MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timeonecom | 2025-06-30 21:43:10+00:00
Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were peak fun.
by saxenauts | 2025-06-30 21:43:22+00:00
working on a cross web, self organizing digital footprint that serves as a human memory and identity for LLMs

https://github.com/saxenauts/persona

90 percent of the AI companion use cases today can work well with just a vector DB to retrieve facts, and chunks of memory, but a connected digital footprint would need a graph+vector hybrid.

memory in the coming future will not just be about fact retrieval but need backlinks of memetics, new streams of data, holistic analysis, infinite schema-less key value store, causal reasoning and other things that define "who and why" of a human and imitate neuroscience's understanding of how our identities work today. this then needs to be translated as language chunks to LLMs

benchmarking this against popular tools, on longmemeval. getting good results so far. i would love to learn from you guys, what's your take on identity and human representation for LLMs in the coming future
by saejox | 2025-06-30 21:43:35+00:00
Claude 3.5 was released 1 year ago. Current LLMs are not much better at coding than it. Sure they are more shiny and well polished, but not much better at all. I think it is time to curb our enthusiasm.

I almost always rewrite AI written functions in my code a few weeks later. Doesn't matter they have more context or better context, they still fail to write code easily understandable by humans.
by linsomniac | 2025-06-30 21:44:02+00:00
My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
by iryndin | 2025-06-30 21:44:13+00:00
Thanks a lot, really appreciate your kind words! You're right — getting out of the garage is already a big milestone :))

Regarding the business model, I’m already offering a subscription for full access, but also thinking about adding discounted annual subscription.

Regarding product ideas I gonna add list of compromised IPs/domains very soon to this project. I am also working on a much more complicated product that is in closed beta now (please let me know if you want to take a look at it, I'll drop a link here) and I am always open to feedback or ideas!

Thanks!
by pedalpete | 2025-06-30 21:44:26+00:00
We are starting to see metal filaments and even this copper one[1]. Multi-filament fdm printers just might be able to make some rather large circuits. I doubt we'll get down to 0.2mm tracers, but if size isn't an issue, we can do better than the conductive carbon tpu(?) filaments which are common today.

[1] https://www.gsc-3d.com/3d_materials/copper-filament/
by agensaequivocum | 2025-06-30 21:44:29+00:00
Really the conclusion of that paper, that people are not vitamin D deficient, ought to be that people are sunlight deficient. This is why studies that involve supplementation of vitamin D frequently show no effect. Vitamin D is only one of many many ways in which light affects biology.

The paragraph near the end about babies needing fortified milk because breast milk is insufficient in vitamin D is laughable. It seems pretty obvious that babies are one of the most, if not the most, sunlight deficient demographics.
by viccis | 2025-06-30 21:44:39+00:00
>I wonder how much that no-expense-spared, money-is-no-object attitude to buying SaaS impacts an engineers ability to make sensible decisions around infra and architecture

I saw this a lot at a previous company. Being able to just "have more Lambdas scale up to handle it" got some very mediocre engineers past challenges they encountered. But it did so at the cost of wasting VAST amounts of money and saddling themselves with tech debt that completely hobbled the company's ability to scale.

It was very frustrating to be too junior to be able to change minds. Even basic things like "I know it worked for you with old on-prem NFS designs but we shouldn't be storing our data in 100kb files in S3 and firing off thousands of Lambda invocations to process workloads, we should be storing it in 100mb files and using industry leading ETL frameworks on it". They were old school guys who hadn't adjusted to best practices for object storage and modern large scale data loads (this was a 1M event per second system) and so the company never really succeeded despite thousands of customers and loads of revenue.

I consider cost consideration and profiling to be an essential skill that any engineer working in cloud style environments should have, but it's especially important that a staff engineer or person in a similar position have this skill set and be ready to grill people who come up with wasteful solutions.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-30 21:44:45+00:00
In retrospect, I wonder if the original ethos of the non-profit structure of OpenAI was a scam from the get go, or just woefully naive. And to emphasize, I'm not talking just about Altman.

That is, when you create this cutting edge, powerful tech, it turns out that people are willing to pay gobs of money for it. So if somehow OpenAI had managed to stay as a non-profit (let's pretend training didn't cost a bajillion dollars), they still would have lost all of their top engineers to deeper pockets if they didn't pursue an aggressive monetization strategy.

