MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _wire_ | 2025-07-31 20:32:38+00:00
Your testament is well known back to antiquity,

The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.

It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.

The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.

Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.

As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.
by sabakhoj | 2025-07-31 20:32:42+00:00
In things that I am comparatively good at (e.g., coding), I can see that it helps 'raise the ceiling' as a result of allowing me to complete more of the low level tasks more effectively. But it is true as well that it hasn't raised my personal bar in capability, as far as I can measure.

When it comes to things I am not good at at, it has given me the illusion of getting 'up to speed' faster. Perhaps that's a personal ceiling raise?

I think a lot of these upskilling utilities will come down to delivery format. If you use a chat that gives you answers, don't expect to get better at that topic. If you use a tool that forces you to come up with answers yourself and get personalized validation, you might find yourself leveling up.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-31 20:32:46+00:00
in case anyone else was curious about the overlap with KDE neon:

> Differences from KDE neon/Prior art

> KDE neon was KDE's first version of a self-made OS.

> It fulfills the "distributed by KDE" requirement, but fails on the reliability angle due to the Ubuntu LTS base that ironically becomes unstable because it needs to be tinkered with to get Plasma to build on it, breaking the LTS promise.

> It is built on fairly old technology and requires a lot of packaging busywork — both of which are non-goals of KDE Linux. [0]

[0]: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Differences_from_KDE_neo...
by brentm | 2025-07-31 20:33:10+00:00
> Would you have asked the Jews to bend over backwards to Nazi Germany to appease them?

The holocaust did not happen because Jews were sneaking into Berlin and murdering innocent people in their homes. When the current conflict begins in that way then the group who started it needs to beg for forgiveness, especially when that is their only card. Hamas is no match for Israel militarily and have no cards to play here. Their only options is to continue to make their people suffer and hope that somehow that leads to outside powers interjecting and changing their situation for the better. The best way to resolve this is to beg for forgiveness and internally remove Hamas from power. Hamas is the problem here, I'd like to think the average citizen of Gaza could find a way to live in peace with Israel if given the choice.
by lukeschlather | 2025-07-31 20:33:10+00:00
"We haven't found the 'right' algorithm yet." seems like the obvious answer, but the numbers in the paper all make sense and I'm interested in some more exotic explanations why it could actually be some orders of magnitude more than a 5090.

Although that's not looking at memory, and I am also interested in some explanation of what... a 5090 has 32GB which, a human brain has more like a petabyte of memory assuming 1 byte/synapse. Which is to say 1 million GB in which case even a large cluster of H100s has an absurd amount of TOPS but nowhere near enough high-speed memory.
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 20:34:20+00:00
Maybe I need to get more comfortable with that. I tend to subscribe to the buy-once, cry-once way of buying things. There have been various times in the past when I wanted thing X, but bought thing Y to save a few bucks. I didn't like it and ultimately ended up with thing X. This costs be more money, time, and frustration than just buying the good thing from the start. But when dealing hobbies I may or may not like, it's a problem.

> Maybe there's benefit in some kind of "temporary hobbyist" FB group or similar

Many libraries have a bunch of stuff like this now. They call it the Library of Things. Looking at my local library, they have things like a record player, gardening tools, a ukulele, steel drum, knitting stuff, some electronics kits, etc. That could be a good "free" resource for things like this. I looked at it before, but should probably actually give it a try.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-07-31 20:35:00+00:00
I remember back when carbon first appeared, I immediately thought it's not gonna get popular simply because it has "fn" and "var"

superficial details matter - people that stayed on C++ instead of transitioning to flashy new ones have type-before-name as part of programming identity

you can have all the features in the world (and be recognized by it), but if the code doesn't _look_ like C++, then it's of no interest
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-31 20:35:50+00:00
I knew someone would make this comment. I almost added a "I'm probably not leet enough to avoid these situations" disclaimer. It seemed a bit pointlessly self deprecating.

You don't always get to choose the state of or the way a system you work in/with is designed. In this case I was working in a limited scripting language that I have no choice about.

Keep that nose turned up. I'm sure you are leet10xninja. Maybe work on your reading comprehension before you dump on someone though as I already specified that I greatly simplified for comment sake.
by milke | 2025-07-31 20:36:05+00:00
FileUtils provides some advanced file operations, available in macOS Finder contextual and toolbar action menus. While FiIeUtils is running, invoking Finder contextual or toolbar action menu will show additional items, each invoking specific file operation executed by FileUtils. Additional items shown in both Finder contextual and toolbar action menus are fully customizable, a user can choose which menu items will be shown and arrange them anyway one wants.

