MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by easterncalculus | 2025-07-16 16:45:28+00:00
This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters do, which isn't true either. They had trouble then too, but (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.

Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.
by wahern | 2025-07-16 16:45:55+00:00
Seems FreeBSD beat OpenBSD to the punch with something similar, FD_RESOLVE_BENEATH, committed only a couple of weeks ago.[1] Seems the idea was conceived before the OpenBSD proposal, and it differs subtly by attaching to the file descriptor rather than the file description (aka file table entry), though unlike the other file descriptor flags (FD_CLOEXEC, FD_CLOFORK) it's hacked to be inherited across dup, behaving more like file table entry flags (access mode, O_NONBLOCK, etc).

[1] https://reviews.freebsd.org/D50371
by hosh | 2025-07-16 16:45:57+00:00
The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen.

The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
by TXTOS | 2025-07-16 16:46:23+00:00
Sure! This is a method that most AI systems haven’t discovered yet, but we’ve put it into practice. By treating the embedding space not as a static lookup but as a dynamic field, we perform dimensional rotations of the text’s semantic vectors. This lets us generate new, coherent ideas by projecting and rotating meanings in high-dimensional space—far beyond simple retrieval or random guessing.
Show HN: Check if your data follows a normal distribution (no code, free tool)
by shaishai | 2025-07-16 16:46:33+00:00
I built a small tool that checks how close your data is to a normal distribution. You just upload a CSV column, and it computes the KL divergence between your data and a normal distribution with the same mean and standard deviation.

No installation, no login, just quick feedback: https://ismydatanormal.com

Built it mostly for fun – but I’ve already found myself testing sleep patterns, messaging habits, and even some sensor data. Would love your feedback!
by frozenseven | 2025-07-16 16:47:51+00:00
>they are some kind of socialist

Yes, that is accurate.

>I guess their story would be worth listening to if it was posted on truth social instead?

No, I don't take anti-AI nonsense seriously in the first place. That aside, the main point here was that Reddit has a very strong political leaning. If anyone tried to insist that the politics of Truth Social is irrelevant, you'd immediately call it out.
by m-schuetz | 2025-07-16 16:48:00+00:00
Yet they ended up creating something that makes OpenGL still an attractive choice. That excessive complexity certainly wasnt necessary.

Personally, I'll sit this generation out and wait dor whatever comes after. I ended up switching to doing software rasterization in Cuda because that's easier than drawing a triangle in Vulkan. Cuda has shown me how insane Vulkan is. Like, why even have descriptir sets, bindings, etc? In cuda you simply call a kernel and provide the data (e.g. vertex or storage buffer) as a pointer argument.
by qwerpy | 2025-07-16 16:48:09+00:00
Oh hey another "I'd fully be on Linux if it wasn't for Fusion 360" person. Although in my case I'm too lazy to maintain VMs, so I just use windows as my base OS. Microsoft may force the issue next year when my perfectly good desktop stops getting Windows 10 updates and can't install Windows 11.

What's torturous about using Fusion 360 in a VM?
by kongolongo | 2025-07-16 16:48:11+00:00
>If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.

Thats speculative. Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money on things they lose money on all the time. What's not speculative is consumers cant buy the drugs themselves. They might ask doctors about it, but if the doctors are misprescribing that's on them or their training and not the consumer.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-07-16 16:48:27+00:00
you could say the same thing about a dozen other languages, but there is definitely a stereotypical cranky java dev that is frustrated writing corporate crud apps that should in theory be blazingly fast, but never quite are for reasons. They revel in the verbosity, and look down on anyone they feel is taking the easy path. If you've never met one you're lucky, but they've been at every company I ever worked for.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-16 16:48:41+00:00
I would argue it really isn't. Massachusetts still has some of the strongest union protections, is one of the most unionized states, and Baltimore has worked hard to maintain an incompetent government for decades. Given the outrageous rents in nearby states and cities Baltimore should have kept growing but has instead shrunk to a half million.

The rust belt as a whole was primarily just companies escaping unions. Cheaper labor may have been an incentive but it fundamentally started with companies who were forced to move production, and US regulation which prevented them from benefiting from local supply chains once they became unionized.
by kristopolous | 2025-07-16 16:48:55+00:00
I've sold linux mint laptops on ebay and I always reach out after sale basically saying "just to be clear, this isn't running windows, it's linux. I'll be happy to cancel if this isn't what you expected"

and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"

Well alright then, there you go...
by neRok | 2025-07-16 16:48:57+00:00
Meanwhile I do 50% of my internet-ing in private mode and get annoyed when I change between apps the wrong way and loose my 4 tabs lol. I think this particular issue happens because firefox-android must get told by android-OS to free up RAM as it's now a background-app.

But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...

Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.

Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-16 16:49:25+00:00
Thanks for the correction!

Brad also produced "All the Widgets" for CHI'90, which of course included progress bars, and a whole lot more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw

>This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0.

