seems to be they don’t think people that were never involved aren’t sorry enough.
by orlp | 2025-06-30 23:08:47+00:00
How to create a fair coin from an arbitrarily biased coin:

1. Toss the coin and remember the answer.

2. Toss the coin again, if it is different from your previous toss then your result from #1 is fair. Otherwise, go back to step 1.

If p is the probability of getting heads, there are four possible outcomes with their associated probabilities:

TT -> (1 - p)^2 (rejected) HT -> p * (1 - p) TH -> (1 - p) * p TT -> p^2 (rejected)

Needless to say, p * (1 - p) and (1 - p) * p have an equal probability, so if we don't reject our two tosses, we have a fair outcome.
Canon selphy cp1500 privacy concerns
by azca | 2025-06-30 23:09:01+00:00
Noticed today while throwing out a cartridge that the dye sublimation used leaves the negatives in each color (blue, yellow, magenta, white) for each photo and the details are enough to reconstruct the pictures if someone spent a little time to automate via Photoshop or gimp to layer and merge the inverse of each color. Searching for this on Google didn't seem to produce any relevant results so I figured I'd post here to be corrected on my assumptions, or at least raise awareness that it's a concern. Canon publishes quite a bit of support docs around privacy for the digital usage side of devices, but I guess old school exfiltrarion is still a possibility.

Anyone at Canon or relevant industries have any insight? What's a proper and privacy friendly consumer disposal option for these cartridges?
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-30 23:09:06+00:00
I remember being quite excited before the release of Max Payne. What they promised, and I believe mostly did, was this: textures based on photographs, not drawn, and an engine with lighting realistic enough to make it look good. That was a small revolution at the time. The company employed a lot of demoscene people, see...

The game was good, but it's not really among my all-time favorites tbh. Still good enough to finish it in just a few days for me as well, at least.
by mccoyb | 2025-06-30 23:09:21+00:00
That doesn't strike me as sophisticated, it strikes me as obvious to anyone with a little proficiency in computational thinking and a few days of experience with tool-using LLMs.

The goal is to design a probability distribution to solve your task by taking a complicated probability distribution and conditioning it, and the more detail you put into thinking about ("how to condition for this?" / "when to condition for that?") the better the output you'll see.

(what seems to be meant by "context" is a sequence of these conditioning steps :) )
by specialist | 2025-06-30 23:09:29+00:00
IIRC, This was previously (recently) discussed wrt rice sold (or given) to Haiti. Because that rice came from the Confederate States, it has more arsenic.

IIRC2, don't buy rice from land formerly used to grow cotton. Because calcium arsenate was used to kill the boll weevil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_Eradication_Progra...
Show HN: Cursor for Fitness
by asdev | 2025-06-30 23:09:34+00:00
Hi all!

I've been using ChatGPT to create and tweak my workout programs for a while now — but it was always a hassle. I had to manually type the workouts into my tracking app, and if I wanted AI to give feedback or adjust things based on what I actually did, I had to copy everything back into ChatGPT.

So I built something to fix that.

It’s an app that integrates AI directly into the workout tracking flow — no more copy-pasting between ChatGPT and a separate app.

Features: - Chat with AI to generate full training programs or individual workouts - Workouts are loaded instantly into the app for tracking - Log sets and reps with a clean interface or by just chatting:“I did 5 sets of squats at 135 lbs” → saved automatically - Ask the AI for advice, tweaks, and recommendations based on your history

It’s still in early beta, and I’d really appreciate any feedback!

App store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forceai-ai-workout-generator/i...
by EricMausler | 2025-06-30 23:09:37+00:00
Alternatively, I've gotten exactly what I wanted from an LLM by giving it information that would not be enough for a human to work with, knowing that the llm is just going to fill in the gaps anyway.

It's easy to forget that the conversation itself is what the LLM is helping to create. Humans will ignore or depriotitize extra information. They also need the extra information to get an idea of what you're looking for in a loose sense. The LLM is much more easily influenced by any extra wording you include, and loose guiding is likely to become strict guiding
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-30 23:09:51+00:00
People who eat mostly rice are picky about the rice they eat.