FileUtils also provides Finder Services menu items for selected files, so each operation can be invoked from that menu too, as well as having assigned a specific keyboard shortcut (customizable in the System Settings/Preferences) and then invoked and executed on selected files in Finder with a keyboard, without using a mouse.

FileUtils is available in three variants: non-sandboxed application, sandboxed application and Mac App Store application. They differ slightly in what they can do and should accommodate the broadest variety of users preferences of software security distribution channels.

For more information, news, updates and support, check out https://fileutils.com.
by neom | 2025-07-31 20:36:32+00:00
I'm redoing our docs right now. My experience tells me devs want 2 things, an evaluation tool and howto, howto best via chatbot, evaluation text (security, architecture, basics of getting going) via a regular old webpage, does this track with what people here want? am I thinking about this correctly? Thank you for helping me with my homework! :)
by andytratt | 2025-07-31 20:36:50+00:00
correct i'd like to be rich why not, also i don't care about money which is the fun part - it proves that this is a mission driven project. the causation is really important and core to the whole thesis. Elon only built SpaceX because he'd rather commit suicide than live in a world without Starship or some progress path to Mars. I never understood that until it clicked last week as fundamentally important to explain to humanity, since Ayn Rand is dead and her books have been lost to social memory & not incorporated fully into modern management practices and mainstream theory.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-07-31 20:37:17+00:00
Yes, really!

Smaller models may hallucinate less: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

The RAG technique uses a smaller model and an external knowledge base that's queried based on the prompt. The technique allows small models to outperform far larger ones in terms of hallucinations, at the cost of performance. That is, to eliminate hallucinations, we should alter how the model works, not increase its scale: https://highlearningrate.substack.com/p/solving-hallucinatio....

Pruned models, with fewer parameters, generally have a lower hallucination risk: https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00695.... "Our analysis suggests that pruned models tend to generate summaries that have a greater lexical overlap with the source document, offering a possible explanation for the lower hallucination risk."

At the same time, all of this should be contrasted with the "Bitter Lesson" (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...). IMO, making a larger LLMs does indeed produce a generally superior LLM. It produces more trained responses to a wider set of inputs. However, it does not change that it's an LLM, so fundamental traits of LLMs - like hallucinations - remain.
by Icy0 | 2025-07-31 20:38:23+00:00
My take is the fall of the current order of scientific institutions was already happening well before Trump's actions this year. Increased academic fraud, the reproducibility crisis, increase in people prioritizing career growth over pursuit of knowledge, overzealous publish-or-perish culture, administrative bloat, and so on.

Can we save it? I want to believe it, but I'm more and more of the mind that we need to create a new scientific institution to replace the old one, whatever that means.
by _benedict | 2025-07-31 20:38:50+00:00
Do you anywhere elaborate what you mean by leaderless, and how this affects the semantics and guarantees you offer?

So far as I understand both Kafka and Pulsar use (leader-based) consensus protocols to deliver some of their features and guarantees, so to match these you must either have developed a leaderless consensus protocol, or modify the guarantees you offer, or else have a leader-based consensus protocol you utilise still?

From one of your other answers, you mention you rely on Apache Bookkeeper, which appears to be leader-based?

I ask because I am aware of only one industry leaderless consensus protocol under development (and I am working on it), and it is always fun to hear about related work.
by sangwulee | 2025-07-31 20:39:17+00:00
Thank you! Glad you find it helpful. The model is focused on photorealism so it should be able to generate most realistic scenes. Although, I think using 3D engines would be more suitable for typical cases for robotics training since it gives you ground truth data on objects, location, etc.

One interesting use case would be if you are focusing on a robotics task that would require perception of realistic scenes.
by sofixa | 2025-07-31 20:39:20+00:00
> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.

That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.
by mathgeek | 2025-07-31 20:39:25+00:00
I know it’s a silly question to begin with, but if you analyze it seriously, you’d want to at most compare human intelligence->superintelligence with the 20 million years between the first homidinae and homo (and even that is probably too large for some folks to compare with).

One could even argue you should only compare it back to the discovery of writing or similar.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-31 20:39:26+00:00
Yes, that's what I mean. Attempting to tell people not to do something is like setting a robots.txt entry. Only a robot that agrees will play along. Therefore, all things have to be enforced server-side if they want enforcement.

