MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-07-30 03:12:50+00:00
I haven't used LLMs too much for study yet, so maybe they really are force multipliers, but I completely disagree with your assessment of self-directed learning pre-llm, the paving forward part isn't so dire.

The internet, and esp. stack exchange is a horrible place to learn concepts. For basic operational stuff, sure that works, but one should mostly be picking up concepts form books and other long form content. When you get stuck it's time to do three things:

Incorporate a new source that covers the same material in a different way, or at least from a different author.

Sit down with the concept and write about it and actively try to reformulate it and everything you do/don't understand in your own words.

Take a pause and come back later.

Usually one of these three strategies does the trick, no llm required. Obviously these approaches require time that using an LLM wouldn't. I have a suspicion doing it this way will also make it stick in long term memory better, but that's just a hunch.
by strogonoff | 2025-07-30 03:13:03+00:00
Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens. Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.

However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.

I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
by dgfitz | 2025-07-30 03:13:28+00:00
I said it many times on this forum, Harris had no platform. There was nothing to vote for.

I’m just so tired of “fuck the GOP” when, as you say, it was inevitable. People love to hate a villain, I get it. “It was Hilarys turn, we will just keep marching forward” really didn’t work out. This GOP narrative is basically screaming into a mirror. Not your GOP narrative, not picking on you. Just frustrated.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-30 03:15:15+00:00
If it's an isolated case and not anything more sophisticated, maybe. When people inevitably start mass-spamming open source projects to make their Github contribution graphs greener, this will be a serious problem that will accelerate maintainer burnouts.

This became a problem when free T-shirts were involved [1]. Now imagine what will happen when job prospects come into the picture.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-30 03:16:03+00:00
Because imagine your local biz can either pay a designer 1k a year or DIY and pay godaddy 200 bucks. Or 30 bucks for Wordpress and 20 hours of fiddling and asking their cousin for help.

Its not great by our standards but I bet many of us drink the house wine not something more sophisticated, right :)
by deathanatos | 2025-07-30 03:17:30+00:00
It is a good carve out, but it means you have to be careful.

For example, in my work, we handle appointment data, and we've gotten appointments sent to us from an upstream provider scheduled for non-existent local timestamps. (E.g., 2:30am in the middle of a spring-forward jump. That timestamp doesn't exist. Also in the fallback, where that timestamp is ambiguous.)

Even Google Calendar chokes on certain appointment times.
by personalyisus | 2025-07-30 03:18:19+00:00
> By noticing that something is not adding up at a certain point.

Ah, but information is presented by AI in a way that SOUNDS like it makes absolute sense if one doesn't already know it doesn't!

And if you have to question the AI a hundred times to try and "notice that something is not adding up" (if it even happens) then that's no bueno.

> In either scenario, the most correct move is to try clarifying it with the teacher

A teacher that can randomly give you wrong information with every other sentence would be considered a bad teacher
by jimmygrapes | 2025-07-30 03:18:21+00:00
> Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.

-Bill Hicks Don't take this as downplaying at all, because it's a fantastic and uplifting revelation, so long as one doesn't presume they're the first to consider it (it is even better this way imo)
by rramadass | 2025-07-30 03:18:50+00:00
The Hindu School of Philosophy named Samkhya/Sankhya gives you the appropriate Worldview in which your questions are answered - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya

There is an "Objective Reality" (mutable, evolves into many forms and includes both material/non-material concepts) and a "Witness-Consciousness" (immutable and attributeless). The latter is embodied in one form of the former which we call Sentient Living Beings. But we forget the distinction between the two and experience reality through its own subjective evolutes within the embodied being i.e. Sensory Mind, Intelligence and Ego. Various techniques/practices have been prescribed in Samkhya/Yoga/etc. to break out of this illusion and realize that one is simply pure awareness/consciousness beyond any experience. This is what is called as Kaivalya/Moksa/Nirvana i.e. a state of mind in which there is total freedom from everything to do with objective reality.

