MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a mindmap-like, non linear tutor-supported interface for papers
by kanodiaashu | 2025-07-04 23:51:27+00:00
Hi everyone,

LLMs have made me feel like I can understand anything, but I’ve been frustrated trying to truly understand ML papers using just ChatGPT or static PDFs. Summaries can help, but then I have to go back to the paper and read it linearly to deeply understand it, and I have long chatgpt conversations which I just can't track. So I built an interface designed to support a non-linear, brain-like exploration of papers — paired with a tutor in a chat interface that guides your understanding.

Try it out at: proread.ai/llm-papers

Knowledge maps let you see how ideas within a paper relate to each other and how papers connect across a field. Start with my curated maps of foundational LLM papers or build your own for any paper/set of papers you’re reading. You can also listen to the map as a podcast.

You have a chat based tutor as with ChatGPT but your questions keep updating the knowledge map so you don't lose anything

The map itself is an editable notebook which allow you to take notes, mark concepts as completed, tag concepts, and construct your own mental model as you read. You can not only read summaries but can go down to actual source content in readers where you want to.

You can make your own space with your own papers or other docs (PDF/txt/html/URLs) and create interactive maps personalized to your research or study needs.

The goal is to move beyond linear reading or static summarization: to create a space where understanding evolves dynamically, like how you actually think, with a tutor helping you make sense of it all.

Please try it out at: proread.ai/llm-papers

I’m looking for feedback from other researchers or paper readers — would this kind of non-linear, guided exploration help you understand tough topics/papers better than traditional PDFs or chat tools? What’s missing or confusing?

Thanks!
by alphazard | 2025-07-04 23:52:00+00:00
> Having a lead position in development I would kick Kent of the team.

I've seen this sentiment a lot lately. That disagreeable top performers have to be disposed of because they are "toxic" or "problematic".

You aren't doing your job as a leader if this is your attitude to good engineers. Engineering is a field where a small amount of the people create a large amount of the value. You can either understand that, and take it upon yourself to integrate disagreeable yet high performing people into the team, paving over the rough patches yourself. Or you can oust them, and quite literally take a >50% productivity hit on your team.

A disagreeable person will take up more of your time as a manager, but a high performer is worth significantly more of your time. When these traits co-occur in the same person, the cost-benefit is complicated. The reason we talk about this problem a lot in tech is because it is legitimately a tough call, with errors in both directions. Wishing that the right move was always as simple as kicking someone off the team doesn't make it true, although it may relieve you from having to contend with the decision.
by shmerl | 2025-07-04 23:52:05+00:00
> ... NVENC are pretty much indispensable

What's so special about NVENC that Vulkan video or VAAPI can't provide?

> AMD also has accelerated video transcoding tech but for some reason nobody seems to be willing to implement it into their products

OBS works with VAAPI fine. Looking forward to them adding Vulkan video as an option.

Either way, as a Linux gamer I haven't touched Nvidia in years. AMD is a way better experience.
by davidee | 2025-07-04 23:52:40+00:00
Not personally offended, but when a company makes a big stink around several gross exaggerations (performance, price, availability) it's not hard to understand why folks are kicking up their own stink.

Nvidia could have said "we're prioritizing enterprise" but instead they put on a big horse and pony show about their consumer GPUs.

I really like the Gamer's Nexus paper launch shirt. ;)
by ggm | 2025-07-04 23:53:05+00:00
I thoroughly recommend the Dover books reprint of Henry Mayhew. "London Labour and the London poor" it is absolutely fascinating. People who had a brass farthing to rub together could enjoy eating 2 day old leftovers from the posh banquets, sold on the streets. (2 days because much of it was premade and so a day or so old by the time it hit the banquet table) Trifle and Lobster for anyone. Clothes rental was a thing. Dirt collecting had specialities with "pure" dog dung fetching extra prices for leather tanning.

I think Mayhew may have fed into Sydney and Beatrice Webb which in turn much later leads to Labour party policy, and ultimately the Beveridge report and birth of the welfare state.

Also, if you enjoyed Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofting you will be familiar with Matthew the cats meat man.
by timschmidt | 2025-07-04 23:53:54+00:00
It seems to me like both cases raised by OP - the Disney droids and Optimus - are cases of people making assumptions and then getting upset that their assumptions were wrong and making accusations.

Neither company was very forthcoming about the robots being piloted, but neither seems to be denying it either. And both seem to use RL / ML techniques to maintain balance, locomotion, etc. Not unlike Boston Dynamics' bots, which are also very carefully orchestrated by humans in multiple ways.