Paywalls are a natural consequence of this and I don't think they suck, but that's a subjective opinion. Maybe one day we will have a pay-on-demand structure, like flattr reborn.
by billy99k | 2025-07-31 20:39:49+00:00
It's a bit of a stretch to say he 'killed 14 million people' with absolutely no proof besides hit pieces on the now defunded NPR.

Many of these people that claim to have been affected by the cuts live in war-torn countries. Shouldn't this fall on the shoulders of their government? Why are they poor and destitute with no medical care to begin with?
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-31 20:40:51+00:00
One way out of this trap is to set yourself ridiculous constrained writing challenges. "Write a story about a duck, but each paragraph has to invoke or subvert the corresponding item of this list of 30 random TVTropes articles; also the prime-numbered sentences have to each introduce a new character, and the even square-numbered sentences have to each kill one off." You can't compare that to a Franz Kafka Prizewinner.

And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".
by worik | 2025-07-31 20:41:54+00:00
Google has lost its appeal in the long-running app store antitrust case, which marks another major victory for Epic Games. Google lost the original case in 2023 when a jury found it abused its market position in smartphones to block competition from Epic and others. Google was able to get the penalties suspended while it pursued its appeal, but now it may need to make plans for a more open future on Android.
by aegypti | 2025-07-31 20:42:02+00:00
Yes, for $30 a year you can instantly stream any torrent with no real setup or install. The most used client is a PWA that calls out to VLC or whatever.

Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-31 20:42:34+00:00
The article discusses many of the reasons QUIC is currently slower. Most of them seem to come down to "we haven't done any optimization for this yet".

> Long offers some potential reasons for this difference, including the lack of segmentation offload support on the QUIC side, an extra data copy in transmission path, and the encryption required for the QUIC headers.

All of these three reasons seem potentially very addressable.

It's worth noting that the benchmark here is on pristine network conditions, a drag race if you will. If you are on mobile, your network will have a lot more variability, and there TCP's design limits are going to become much more apparent.

TCP itself often has protocols run on top of it, to do QUIC like things. HTTP/2 is an example of this. So when you compare QUIC and TCP, it's kind of like comparing how fast a car goes with how fast an engine bolted to a frame with wheels on it goes. QUIC goes significantly up the OSI network stack, is layer 5+, where-as TCP+TLS is layer 3. Thats less system design.

QUIC also has wins for connecting faster, and especially for reconnecting faster. It also has IP mobility: if you're on mobile and your IP address changes (happens!) QUIC can keep the session going without rebuilding it once the client sends the next packet.

It's a fantastically well thought out & awesome advancement, radically better in so many ways. The advantages of having multiple non-blocking streams (alike SCTP) massively reduces the scope that higher level protocol design has to take on. And all that multi-streaming stuff being in the kernel means it's deeply optimizable in a way TCP can never enjoy.

Time to stop driving the old rust bucket jalopy of TCP around everywhere, crafting weird elaborate handmade shit atop it. We need a somewhat better starting place for higher level protocols and man oh man is QUIC alluring.
by kragen | 2025-07-31 20:43:21+00:00
Anyone can upload a CC-BY article in full to anywhere, and anyone can upload a CC-BY-NC-ND article to anywhere noncommercial. ArXiv only accepts uploads from authors, though.

The "history" section of the Wikipedia article cites Kay's excellent "Early History of Smalltalk" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/155360.155364 which of course does cite Ingalls's 01978 POPL paper, as well as 17 other papers published by the ACM, by my count, more than any other single publisher except Xerox. That section also highlights the ACM conference OOPSLA and cites Borning's "Thinglab", published at OOPSLA. So access to historical ACM papers is extremely important for understanding the history of object-orientation.
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 20:44:52+00:00
I'm not surprised people are confused. They probably know what happened with Beanie Babies 20+ years ago and see Labubu has the same thing. Except now the trends or shorter and more frequent. Labubu is one of many such little collectables that aims to trigger rampant consumerism.

If someone were to tour my house and poke around, they would likely conclude that I have collections of watches and shoes. I would never call either of these things collections. They are just things I wear that I like and finding ones I like leads me to trying out a lot of them.

I generally have an issue understanding most people who spend thousands of dollars on "collectibles", where the only apparently purpose is to buy it and stick it on a shelf.