See also the paper A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications and previous discussion on it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40844824
by evanjrowley | 2025-07-30 03:19:29+00:00
Recently I started taking an angiotensin II receptor blocker as a medication to lower my blood pressure. The first week was difficult because my body couldn't significantly raise blood pressure during periods of sustained effort, like exercise and yardwork. I believe I'm over this now. Fortunately, the medication seems to be effective and I haven't experienced any negative side effects yet. Some people who take this medication have reported bad side effects, including "brain fog" while using it. I wonder if/how this medication might interact with the blood pressure control mechanisms observed in this research.
by spopejoy | 2025-07-30 03:20:26+00:00
Hmm ... How do you implement the common pattern of a top-level exception catcher (e.g. for a long-running thread) with option types in pony/rust/swift? In Haskell this is ergonomic thanks to Functor and friends, but how do langs other than Haskell propagate this behavior up the call stack?
by Groxx | 2025-07-30 03:21:12+00:00
Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.

Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
by angelgonzales | 2025-07-30 03:22:12+00:00
Totally support you!

I have done research and analysis long enough to understand that we all need to remain humble and refrain from assuming a conclusion without substantial evidence.

When I read the sentence “All of which have had deep funding cuts.” I speculate that this response is a simple signal amplification without any added evidence and without critique. I think it’s an attempt at self and collective affirmation.

Who is to say that funding cuts in academia won’t have short and long-term benefits for society and also result in a net increase in happiness and productivity? We simply don’t know yet. Supply and demand of valuable thought and research may redistribute within the economy!

I think there are very political people out there, the world may benefit from forums which cater to people who are political and separately to those who aren’t very political!
by pedalpete | 2025-07-30 03:26:33+00:00
Dementia is never guaranteed. I don't want to be a harbinger of doom, but it is an area we are keen for more research in, and are preparing to supply researchers with devices to continue the research in this space.

I truly appreciate your support. We'll have an update for you very soon, and we're excited to show off what we've got.

Are you on the waitlist? I've been sending updates, and will have a few more before we begin pre-sales.
by _butter_ | 2025-07-30 03:27:29+00:00
I built this project as an opportunity to explore how we can get random outputs out of LLMs. If you've ever tried asking AI for random recommendations, it is not capable of consistently and repeatedly returning new truly random outputs. This is because of its tendency to bias towards the average of its training data. I've been exploring different prompting techniques that allow it to truly act as a random generator.

This website is powered by a dataset I generated locally running the randomizer agent thousands of time. I hope you find the outputs are indeed quite random. Any feedback is appreciated and if you would like to see any categories added please let me know!
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-30 03:27:55+00:00
This shouldn't be flagged. This is a new type of spam that will have serious consequences for open source.

LLMs have made it possible to effortlessly produce plausible looking garbage at scale and open source maintainers will soon have to deal with a high volume of these PRs going forward.

Just look at how much spammers it attracted when Digital Ocean offered free T-shirts to open source contributors [1]. Now, imagine what will happen when job prospects are involved and anyone can mass produce plausible looking garbage PRs in one single click.

LLMs will accelerate maintainer burnouts in the open source world and there's no good solution for that right now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
by askbjoernhansen | 2025-07-30 03:29:19+00:00
Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.

I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.

I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
by mahidalhan | 2025-07-30 03:29:41+00:00
I had made a specialized prompt in Claude projects, for my learning, + added like field notes and lecture transcripts, was going good.

Then I tried to migrate it to chat gpt to try this thing out, but seems to be like it’s just prompt engineering behind. Nothing fancy.

And this study mode is not only not available in chat gpt projects, which students need for adding course work, notes, transcripts.

Honestly, just release gpt-5!!!
by F3nd0 | 2025-07-30 03:30:39+00:00
> You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.

What difference does that make for 'all the kids that are growing up in Gaza now'? If they're less than 77 years old (which I assume they are, being kids and all), Israel has been their (and many of their parents') neighbour for all of their lives.
Show HN: PlantGenieAI – AI app to identify plants and give care advice
by jackhy | 2025-07-30 03:30:40+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm a solo builder and a plant lover. I kept struggling to identify my houseplants correctly, and even when I knew their names, I wasn’t always sure how to care for them properly. Watering too much, not enough light… you know the drill.

So I built PlantGenieAI, an iOS app that does four things:

1. Instantly identifies plants from a photo (95%+ accuracy)

2. Gives tailored care guides based on species

3. Lets you chat with an AI assistant — ask anything like: “Why are my pothos leaves turning yellow?” “How much sunlight does a fiddle leaf fig need?”

4. Smart reminders for watering, fertilizing, and more

I originally built this for myself, but it's now live on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plantgenieai/id6747911595

Would love feedback — on product direction, UX, or growth ideas.