Haters gonna hate (downvotes just prove it - ha!)
by standardUser | 2025-07-04 23:54:02+00:00
> Like most skeptics and critics, I use these tools daily. And 50% of the time they work 50% of the time.

I use LLMs nearly every day for my job as of about a year ago and they solve my issues about 90% of the time. I have a very hard time deciphering if these types of complaints about AI/LLMs should be taken seriously, or written off as irrational use patterns by some users. For example, I have never fed an LLM a codebase and expected it to work magic. I ask direct, specific questions at the edge of my understanding (not beyond it) and apply the solutions in a deliberate and testable manner.

if you're taking a different approach and complaining about LLMs, I'm inclined to think you're doing it wrong. And missing out on the actual magic, which is small, useful and fairly consistent.
by qualeed | 2025-07-04 23:54:56+00:00
I can understand the stance, I'm just saying that it's not something that I would ever describe as "marketable".

No one is saying "I've never used a gun" or "I've never pirated a movie" on their resume to market their morals. Resumes are to market the skills you have that match the job you're applying for, not for marketing your moral stance.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-04 23:55:12+00:00
And most people still have private insurance…

But you still haven’t said why it doesn’t make more sense to take advantage of making two to three times as much in the US, save money and retire somewhere else instead of taking a huge pay cut and paying more in taxes.

In fact, this isn’t some hypothetical thing from my wife and I. We are already planning to stay in Costa Rica for a few months a year starting next year, I researched how residency works when I retire and how the health insurance works (caja).

But politically, no one messes with old people and take away their benefits.
by ddtaylor | 2025-07-04 23:55:15+00:00
I fear posting this because it's YouTube content and I don't know of the creator very well beyond these videos, but I have been following this saga a bit from this creator:

https://www.youtube.com/@SavvyNik/videos

He gets a few words wrong because my understanding is he covers the topic in a more broad way, but most of his coverage seems objective and factual. He does have some opinions, but I think it's closer to journalism of the LKML than an opinion piece.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-04 23:55:56+00:00
> It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he’s a gifted software engineer.

> For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.
by juandsc | 2025-07-04 23:56:34+00:00
Three years ago I left my job with VERY high salary because I was starting to burn out and took two months off.

From my experience, if you're burnt out or starting to burn out then leave, otherwise I recommend staying until you secure another job.

Regarding the situation, they want to delete the tests? Fine, you have git right? Replace it, and let everything set on fire, quietly enjoy the chaos and at some point revert the changes. Or don't, you're leaving anyway.
by sarchertech | 2025-07-04 23:57:12+00:00
If what you meant by 100x more productive is that sometimes for very some specific things it made you 100x more productive, and that isn’t applicable to software development in general, I can see that.

I have many times delivered a year of value in a few days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to build something instead of just building exactly what someone asked for.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-04 23:57:19+00:00
The interface churn in linux adds a strong incentive (on top of the GPL) to upstream drivers, i.e. publish them as open source. Not doing so tends to mean you get stuck on old versions. If it had a stable interface, hardware vendors would just release crappy binary blobs and they'd only be usable on linux, and not maintainable by anyone else (and hardware vendors don't generally maintain their drivers for long)
by AlexeyBrin | 2025-07-04 23:59:09+00:00
This is getting ridiculous - you are now supposed to use Copilot to reduce your stress after losing your job? Some people are really disconnected from real life. He even suggests the proper way to pray (pardon, to prompt) to the LLM.

I understand to use an LLM to get/test an idea about something technical, or to clarify some unknown (to me) concept. But I would never treat the LLM as a friend/human that can help me with my stress management.
by doug_durham | 2025-07-04 23:59:32+00:00
How much of the communication and meetings are because traditionally code was very expensive and slow to create? How many of those meetings might be streamlined or entirely disappear in the future? In my experience there is are a lot of process around making sure that software on schedule track and that it's doing what it is supposed to do. I think that the software lifecycle is about to be reinvented.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-04 23:59:56+00:00
This reminds me of a surprisingly good buffet lunch at a tourist spot in New Zealand's south island where the chef would prepare the Caesar salad right in front of you. You could pick and choose your ingredients, which was nice, but the really unique approach was that the chef mixed the salad in a "bowl" cut into a wheel of Parmesan cheese. This thoroughly coated every leaf with cheesy goodness. Best salad I've ever had in my life!
NodeTrellis – free mobile mind-map builder for ChatGPT JSON
by Pyhelix | 2025-07-05 00:00:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I built NodeTrellis, a lightweight web app that converts ChatGPT-generated JSON into an interactive mind-map. It’s 100 % client-side—no log-ins, no servers, completely free.