That's why I want to gag a little when I hear all this flowery language about how AI will cure all these diseases and be a huge boon to humanity. Let's get real - people are so hyped about this because they believe it will make them rich. And it most likely will, and to be clear, I don't blame them. The only thing I blame folks for is trying to wrap "I'd like to get rich" goals in moralistic BS.
by vkou | 2025-06-30 21:44:52+00:00
Vintage cars are a tiny fraction of the vehicle base, and due to demand and population growth, and the fact that an old car had to have been a new car at some point, there is an immediate bias towards having more newer cars.

Also, unlike with money and wealth and other metrics where averages aren't very useful, the distribution of car ages does not have a tail of incredible outliers. There aren't a lot of billion-year-old cars driving that average away from the median.

Look, it's entirely possible that 'this time it'll be different', and we'll regress on this metric, but at the moment the data does not support it.
by davidclark | 2025-06-30 21:46:11+00:00
Good example of why I have been totally ignoring people who beat the drum of needing to develop the skills of interacting with models. “Learn to prompt” is already dead? Of course, the true believers will just call this an evolution of prompting or some such goalpost moving.

Personally, my goalpost still hasn’t moved: I’ll invest in using AI when we are past this grand debate about its usefulness. The utility of a calculator is self-evident. The utility of an LLM requires 30k words of explanation and nuanced caveats. I just can’t even be bothered to read the sales pitch anymore.
by simonw | 2025-06-30 21:46:19+00:00
Claude 3.5 was remarkably good at writing code. If Claude 3.7 and Claude 4 are just incremental improvements on that then even better!

I actually think they're a lot more than incremental. 3.7 introduced "thinking" mode and 4 doubled down on that and thinking/reasoning/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is particularly good at code challenges.

As always, if you're not getting great results out of coding LLMs it's likely you haven't spent several months iterating on your prompting techniques to figure out what works best for your style of development.
by ianburrell | 2025-06-30 21:47:25+00:00
They don't do well in open ocean which is why only saw them in Caspian Sea. My understanding is that they need to fly a certain distance above the waves to keep from hitting them. When the waves are big, this pushes them close to ground effect limit.

My guess is that they would be okay for confined seas like Mediterranean. Or uses where they didn't need to keep to schedule.
by T-Winsnes | 2025-06-30 21:47:46+00:00
SAML allows you to send additional attributes with the identity payload, like group memberships. This is not inherently authorisation, but can be used to automatically map users to teams/groups/roles in your application.

SAML is a very complicated standard, and very painful to implement. OIDC is much simpler, but lacks some of the capabilities.

Both can automatically create users on login, that is application implementation detail. Both also need SCIM or something similar to offboard users
by wavemode | 2025-06-30 21:47:55+00:00
> Explain stifle, or more specifically how Apple is doing that ?

I wrote a comment about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426128#44427725

> You may not like the price associated with it, which is what most of these complaints are about, the fact that Apple scoops up 30% of recurring subscriptions created through the App Store as well. People tend to forget that running your own infrastructure is also not free, especially when you need to handle refunds, legal matters and international compliance.

Simply having a link in my app to a page where someone pays through Stripe instead of through Apple Payments, costs nothing to Apple and creates no obligation for Apple to do anything.

> Sideloading is usually a very bad idea in this day and age.

Then don't do it. Who exactly is forcing you to?
by sneak | 2025-06-30 21:47:58+00:00
I believe Ente supports all of this, and can be self-hosted. All of the AI stuff is done locally.

I pay them for service/storage as it’s e2ee and it doesn’t matter to me if they or I store the encrypted blobs.

They also have a CLI tool you can run from cron on your NAS or whatever to make sure you have a complete local copy of your data, too.

https://ente.io - if you use the referral code SNEAK we both get additional free storage.
by simonw | 2025-06-30 21:48:47+00:00
I liked what Andrej Karpathy had to say about this:

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626

> [..] in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting... Too little or of the wrong form and the LLM doesn't have the right context for optimal performance. Too much or too irrelevant and the LLM costs might go up and performance might come down. Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits.
by ghusto | 2025-06-30 21:49:20+00:00
It's really not as scary as you think it is.

Whenever I want a subscription I want inside an app, I actually take the effort to go to their website and buy it from them directly, because it's cheaper (not that they're allowed to tell me this in their app though).

When I want to stop paying for the subscription, I cancel it and I'm done. At least in the EU, this is always an easy thing to do.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-30 21:50:30+00:00
All these already existing dragnets make oldies like the Clipper Chip seem like a weekend hackathon project.

The irony is that all of these metadata leaks and correlation attacks etc were theoretical at the time these technologies were created and developed, unless you’re NSA level compute power, both human and silicon. Now, any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing, and no one will care when they do besides the feds who cry foul about their turf being stepped on by plebeians. The public will never care because their eyes will already have glazed over once you mention MAC addresses and SSIDs.
by mfuzzey | 2025-06-30 21:51:07+00:00
The way I remember it is:

INIT_LIST_HEAD is of form VERB_NOUN so is called from within a function to programatically initialise the list.