Thanks for reading, and happy plant parenting!
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-30 03:31:00+00:00
I noticed supermarkets in my area changed their in-shop audio ads to use screechy loudness-enhanced tone in recent years and attributed it to people like me wearing headphones becoming more frequent - the loudness-enhanced tone cuts through the headphones like a megaphone, thus forcing me again to hear the ads even with headphones. Black mirror saw it all coming :/
by TimTheTinker | 2025-07-30 03:31:51+00:00
I had a similar strategy when building early web apps with jQuery and ExtJS (but using the URL hash before the History API was available). Just read from location.hash during page load and write to it when the form state changes.

For more complex state (like table layout), I used to save it as a JSON object, then compress and base64 encode it, and stick it in the URL hash. Gave my users a bookmarklet that would create a shortened URL (like https://example.com/url/1afe9) from my server if they needed to share it.
Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data
by giulioco | 2025-07-30 03:33:09+00:00
historically, rentals in NYC have been pretty wild. the median 1BR in West Village as of July 2025 cost $5,750/month. about a month ago, NYC passed a law to ban broker fees which many predicted would have increased rents. I realized I had access to some original data from a previous project so I built a dashboard to help me visualize the changes and see for myself.

you can filter by neighborhoods, bedrooms, original source where the rentals were posted, and select a timeframe.

this is still a work in progress, so apologies in advance for any issues you encounter. I would love any feedback on how to improve it and/or what other visualizations i should add. known issues include:

- some neighborhoods like Prospect Park will also automatically select other, unrelated, neighborhoods when selected

- sometimes even when you filter by 1BR it will also include some 2BR

- some units might have been listed on multiple platforms, effectively counting as duplicates
by scblock | 2025-07-30 03:34:30+00:00
I'm really angry about this outage. I have a small linode in Newark that runs a couple of things but mostly a Miniflux instance for my RSS feeds. And on Sunday I opened my feed reader app and it kept timing out. So I tried to load the reader in a browser, and it timed out.

Worried, I logged into linode's management interface. There was no outage notice on the front page, no banner, for example. And there was nothing noted on the manager page. The dot next to the unresponsive system in my list of linode instances was green.

At this point I assumed the system had hung, or (worst case) even that it had been hacked. I tried to connect to it over the LISH console, and the connection timed out. So my conclusion was a fully hung system. So I tried rebooting the system from the management interface and the task just hung. For hours. I still assumed this was something broken with my machine. There was no outage indication in the management interface. I searched the internet for how to hard reset a linode. I nearly tried to clone it from a backup to a new system before deciding it wasn't mission critical on a Sunday.

Monday came around and I got an email at some point that the system had finally booted and I went in and spent at least an hour digging through logs to see what had happened, why the system had hung up. I took the time to look for evidence of hacks, checking SSH keys and system login data records and history files and quite seriously considering nuking the system and rebuilding in case it was hacked.

And later that day, after a couple hours spent on this I got an email informing me about a ticket related the datacenter outage.

Again, no banner on the front page of linode.com. No banner on the linode management interface. A GREEN LIGHT on the status indicator for the list of active systems.

You could say "why didn't you check the status page" and sure, that's sensible. But in the 20+ years I've had dedicated servers and VPSs outages are almost always my fault, so that's where I start. And if the Newark datacenter was dead why wasn't that posted straight to the top of their entire web interface? It's ridiculous.
by nabwodahs | 2025-07-30 03:36:47+00:00
The best Lightning audio adapter is Apple's Lightning-to-30-pin-iPod adapter. It provides line-level audio out, as the 30-pin port always did. So you don't have to dick around with two volume levels; it's fixed coming out of the phone, and you only adjust your amp.

I built one into a dock in my car that charged the phone and delivered audio to my car radio.
by roesel | 2025-07-30 03:36:58+00:00
If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.

Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?

(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
by protocolture | 2025-07-30 03:38:03+00:00
>Over 20,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition

How many beds are available in what hospitals to treat malnutrition.

https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/...

>Who is taking to the streets and posting daily to Hacker News about the 369,000 people

Whataboutism

>Israel is being singled out.

Finally

>Israel is, as it should be, accelerating aid delivery to Gaza given the objectively worsening conditions.