How it works

1. Enter a topic (or paste any URL) and click Copy Prompt. 2. Send that prompt to ChatGPT and copy the JSON it returns. 3. Paste the JSON back into NodeTrellis and hit Render Map. 4. Instantly get a draggable, zoomable map you can edit, undo/redo, and export.

I’d love your feedback, bug reports, and feature ideas. Thanks for checking it out!
by kazinator | 2025-07-05 00:01:58+00:00
I suspect that if you don't change the /sector/ of computing you are working in, you may run into the same thing elsewhere.

AI is being adopted mainly where it works, and where it works is where regurgitated code cobbed-together from what has been seen before is sufficient to get the job done.

Assume that your CEO and CTO are not complete idiots; that they have some rational argument for believing that the approach will work. It's also possible they are gambling on an experiment; if it fails, they will back off on it.

If you want to avoid being told to use AI, you have to work on legacy tech stacks that AI doesn't understand; algorithmically complex code; critical infrastructure code where one bad bit stops multiple machines and applications; safety-critical embedded where AI slop could maim and kill and so is out of the question, etc.
by jorl17 | 2025-07-05 00:03:14+00:00
This, and if you add in a voice mode (e.g. ChatGPT's Advanced Mode), it is perfect for brainstorming.

Once I decide I want to "think a problem through with an LLM", I often start with just the voice mode. This forces me to say things out loud — which is remarkably effective (hear hear rubber duck debugging) — and it also gives me a fundamentally different way of consuming the information the LLM provides me. Instead of being delivered a massive amount of text, where some information could be wrong, I instead get a sequential system where I can stop/pause the LLM/redirect it as soon as something gets me curious or as I find problems with it said.

You would think that having this way of interacting would be limiting, as having a fast LLM output large chunks of information would let you skim through it and commit it to memory faster. Yet, for me, the combination of hearing things and, most of all, not having to consume so much potentially wrong info (what good is it to skim pointless stuff), ensures that ChatGPT's Advanced Voice mode is a great way to initially approach a problem.

After the first round with the voice mode is done, I often move to written-form brainstorming.
by tombert | 2025-07-05 00:03:25+00:00
I'm just not convinced that these licenses are realistically enforceable. A lot of binaries aren't going to show obvious signs in the output. I would have to reverse engineer every binary that might be using my code and look for a sign that they are violating the license so that I might be able to get a discovery request and sue them.

As of right now, I just feel like the best thing to do is not put my code out there, and just binaries. If a company likes what they see then they can pay me for the code.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-05 00:03:34+00:00
A lot of those Xeon e-waste machines were downright awful, especially for the "cheap gaming PC" niche they were popular in. Low single-core clock speeds, low memory bandwidth for desktop-style configurations and super expensive motherboards that ran at a higher wattage than the consumer alternatives.

> THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for.

Or TSMC could become geopolitically jeopardized somehow, drastically increasing the secondhand value of modern GPUs even beyond what they're priced at now. It's all a system of scarcity, things could go either way.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-05 00:03:51+00:00
I'm not talking about the check-in counter, I'm talking about general security that non-charter passengers always have to go through to board a flight. Security checkpoints operate limited hours at even the largest airports, like LAX where they're open from 4h00-22h00 max. If we look the departures for LAX today, we can see that no passenger planes departed between 2h00-5h00, except for one charter jet out of the private terminal. Yesterday had no such departures, only the usual nighttime cargo flights.
by abxyz | 2025-07-05 00:03:52+00:00
Disney are open about their droids being operator controlled. Unless nvidia took a Disney droid and built it to be autonomous (which seems unlikely) it would follow that it is also operator controlled. The presentation was demonstrating what Disney had achieved using nvidia’s technology. You can see an explainer of how these droids use machine learning here: https://youtube.com/shorts/uWObkOV71ZI

If you think the droid was autonomous then I guess that is evidence that nvidia were misrepresenting (if not lying).

Having seen these droids outside of the nvidia presentation and watching the nvidia presentation, I think it’s obvious it was human operated and that nvidia were misleading people.
by simonsarris | 2025-07-05 00:04:01+00:00
The chief reason is that websites pay for advertising and want to know if the advertising is working and Google tag manager is the way to do that, for Google Ads.