Brad is well known for his many projects named after gemstone and rock acronyms:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/acronyms.html

CHI 2017 SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award: Brad A. Myers - RUBY: Reminiscing about User interfaces by Brad over the Years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVoovFR5nUY

>But probably the Garnet tool with the most unusual acronym is C32, which I won't read. C32 is a spreadsheet interface for defining and debugging Garnet's constraints. A story about C32 it it started off of C29 when I submitted it to UIST, and it got rejected. So I fixed a couple things, added three more C's, and it flew through the CHI'91 referee process.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/CHI-award-talk/MyersCHI-AwardTal...

Also be sure to check out ROCK FACTS: Daily Geological Wisdom & Programming Crystals from Brad Myers' Collection:

https://lloooomm.com/rock-facts-subscription-service.html

I sympathize with your pet peeve! Here are some of the other groundbreaking ideas Preston Rockwell III invented for Sentient User Interfaces as a Service (SUIAAS), that may sooth your pain and frustration while entertaining you:

- Sentient Error Messages that apologize in haikus: "File not found, friend / Like my purpose in this world / 404 sorry"

- Conscious CAPTCHAs that question their own existence: "Prove you're not a robot by helping me understand if I am one"

- Self-aware 404 pages that redirect users to therapy: "This page doesn't exist. Neither do most of our hopes. Let's talk."

- Loading screens that perform Shakespeare during quantum computing: "To load or not to load, that is the quantum superposition"
by genewitch | 2025-07-16 16:49:31+00:00
there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember.

I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.
by bn-l | 2025-07-16 16:49:41+00:00
I think it may cause cognitive decline. I mean longterm.

It was rightly banned in Australia. Fuckwits had a tendency of buying it online and then taking huge doses without a break (sensitisation) and then posting essays on the sheer horror they go through when the drug leaves their system and they rebound.

A nice reminder to libertarians that, yes you may be smart and careful with risk taking but there are many fuckwits who aren’t and shouldn’t have to suffer because of it unnecessarily.
by rdtsc | 2025-07-16 16:50:34+00:00
> Thus, safety measures for future AI agents will likely need to employ multiple monitoring layers that hopefully have uncorrelated failure modes [...] We encourage the research community and frontier AI developers to make best use of CoT monitorability and study how it can be preserved.

I am bit confused what all the 40 authors contributed to here. The paper seems to make a suggestion - monitor the chain of thought for safety. Is that the novelty part? But then, did one person come up with the idea and all 40+ people agreed to it and there put in the authors list.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-07-16 16:50:41+00:00
After using Rust's tooling, Python's tooling is obscenely painful. Like intolerable. Which makes some of us feel overwhelmingly frustrated with the language itself. The amount of time I've squandered on Python because of its tooling... I'm never getting that back.

But then uv came along. It's not just another poetry or pipenv or whatever. It works well and it has uvx and `uv tool install` and other nice things.

Previously when I saw that something was written in Python I'd curse under my breath because I don't have the mental energy to make a virtual environment and source its shell script and remember where I put it just to try something out. On arch Linux I can't just pip install something without going through some crazy setup that I used to have patience for but as I get older it's been better to just curse that snake language altogether and spend time doing something more chill like writing rust.

But now I can just type "uvx" and it works. I'm probably not going to start writing python again any time soon, but at least now I have less reason to be disappointed with people who themselves choose to write Python.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 16:51:21+00:00
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.

That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.

Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")

> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.

I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.

Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 16:51:53+00:00
> How do you that with Gemini?

You keep it isolated from the ecosystem in which all of those things are taking place.

> The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.

The whole point is to minimize the chance of that happening -- by limiting mainstream appeal, keeping it a niche, and avoiding Eternal September -- and to maximize the friction of bridging these two ecosystems. And so far, they've done a fairly good job of it, since Gemini has been expanding for six years without any indication of any of this starting to happen.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 16:51:54+00:00
It uses the CLI to connect to the database. When you start the tool, it creates a server on your localhost (localhost:4466), and acts as:

- Local database: it stores some stuff locally, like saved queries or DB configurations

- Query runner: when you run a query in the webapp it will call your localhost server, which will connect to the database and execute the SQL statement

It is technically possible to host it elsewhere, but I wouldn't recommend it (there is no documentation).
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-16 16:52:14+00:00
This paper annoyed my when it first came out, and still does. Harnad sets arbitrarily high standards for what constitutes a symbol system by I) requiring that the rules must also be fully symbolic, II) everything must be "semantically interpretable", III) omitting _relations_ between symbols from the domain of discourse.

In doing so, he rules out much of mathematics (e.g. matrix multiplication, in which the elements have no meaning in isolation, geometry, where points, lines and lines are explicitly left undefined, formal logic, etc.). This "turtles all the way down" stricture largely creates the problem that he then addresses.
by aydyn | 2025-07-16 16:53:06+00:00
I think that perspective is mostly just romanticization of reading, which is fine; if you have a book reading fetish nobody is stopping you from reading books.

But in terms of efficiently grokking information I don't think it holds up.

Cliff notes is not the same as ChatGPT. Using cliff notes, you only have a fixed bullet point summarization. But with ChatGPT, if a bullet point is not sticking, you can ask ChatGPT to expound on it. Expound on the stories from Carnegie's life and how that lead him to the techniques he talks about. That mode of learning, having someone to bounce discussion back and forth is really efficient for me.
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-16 16:53:33+00:00
Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.