International pressure has forced Israel to alleviate conditions somewhat. The only pressure being responded to is that of recognising a Palestinian state. And thats only threatening as it would conclude or at best pause the project of genocide.

>Israel is still responsible but it can't be held solely responsible.

Israel could immediately return Rafah, leave Gaza, remove settlers from the west bank, repatriate the refugees, return them to their land and investigate (civilly) the population for Hamas.

Much like how Russia could simply turn around and leave Ukraine today.

>What is really happening is that the international and media attacks on Israel are fueling Hamas' determination to hold on and prolonging the war.

"If only people would stop complaining about our ongoing genocide, we could hurry up and complete the genocide"
by gus_massa | 2025-07-30 03:39:21+00:00
Nice research, horrible press coverage and article. Quantum tunneling is teach in the second or third year of the university for a physics mayor. The calculations are quite simple assuming you have all the previous courses (that are not easy). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling

The main idea is that outside the barrier object moves like a wave that is an imaginary exponential function A*e^{i(t-x)} but inside the barrier it the exponential gets real B*e^{it-ax} and after the barrier it's imaginary again C*e^{i(t-x)} where C is usually very small. The details are in every medium level QM book.

It's nice that they measure a collision during tunneling, but it does not solve the problem at all, in particular because it's already solved.
by Buttons840 | 2025-07-30 03:40:15+00:00
I'd like an LLM integrated spaced-repetition app. It would go along with this study feature quite well.

If LLMs continue to improve, we are going to be learning a lot from them, they will be our internet search and our teachers. If we want to retain some knowledge for ourselves, then we are going to need to learn and memorize things for ourselves.

Integrating spaced-repetition could make it explicit which things we want to offload to the LLM, and which things we want to internalize. For example, maybe I use Python a lot, and occasionally use Pearl, and so I explictly choose to memorize some Python APIs, but I'm happy to just ask the LLM for reminders whenever I use Pearl. So I ask the LLM to setup some spaced repetition whenever it teaches me something new about Python, etc.

The spaced repetition could be done with voice during a drive or something. The LLM would ask the questions for review, and then judge how well we did in answering, and then the LLM would depend on the spaced-repetition algorithm to keep track of when to next review.
by al_borland | 2025-07-30 03:40:30+00:00
This is the big issue with AI in the real world. It does great in tech demos, I got it to one shot a password generator site with some customizations I wanted that most don’t have. However, when it comes to my actual job it’s almost always weird stuff done in a weird way that there isn’t much information out there for. I have to assume a lot of companies are this way. Enterprise apps tend not to have a bunch of code examples out on GitHub for AI to train on.

A couple years ago we got some professional services from a well known vendor that makes the platform we were running. What they developed was basically something you’d see in a blog post, it was useless. If that’s what AI is going to do, it’s not helpful. We ended up throwing away all their code and doing our own thing so that it would scale and not be a pain to use.

As far as I can tell this will be a weakness of AI for some time to come.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-30 03:40:30+00:00
Note that FDB can support other paradigms on top of KV

https://foundationdb.github.io/fdb-record-layer/SQL_Referenc...

Also IIRC Apple uses FDB at tremendous scale:

https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-apple-built-icloud-to-...
by roesel | 2025-07-30 03:40:48+00:00
I would love to do: - set aperture priority (fully open for most cases) - set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s) - set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)

If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.

It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-30 03:41:34+00:00
I don't think our conversation is being used as justification by the trump administration to inform their policy decisions. I think nuanced points are the interesting ones to think, discuss, and clarify, so that is what I want to do.

I dont see some obscure and transient conversation in a forum backwater as meaningful political action. There are no stakes.

To the extent there are policy implications, I would like to define a preferred policy position on a specific issue. I already know my position on $5T of additional debt. What is the point of talking about it?
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-30 03:41:51+00:00
I hear you. And based on how the left has reacted to his term so far, I'm not sure there is anyone currently that can prevent a Vance or Desantis presidency next time. The left is to far left, they have abandoned the center and the center has sought safety in the GOP. Not because we want to be there but because there is literally no where else for us to go. My politics have not changed, but the party I have voted for for almost 3 decades very much has.

We have left leaning main stream media organizations implying that a jeans commercial is a nazi rallying cry because it features a white woman. I just cant vote how I used to vote and look my young sons in the eye. The Dem party is gone.