Golden Rice 2 was on the market for about five years in the Philippines before it got banned. If anybody had wanted to grow it or eat it it could have been a different story. I was talking to a genetic engineer a few weeks ago who said that the sensory qualities weren't that great. Nothing would have stopped advocates in the US from planting a few acres and selling bags of it (it's approved and all) but had they done so it would have put the lie to the idea that the developers were being persecuted like Prometheus. I don't think it was anywhere near the threat that its opponents said it was but it was nowhere near the boon that its promoters said it was.
by el_pollo_diablo | 2025-06-30 23:10:18+00:00
Sure, but your alternative code incorrectly assigns to (list)->payload. You have many other options. Without typeof, you can if(0) the assignment, or check type compatibility with a ternary operator like 1 ? (item) : (list)->payload and pass that to _list_prepend, etc. With typeof, you can store item in a temporary variable with the same type as (list)->payload, or build a compound literal (typeof(*(list))){.payload=(item)}, etc.
by theultdev | 2025-06-30 23:11:24+00:00
not the same species!

american white rice is only good when it's transformed into spanish rice, fried rice or creamy rice.

otherwise it's too bland because it's stripped. brown rice is better but still not as good.

both japonica and jasmine rice are good on their own.

love jasmine rice over all of them, it makes your mouth water when you cook it.

edit: who downvotes a comment about rice? lol.
by stillpointlab | 2025-06-30 23:11:29+00:00
I've been using the term context engineering for a few months now, I am very happy to see this gain traction.

This new stillpointlab hacker news account is based on the company name I chose to pursue my Context as a Service idea. My belief is that context is going to be the key differentiator in the future. The shortest description I can give to explain Context as a Service (CaaS) is "ETL for AI".
by nipponese | 2025-06-30 23:11:44+00:00
Let me say it another way — When the pioneers of the Internet started working on the first protocols, MANY of them thought it would lead to a new area of peace and free-thought. In 2025, many of them now just believe they created a corporate surveillance state.

As a former bitcoiner, I challenge any pro-crypto person to start imaging ways it could all go wrong.

Or at least make a list of three possible downsides?
by linotype | 2025-06-30 23:11:55+00:00
That kind of sounds amazing TBH. As an American I’m only now waking up to the depths of narcissism this country has, and Trump got it. Americans are either socially liberal and fiscally conservative (few), or socially liberal/conservative and fiscally liberal. They’re just giving the people what they want, let’s just give it to them faster and reset the whole thing sooner.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-30 23:12:34+00:00
The problem is they usually care about these things from a partisan lens. Republicans or Democrats criticize power in the others but then want to employ the same authoritarian tactics when it benefits them. This also happens in other countries with different parties, and the public at large is the one that loses, usually participating in the tribalism and supporting different levels of authoritarianism with whatever the latest "threat" excuse is in vogue. Just like we're now seeing the "we absolutely need digital IDs to access the Internet to protect children".
by matthew-wegner | 2025-06-30 23:12:58+00:00
It would work even better. From the linked support page:

"Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans."
by willejs | 2025-06-30 23:12:59+00:00
Yeah, the secret sauce of the dd libs was/is addictive for sure! I think its perhaps better now you can just use oTel for custom traces and oTel contrib libs for auto instrumentation and send that to the dd agent? I have not yet tried it because i suspected labels and other things might be named differently than the DD auto instrumentation/contrib packages, but i don't think the gap is as big now?
by bumby | 2025-06-30 23:13:41+00:00
I’ll try to put it more succinctly:

“I don’t need regulated sensors installed because I have a regulated sensor installed” is a circular argument.

Now much of what you bring up is tangential. But one thing I think we think differently about is that each of the premises you laid out starts with regulation. I differ because i see regulation as a response to a prior underlying risk. In other words, the risk exists before the regulation. So I don’t view regulation as a “self-licking ice cream cone”, or excusing for its own sake, but rather a risk mitigation. That’s why an ABS sensor can be used for monitoring pressure: it’s not the sensor that matters but whether the risk os appropriately mitigated.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-30 23:14:17+00:00
> what force but economic globalization could cause something like that?

This is a good observation. One possibility is that globalism serves as a vector for communicating certain cultural habits. A natural place to look is the US as it has been the primary globalizing force in recent history. American popular culture (TV, cinema), NGOs, the influence of American universities, etc. all serve to spread ideas sell a certain vision of life. It doesn't matter if the ideas are good. These methods appeal to the emotions.