LIST_HEAD_INIT is NOUN_VERB and is used within a structure initialiser not from a function.

But my main point was to show the "embed the list in the data" approach rather than "embed the data in the list" or "point to the data from the list" and not to discuss the naming details in the kernel implementation of the concept.
by 8organicbits | 2025-06-30 21:51:35+00:00
One thought experiment I was musing on recently was the minimal context required to define a task (to an LLM, human, or otherwise). In software, there's a whole discipline of human centered design that aims to uncover the nuance of a task. I've worked with some great designers, and they are incredibly valuable to software development. They develop journey maps, user stories, collect requirements, and produce a wealth of design docs. I don't think you can successfully build large projects without that context.

I've seen lots of AI demos that prompt "build me a TODO app", pretend that is sufficient context, and then claim that the output matches their needs. Without proper context, you can't tell if the output is correct.
by mistrial9 | 2025-06-30 21:51:47+00:00
it might mean that you are obtusely defending a point of view that ultimately, rationalizes any amount of work for any amount of hours assigned to a helpless cog knowledge worker. "We pay you for that" turns into "you are responsible for that" turns into "do it or you are fired" and "its not done you cant leave until it is done and why did you waste time and why are you failing at this task I gave you" etc..
by Findecanor | 2025-06-30 21:51:54+00:00
Compiler back-end for WASM and more, but with the core at a slightly lower abstraction level than WASM and with a somewhat novel ABI.

To abstract around register file differences in different ISAs, I'm using SSA-form with spilling to a separate "safe stack". Enforces code-pointer integrity for security's sake (not unlike WASM) but extended also to virtual method tables.

"Partial-ISA migration" allows a program to run on multiple cores with slightly different ISA extensions. "Build-migration" is migration to another build of the same program in the same address space: Instead of trying to debug an optimised program, you would migrate it to a "debug-build" to attach a debugger. Or you could run a profiling build, compile a new build using the result and then migrate the running program to the optimised build: something that previously only JIT-compilers have done AFAIK.

I'm out of the research stage and at the stage of writing the first iteration of the main passes of the compiler, but now and then I've had to back-track and reread a paper on a compiler algorithm or refine the spec. It has taken a few years, and I expect it to take a few years more.
by oytis | 2025-06-30 21:52:59+00:00
> It’s also the frustrated, desperate plea of someone who has been in the trenches for long enough to have seen the same nihilistic response to their pleas.

Not sure what trenches you are talking about. The author is a journalist and a founder of a PR agency, who got prominence ranting against AI industry. I must admit, as much I empathise with author's stated sentiment to gen AI, I couldn't read any of his pieces to the end either. It's not just the tone, I don't feel I am getting anything useful from them, just any food for thought - as opposed to writings of Nikhil Suresh for instance, that also have a benefit of being well-written.
by gwbas1c | 2025-06-30 21:53:09+00:00
I think it's more about how there's a lot more advertising now than in the past; and just how generally intrusive advertising has become overall.

Think about a newspaper / magazine: The ads didn't suddenly block the article, move the page around, or phone home to the advertiser. Likewise, the ads wouldn't slow the magazine down, flash, or make noise.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-30 21:53:21+00:00
> wonder if the original ethos of the non-profit structure of OpenAI was a scam from the get go, or just woefully naive

Based on behaviour, it appears they didn't think they'd do anything impactful. When OpenAI accidentally created something important Altman immediately (a) actually got involved to (b) reverse course.

> if somehow OpenAI had managed to stay as a non-profit (let's pretend training didn't cost a bajillion dollars), they still would have lost all of their top engineers to deeper pockets if they didn't pursue an aggressive monetization strategy

I'm not so sure. OpenAI would have held a unique position as both first mover and moral arbiter. That's a powerful place to be, albeit not a position Silicon Valley is comfortable or competent in.

I'm also not sure pursuing monetisation requires a for-profit structure. That's more a function of the cost of training, though again, a licensing partnership with, I don't know, Microsoft, would alleviate that pressure without requiring giving up control.
by smallerize | 2025-06-30 21:53:38+00:00
This is actually a feature of the Plume wifi mesh devices. https://support.plume.com/s/article/Sense-Live-View?language... It's also available from any other ISP that uses them, or if you buy your own Plume device and a subscription. It's been there for years. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/from-wi-fi-to-spy-fi...
by amazingman | 2025-06-30 21:54:37+00:00
Put your cable modem in bridge mode and use your own WiFi.