This is not unreasonable! People spend a lot of money on ads and would like to find out if and when they work. But people act like its an unspeakable nebulous crime but this is probably the most common case by miles.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-05 00:04:25+00:00
Yes, many people have tried this. The inherent deference of the language models makes them ineffective DMs - they're unable to effectively enforce rules or create meaningful challenges for the player. Even if that were somehow avoided, though, they're still inherently unable to do any serious planning or worldbuilding, or to conceal information from the player - at best, you might get the experience of playing with a frazzled, unprepared DM who's making everything up on the fly.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-05 00:04:32+00:00
> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games

My favorite part about being a reformed gaming addict is the fact that my MacBook now covers ~100% of my computer use cases. The desktop is nice for Visual Studio but that's about it.

I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely zero desire to upgrade.
by archagon | 2025-07-05 00:04:48+00:00
> And most people still have private insurance…

Once the industry gets more fully deregulated, insurance companies will fall over themselves to institute coverage limits, pre-existing condition checks, and so on. Nobody's gonna cover a decade of chemo or Alzheimer's care for you.

> But you still haven’t said why it doesn’t make more sense to take advantage of making two to three times as much in the US, save money and retire somewhere else instead of taking a huge pay cut and paying more in taxes.

First, it's a question of spending the healthiest and most active years of your life in a place with high QoL vs. waiting until you're older. Second, I don't expect that this scheme will remain viable in the future given the uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment around the world. After all, why would locals want a bunch of foreign seniors siphoning off their social benefits and ballooning local prices? It's an aggressive form of gentrification.

> But politically, no one messes with old people and take away their benefits.

Evidently not: https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting...
by snackbroken | 2025-07-05 00:05:29+00:00
Out of the 11 games I've bought through Steam this year, I've had to refund one (1) because it wouldn't run under Proton, two (2) had minor graphical glitches that didn't meaningfully affect my enjoyment of them, and two (2) had native Linux builds. Proton has gotten good enough that I've switched from spending time researching if I can play a game to just assuming that I can. Presumably ymmv depending on your taste in games of course, but I'm not interested in competitive multiplayer games with invasive anticheat which appears to be the biggest remaining pain point.

My experience with running non-game windows-only programs has been similar over the past ~5 years. It really is finally the Year of the Linux Desktop, only few people seem to have noticed.
by kgeist | 2025-07-05 00:05:30+00:00
The OP compares the current LLM hype to crypto, but I think it's more fair to compare it to the dotcom bubble. When a new, interesting technology appears, there's always a lot of hype around it - I think it's natural. People are still figuring out what works and what doesn't. Naturally, some overoptimistic people overhype it. The dotcom bubble burst; nonetheless, the internet is now an integral part of our lives. Despite the hype, crypto was always a very niche area, while currently even my grandmother uses ChatGPT - just like the internet.
by alganet | 2025-07-05 00:05:50+00:00
Why not?

This is the exact model in which WWII operated. Car and plane supply chains were practically nationalized to support the military industry.

If drones, surveillance, satellites become the main war tech, they'll all use silicon, and things will be fully nationalized.

We already have all sorts of hints of this. Doesn't need a genius to predict that it could be what happens to these industries.

The balance with food and fuel is more delicate though. A war with drones, satellites and surveillance is not like WWII, there's a commercial aspect to it. If you put it on paper, food and fuel project more power and thus, can move more money. Any public crisis can make people forget about GPUs and jeopardize the process of nationalization that is currently being implemented, which still depends on relatively peaceful international trade.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-05 00:06:11+00:00
'control system' in this case is not implying remote control, it's referring to the feedback system that adjust the actuators in response to the sensed information. If the motion is controlled automatically, then the control loop can in principle anticipate the motion in a way that it could not if it was remote controlled: i.e. the opposite, it's easier to control the motions (in terms of maintaining balance and avoiding overstressing the actuators) if the operator is not live puppeteering it.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-05 00:06:30+00:00
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.

> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.

This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.

They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.

Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.

PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-05 00:06:30+00:00
It's that there's nothing special about blending "operator initiated animation commands" with the RL balancing system. The balance system has to balance anyway; if there was no connection between an operator's wave command and balance, it would have exactly the same job to do.

At best the advantage of connecting those systems is that the operator command can inform the balance system, but there's nothing novel about that.
by w10-1 | 2025-07-05 00:06:44+00:00
Recognizing delusions is probably the highest form of wisdom. It can help us avoid entire wasted lives.

That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?

The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.

It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.

If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.

Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.