And this is not a bad suspicion, as it seems that the inverse relation between number of children and wealth, when people are otherwise permitted to have children as they wish, seems to be characteristic of consumerist societies.
by nakedneuron | 2025-06-30 23:14:25+00:00
> But I doubt that DAT units could ever have become as cheap as cassette players, and certainly not as portable, because the electromechanical design was so complex and fussy.

In fact they were portable. Cheap, certainly not.

Sold my beloved Sony TCD-D100 some years ago, as it was just sitting around. Beautiful device.

Also check out the TCD-D10. Truly a gem of 80s design.

(https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Sony_TCD-D_10)
by SpecialistK | 2025-06-30 23:14:45+00:00
The PC is for me as well - I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny through a Yamaha MD8 MiniDisc multi-track recorder which then goes into my Yamaha 5.1 receiver. The MD8 is used for karaoke, and the receiver uses Dolby ProLogic to make it surround.

For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.
by meinstein | 2025-06-30 23:14:56+00:00
I'm one of the creators of a tool called PBRgen, which is an AI-powered online PBR material generator. The idea is that it can generate seamless materials for games and 3D animations etc. We’re still in early beta and really want to shape this with input from artists, so we are looking for artists and creators to help test and give feedback on the tool.

Here’s the link to try it out: https://pbrgen.aixpoly.com/ (limited spots available)

Let us know what works, what doesn’t, or what you wish it did. All feedback is so helpful right now.
by halfcat | 2025-06-30 23:15:20+00:00
The line is: building an internal world model requires interfacing with the world, not a model of it, and subsequent failing (including death and survivorship over generations) and adaptation. Plus pattern matching.

Current AI only does one of those (pattern matching, not evolution), and the prospects of simulating evolution is kind of bleak, given I don’t think we can simulate a full living cell yet from scratch? Building a world model requires life (or something that has undergone a similar evolutionary survivorship path), not something that mimics life.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-06-30 23:15:47+00:00
A classic law of computer programming:

"Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find that programmers cannot write in English."

It's meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there is a certain truth to it. Most human languages fail at being precise in their expression and interpretation. If you can exactly define what you want in English, you probably could have saved yourself the time and written it in a machine-interpretable language.
by tomcam | 2025-06-30 23:15:55+00:00
Old guy here. My precious side projects are out the window. My sole "project" is getting my blood sugar down and losing weight. Have no energy for anything else except practicing musical instruments.

My credit rating has literally plummeted 200 points for reasons I don't even have the energy to investigate (I have a pretty good retirement fund, no debts/mortgage/care payments). Just no energy to do anything except hang around trying not to eat.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-30 23:16:04+00:00
These discussions increasingly remind me of gamers discussing various strategies in WoW or similar. Purportedly working strategies found by trial and error and discussed in a language that is only intelligible to the in-group (because no one else is interested).

We are entering a new era of gamification of programming, where the power users force their imaginary strategies on innocent people by selling them to the equally clueless and gaming-addicted management.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-30 23:16:22+00:00
I agree with you, but would echo OP's concern, in a way that makes me feel like a party pooper, but, is open about what I see us all expressing squeamish-ness about.

It is somewhat bothersome to have another buzz phrase. I don't why we are doing this, other than there was a Xeet from the Shopify CEO, QT'd approvingly by Karpathy, then its written up at length, and tied to another set of blog posts.

To wit, it went from "buzzphrase" to "skill that'll probably be useful in 3 years still" over the course of this thread.

Has it even been a week since the original tweet?

There doesn't seem to be a strong foundation here, but due to the reach potential of the names involved, and their insistence on this being a thing while also indicating they're sheepish it is a thing, it will now be a thing.

Smacks of a self-aware version of Jared Friedman's tweet re: watching the invention of "Founder Mode" was like a startup version of the Potsdam Conference. (which sorted out Earth post-WWII. and he was not kidding. I could not even remember the phrase for the life of me. Lasted maybe 3 months?)
by lerno | 2025-06-30 23:16:43+00:00
Something you somewhat touch upon: early adopters are invested in the success of their chosen language because they are relying on its success to make their investment in early adoption pay off.