I did have a couple Beanie Babies during that craze, since my mom was always at the store looking at them and buying them. I treated them like normal stuffed animals, and did end up making 100x by selling one of them, but that was never my intent when I got it. It was dumb luck that it was rare. I found all of that very confusing.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-31 20:45:15+00:00
> there are studies that show (by looking at past conflicts) that peacekeeping does work

They work for the people whose peace they're keeping. Their benefit to the benefactors is less clear. It's why they're becoming increasingly uncommon [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_peaceke...
Ask HN: My coworker's AI responses are driving me insane
by blinkbat | 2025-07-31 20:46:17+00:00
there's a user-facing worker on my team who regularly responds to users with AI slop. they don't even bother to remove the emdashes or adjust the pandering tone. it's absolutely nails on a chalkboard for me. I'm not their manager so I hesitate to intervene at all, but it makes me cringe and I think lots of users would feel the same. what would you do in this situation?
by toyg | 2025-07-31 20:46:47+00:00
One should remember that Ferrari was effectively on the verge of bankruptcy for most of Enzo's tenure as leader. Eventually he was forced to sell to FIAT, and spent his last few years pretending that he was free to make the choices that FIAT's owner Agnelli wanted him to make. Ferrari eventually turned a corner once Enzo died.

Enzo Ferrari always wanted to make a better Alfa Romeo, and he did. Branding was a side effect that other people exploited later.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-31 20:47:02+00:00
I guess it makes sense: the tactics are defined in the lean repo (but not in the kernel of that repo), while mathlib has its own repo. But any changes to tactic code triggers a test to verify that mathlib still works against it. Which implies there's a reasonable set of checks and balances that don't allow tactic changes to break anything too badly if you follow mathlib's idioms, though it can still happen.
by toast0 | 2025-07-31 20:47:30+00:00
I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-07-31 20:48:12+00:00
I've been a unifi user for quite a few years, enthusiastically at first and with somewhat more trepidation as of late. They seemed to have some kind of hardware talent exodus a couple years ago, and also when they stopped having self-hostable unifi video and network. I ended up capitulating and just bought a cloud-key but wasn't thrilled.

But yes, they still seem to be the best for small business / homelab type people who want something more than "the AT&T guy put a box behind the couch in 1998 and i don't know where it went after that" but also doesn't want to have to do opnsense or a bunch of that stuff.

And they've managed to regain my enthusiasm a bit by adding plain-ole wireguard (not even teleport, though i do like teleport for my phone) to their managed VPN options, and now by bringing back self-hosting.

My main gripe about lack of self-hosting is, I have a bunch of terabytes just sitting around i could put my video footage of my front lawn on, and it's free real estate. but since i can't (couldn't) self-host video on it, I would've had to pay like hundreds of bucks (or is it thousands?) to get the rackmount video server from them. But now that this is back, hopefully I can switch back to self hosting if my cloudkey ever dies. So that's nice.
by kragen | 2025-07-31 20:48:40+00:00
The odds of the ACM library vanishing are the same as the odds that you, personally, are going to die: at least 1000:1 in favor.† The only question is whether it happens before the relevant copyrights expire. Anyone who can't convince CloudFlare they're human has already lost access to the ACM library.

I've already addressed your "You are free to publish" argument.

I'm being hostile because your comment, in addition to being factually incorrect in a way that demonstrates your complete unfamiliarity with the subject matter, consisted almost entirely of personal attacks on me. You accused me of "looking a gift horse in the mouth", of playing "no part" in "creating" "human knowledge", and "demanding more for nothing". Now you're implying you thought that was friendly rhetoric? Do you expect anyone to believe that? How stupid do you think other people are?

I already gave "Attention is all you need" as a recent example of a possibly highly impactful paper in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734480. The fact that it wasn't published in an ACM venue is one of the reasons that the ACM's policy on new papers is relatively inconsequential compared to their policy on existing papers.

______

† I'd say 1:0 in favor, but rationally speaking, we can't completely exclude the possibility that all of this is some sort of hallucination or simulation, or that time will stop tomorrow so that everything that exists at that time will never vanish, and so on. But, under the usual presumptions that the universe is objectively real and everything in it vanishes sooner or later, the ACM Digital Library is absolutely guaranteed to vanish. And if you think it's inconceivable that it will be destroyed by political machinations within a few years, did you predict two years ago that the US would vote in favor of Russia invading Ukraine in the UN?