I used to recommend using your own cable modem as well, but these days you have to use the Xfinity modem to avoid overages if you're in a market with data caps.

Comcast has a stellar network operations unit, but their business operations are creepy and exploitative.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-30 21:55:20+00:00
Except that those claims feel like intentional exaggerations and not meaningfully true?

I use both iOS and Android.

> It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings

I have no love for the way iOS settings are done, but calling the setting for this in particular a complex labyrinth is some pretty blatant editorializing.

> A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified

I don't think this is a true statement? My default calendar is a Google calendar. Actually switching to instead use my Apple iCloud calendar has been something of a chore.
by labrador | 2025-06-30 21:55:25+00:00
I’m curious how this applies to systems like ChatGPT, which now have two kinds of memory: user-configurable memory (a list of facts or preferences) and an opaque chat history memory. If context is the core unit of interaction, it seems important to give users more control or at least visibility into both.

I know context engineering is critical for agents, but I wonder if it's also useful for shaping personality and improving overall relatability? I'm curious if anyone else has thought about that.
by bglazer | 2025-06-30 21:55:37+00:00
This shows just how completely detached from reality this whole "takeoff" narrative is. It's utterly baffling that someone would consider it "controversial" that understanding the world requires *observing the world*.

The hallmark example of this is life extension. There's a not insignificant fraction of very powerful, very wealthy people who think that their machine god is going to read all of reddit and somehow cogitate its way to a cure for ageing. But how would we know if it works? Seriously, how else do we know if our AGI's life extension therapy is working besides just fucking waiting and seeing if people still die? Each iteration will take years (if not decades) just to test.
by ozim | 2025-06-30 21:55:40+00:00
Finding a magic prompt was never “prompt engineering” it was always “context engineering” - lots of “AI wannabe gurus” sold it as such but they never knew any better.

RAG wasn’t invented this year.

Proper tooling that wraps esoteric knowledge like using embeddings, vector dba or graph dba becomes more mainstream. Big players improve their tooling so more stuff is available.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-06-30 21:56:16+00:00
I don’t have any further information. I did the research a decade ago. Given I have severe allergies and asthma, it stuck with me.

My more recent research into ADA looked similar. Most of the time issues like this are solvable but the solution is inconvenient.

It’s also important to note that ADA does not apply to companies with less than 15 people. If you’re a small shop, you can hire someone else who isn’t allergic to dogs.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-30 21:57:56+00:00
Whatever criticisms of the economic system one might have (and there are plenty), we seem to be forgetting that we live in the most materially abundant and safe period of human history, and the problem is especially apparent in the richest countries of the world. So this is no explanation of the demographic crisis.

The decision not to have children is also not especially unique to those in economically precarious situations or those living in poverty. On the contrary, the demographic crisis affects everyone, including a well-off middle class that will have no trouble providing for its children. On top of that, while I support sound pro-natal policies, what we've found is that using financial incentives has very little to no effect on increasing birth rates.

Demographic decline reflects deeper problems in our cultures. We structure our lives in ways that do not respect optimal fertility, putting things off until "we're established in our careers". We define ourselves by what we own. We have a prejudice against large families, associating them with the shame of poverty, misery, backwardness, and a lack of education instead of the great wealth that they are. We have taken individualism to such an extreme that family and community life has taken a huge blow, and with it, the broad social support children would usually grow up with. Children have fewer siblings and fewer cousins to play with and grow up with. We have a dating culture that, instead of functioning as a way to find someone to marry to start a family, is recreational, aimless, and devoid of any desire for commitment. Expectations w.r.t. children that are financially costly lead to thinking that having more children would "deprive" them of a desired standard (this relates to keeping up with the Jones's). And what if you have more than 2 children in close succession? Well, because of safety regulations, you need to buy a larger car, because a basic sedan cannot hold three car seats.

Taken in aggregate, the cultural climate, as well as the attitudes it shapes, is not favorable.
by ghusto | 2025-06-30 21:57:59+00:00
How about people who want a Mac (which is still "open" to the extent that it makes a difference), and therefore would also like an iPhone because of the propitiatory APIs Apple makes available solely to the iPhone?

I don't particularly like my iPhone, in fact I see as a worse device in many ways to my old Android phone, but the interoperability with my Mac makes the trade-off worth it. So ironically, the only reason I want it is because of even _more_ anticompetitive practices.

And yes, the day the Mac is as closed off as the iPhone, there will be zero Apple devices in this house.