If you are an early adopter of language X and invest time and effort in learning it, then that will be a complete waste unless X actually is successful! That thinking will encourage all sorts of behaviour (some unethical) to promote their chosen language.
by messagebus | 2025-06-30 23:16:52+00:00
I've been working on a simple, multi-protocol, global pub/sub system. https://messagebus.org/

It currently supports subscribing, publishing, and unsubscribing in JMS, MQTT5, Redis, and Websockets, and send-only in SNS.

I'm not really sure who might use it, but it's been fun.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-30 23:17:32+00:00
Passports and license renewals are often for periods in the nature of 10 years. Is that meaningfully different from the self-invalidation already implied by an ID that claims you're 144 years old? The mean time between mass data breaches is certainly already less than the existing renewal interval.

Meanwhile how does a stolen scan of an identity document become invalidated by requiring a renewal? The new document is identical and even contains the same ID number. The only difference is the date which anyone could trivially alter with a computer. For that matter the only thing they need from the stolen ID is the name and number, so even if you completely redesign the layout of the ID, someone with the old one can recreate a scan of the new layout using only the information on the old stolen one.

The problem here is not that you need IDs to expire, it's that you need fools to stop trying to rely on a computer image of an ID to authenticate anything.
by taeric | 2025-06-30 23:20:04+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean? 1/7 repeats, as well. As does 1/14. As do... a lot of fractions. https://projecteuler.net/problem=26 was a fun problem to explore for some that I remember. Pretty sure there were other problems on this general theme, as well.

My point was strictly that we have "bar notation" in writing to show that 1.3 is not the same as 1.33 or 1.333 or 4/3. No matter how many 3s you put at the end. I don't know of any similar scheme in computers. I'm assuming it has been tried.
by JohnTHaller | 2025-06-30 23:20:42+00:00
For the curious, he opened up a Google Home Mini Gen 1 and connected the speaker wires within directly to a Rockville 5.25" bookshelf speaker. Then 3D printed a case to mount the Mini to the top along with a handle and some 3M rubberized feet. Not portable as is but would be with a battery pack.
by tom_ | 2025-06-30 23:20:45+00:00
The mid-1980s Acorn 8-bit range all used dynamic RAM for the onboard memory.

The BBC Micro range all had 250 ns DRAM, with the CPU getting 2e6 accesses and the video getting the other 2e6 (taking advantage of the 6502's predictable RAM access rate). The display memory fetches served to refresh the RAM.

I don't know much about the Acorn Electron, which was very different internally, but it had dynamic RAM as well. I expect the video refresh was used to refresh the DRAM in this case too - as the display memory layout was the same, and so over every 640 microsec it would touch every possible address LSB.

The 6502 second processor had DRAM as well, refreshed by a circuit that ran on a timer and stole the occasional cycle from the CPU at some rate.

Though static RAM was quite common for RAM upgrade boards (of one kind or another), presumably cheaper for this case than the alternative.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-30 23:21:09+00:00
Who is an "AI guy"? The field as we know it is fairly new. Sure, neural nets are old hat, but a lot has happened in the last few years.

John Carmack founded Keen technology in 2022 and has been working seriously on AI since 2019. From his experience in the video game industry, he knows a thing or two about linear algebra and GPUs, that is the underlying maths and the underlying hardware.

So, for all intent and purposes, he is an "AI guy" now.
by cysteinechapel | 2025-06-30 23:21:52+00:00
There are existing frameworks for integrating functional and statistical fine mapping methods (e.g. polyfun + susie/finemap). They use annotation overlaps like epigenetic or conservation tracks but can be extended to variant effect predictions from models like this. They essentially modify the prior probability of a variant being causal from uniform to one that depends on the functional annotation.
by redbackthomson | 2025-06-30 23:22:05+00:00
Just published my Chrome extension that makes finding new content on YouTube easier!

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/relevant/fdhnccpldk...

Two months ago I posted an update that I had begun work on my Chrome extension [1] for Relevant. Relevant is a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".

Although I had a little bit of engagement on the website, I found myself looking for something that could bring the experience onto YouTube, so I began work on a Chrome extension. It turns out there's a lot more complexity in building a Chrome extension than I realised. It's basically like building a website for the popup window, a javascript server for the background service workers and a message bus for the service worker.

After 2 months' of working weekends, I finally released a version of it that lets users see the categories of the content on the page, discover more channels matching those categories and contribute to the categorisation effort!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822671