As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.

Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 16:54:04+00:00
Hi guys, thanks for all the feedback.

After reading all the comments, I can see there are two big issues here:

- The code is not open-sourced, and some people don't trust running it locally

- The landing page does not clearly show/explain what DataRamen is and how it works

I should've seen it coming. I will take the following actions to tackle these problems:

1) Open-source the CLI code. There are no super sophisticated algorithms behind it, so no need to keep it private.

2) Improve the landing page with screens and videos to showcase its features.

In addition to this, I will keep working on new features. I saw multiple comments mentioning SQLite support. Since it is possible to run SQLite directly in the browser, I might as well use it as a live demo where you can try the tool with a dummy DB without installing it locally (can't promise it, I have to see the feasibility of this project).
by immibis | 2025-07-16 16:54:21+00:00
Me, as a teenager: "I am building the Torment Nexus, and I am calling it Happy Kittens Inc."

Me, 10 years later: "I am proud to unveil Happy Kittens Inc."

You: "That's the Torment Nexus."

My irrational fans: "There's no reason to bring up something he said as a teenager."
by nico | 2025-07-16 16:54:55+00:00
Tangential, but related. Is there a way to have a "locally writable" read replica, ie. a secondary db that reads from a primary, but that can also hold local changes that doesn't send back to the primary?

One of the use cases is to have a development db that can get data from production or staging (and doesn't send local changes back)

What I've done usually is have some script/cron/worker run periodically to get data, either via dump or running some queries, create a snapshot, store it in S3, then have a script on the local dev code that gets the snapshot and inserts/restores the data in the local db. This works for many cases, but index building can be a pain (take a long time), depending on the data
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-16 16:55:18+00:00
Lol preach

(Have worked as SRE at large global platform)

I just mostly over the last few years tune out such responses and try not to engage them. The whole uninformed "Well, if it were me, I would simply not do that" kind of comment style has been pervasive on this site for longer than AI though, IMO.
by Covzire | 2025-07-16 16:55:26+00:00
What if it was a primitive form of identification?

"Oh you're a Roman citizen you say? Can you prove it?"

"You know I can't prove it, you'll have to take my word for it" nonchalantly fidgets with their dodecahedron

"You know, I'll just take your word for it, be on you way" wink
by TXTOS | 2025-07-16 16:55:46+00:00
Hi everyone! I’m the creator of this system—happy to answer any technical questions.

The .txt file here is not just a prompt—it’s a full reasoning scaffold with memory, safety guards, and cross-model logic validation. It runs directly in GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3, DeepSeek, Kimi, and Perplexity—all of which gave it a 100/100 score under strict evaluation.

Feel free to ask me anything about the semantic tree, ΔS metrics, hallucination resistance, or how to build your own app using just plain text.
by m-schuetz | 2025-07-16 16:56:09+00:00
> Most modern 3D APIs also switched to staging buffers though, and I guess there's not much choice if you don't have unified memory.

Well I wouldn't know since I switched to using Cuda as a graphics API. It's mostly nonsense-free, and faster than the hardware pipeline for points, and about as fast for splats. Seeing how Nanite also software-rasterizes as a performance improvement, Cuda may even be great for triangles. Only implemented a rudimentary triangle rasterizer that can draw 10 million small textured triangles per millisecond. Still working on the larger ones, but low-priority since I focus on point clouds.

In any case, I won't touch graphics APIs anymore until they make a clean break to remove the legacy nonsense. Allocating buffers should be a single line, providing data to shaders should be as simple as passing pointers, etc..
by lukeschlather | 2025-07-16 16:56:33+00:00
I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.

Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.

A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.
by lumbroso | 2025-07-16 16:56:37+00:00
Fair point on the metaphor—let me be concrete.

What’s new here isn’t just exposing `current_datetime()`. The server also gives the model tools to reason about time:

(1) time_difference(t1, t2) – exact gaps with human wording (2) timestamp_context(t) – “weekend evening”, “workday morning” (3) time_since(t) – “2 h ago, earlier today”

I also request that Claude ask for time at every turn, which creates a timeseries that is parallel to our interactions. When Claude calls these every turn it starts noticing patterns (it independently labelled our chat as a three-act structure). That was the surprise that prompted the title.

Ask Claude “what patterns do you see so far?” after a few exchanges.

If you still find it trivial after trying, happy to hear why—genuinely looking for ways to push this further. Thanks for the candid feedback.

Finding a good title is really hard. I'd appreciate any advice on that. You'll notice I wrote the article several weeks ago, and that's how long it took me to figure out how to pitch on HN. I'd appreciate any feedback to improve. Thanks!
by ajross | 2025-07-16 16:56:40+00:00
> That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.

And losing public support for an effort via an embarassing disaster can just as certainly lose it, which was my point.

Yes yes yes, blow stuff up. Take territory, shoot people, yada yada. At some point that has to happen for a "war" to be a "war". But at the end of the day the winner is essentially always predetermined by economics and politics. Making deployment decisions in the absence of those considerations is generally how one loses wars.