MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ghusto | 2025-07-01 12:16:55+00:00
> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments

It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment.

Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-01 12:17:58+00:00
> Cholrine has a toxic PPM of something like 400 Floride has a toxic PPM of like 2. It’s not the same.

So what? That’s why the EPA sets a maximum level of both, independently.

> I've seen numerous reports over the years where poor area water departments have had malfunctioning equipment for many years before anyone noticed.

Not every bit of equipment is safety critical. If you’d like we can discuss a specific case.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-01 12:18:25+00:00
I wonder how you calculate the system cost for nuclear? Seems to me that dealing with the waste products is still an unsolved problem. Making whole areas of the globe uninhabitable by most biology for thousands of years seems like a pretty big cost . Instability and dependence due to centralized power generation also does cause lots of missed economic potential.

> Do you have any evidence that oil and gas companies are deliberately spreading false information?

Not original parent, but: well, it's in their economic interest, and there are lobbyists and PACs denying CO2 caused climate change. I wonder who's financing them to do that if not the oil and gas industry? Who else would have such an incentive?
by afandian | 2025-07-01 12:18:25+00:00
I've been thinking about something similar for a long time, although fully chromatic, about 4 octaves. Either percussive, with reeds, or flute organ pipes. Where I always get hung up is the cost of all the solenoids or valves. There's some amazing projects on youtube but they must have cost hundreds.

Has anyone done something similar with more notes?
by swah | 2025-07-01 12:19:52+00:00
Nowadays the "muscle gym" doesn't feel like the boxing, muai thai and BJJ gyms (a small community of like minded individuals). Its just a place I go to execute movements defined by the expensive metal machines.

Even if the gym is run by an old bodybuilder with old machines and weights, its mostly younger people that maintain it, and they don't know you were allowed to have fun and talk in that kind of place, only 10 or 20 years ago..

The light bullying when I went to a gym in the 2000s was not awesome, but the current atmosphere is even worse...
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-01 12:19:59+00:00
While the general problem of limited context windows remains, the example given regarding Novellas is highly outdated. Even many open models now offer >128k tokens, which makes it possible to fit an entire novella in the context window (using rule of thumb, 128k tokens ~= 100k words ~= 300 pages of english text).

The frontier models even support context in the millions of tokens range, making it possible to keep an entire novella series inside the context window. I feel most memory related problems will simply disappear due to increasing context lengths, because attempts at outsourcing LLM memory or producing theoretically infinite context have beein going on for years and have not yet produced anything that can compete with raw scaling of transformers.
by danaris | 2025-07-01 12:20:10+00:00
The problem with this is that people who want to make money will always be highly motivated to either find loopholes to abuse the system, outright lie about their intentions, buy and resell the data for less (making profit on volume), or just break in.

"Ah, it's free for research? Well, that's what I'm doing! I'm conducting research! Ignore the fact that once I have the data, I'm going to turn around and give it to this company that is coincidentally also owned by me to sell it!"
by bombcar | 2025-07-01 12:20:21+00:00
https://structuretech.com/attic-inspections-sealed-access-pa... Is a MN inspector and they cover it.

Attic access has to be weatherstripped - cheap ass builders just seal it.

I ain’t buying’ no pig in a poke. If it’s new construction I can inspect before completion (and you should); if it’s used, I am breaking the seal and crossing the streams. Attics got way too much “fun” to discover.
by Melonai | 2025-07-01 12:20:56+00:00
I think in the grand scheme of things barely anyone uses agents (as of now) to crawl sites quickly apart from maybe a quick Google search or two. At least that's been my observation of my non-technical field friends using LLMs.

From what it looks like in the web logs it is in fact the same few AI company web crawlers constantly crawling and recrawling the same URLs over and over, presumably to get even the slightest advantage over each other, as they are definitely in the zero-sum mindset currently.
by kruador | 2025-07-01 12:21:14+00:00
No, SDRAM means Synchronous DRAM, where the data is clocked out of the DRAM chips instead of just appearing on the bus some time after the Column Address Strobe is asserted. Clocking it means that the data doesn't appear before the CPU (or other bus master) is ready to receive it, and that it doesn't disappear before the CPU has read it.

Static RAM (SRAM) is a circuit that retains its data as long as the power is supplied to it. Dynamic RAM (DRAM) must be refreshed frequently. It's basically a large array of tiny capacitors which leak their stored charge through imperfect transistor switches, so a charged capacitor must be regularly recharged. You would think that you would need to read the bit and rewrite its value in a second cycle, but it turns out that reading the value is itself a destructive operation and requires the chip to internally recharge the capacitors.

Further, the chip is organised in rows and columns - generally there are the same number of Sense Amplifiers as columns, with a whole row of cells discharging into their corresponding Sense Amplifiers on each read cycle, the Sense Amplifiers then being used to recharge that row of cells. The column signals select which Sense Amplifier is connected to the output. So you don't need to read every row and column of a chip, just some column on every row. The Sense Amplifier is a circuit that takes the very tiny charge from the cell transistor and brings it up to a stable signal voltage for the output.

So why use DRAM at all if it has this need to be constantly refreshed? Because the Static RAM circuit requires 4-6 transistors per cell, while DRAM only requires 1. You get close to 4-6 times as much storage from the same number of transistors.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-07-01 12:22:25+00:00
Something that strikes me, is that (the whole point of this thread is) if I want two LLMs to “have a conversation” or to work together as agents on similar problems we need to have same or similar context.

And to drag this back to politics - that kind of suggests that when we have political polarisation we just have context that are so different the LLM cannot arrive at similar conclusions

I guess it is obvious but it is also interesting
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-01 12:24:03+00:00
The problem is “dog” encompasses 20lb to 40lb poodles and shitzus and 60lb to 100lb pitbulls and Rottweilers that can be more dangerous than wild animals that we don’t allow in public.

And those with short fur that don’t shed a lot or are less allergenic and those with long fur that cover the whole space with their hairs.

My toddle has less rights to exist in a space outside their home compared to a dog capable of severely hurting them (and has many times in the past) specifically bred to be aggressive that does not let go after they bite.

This happened to my daughter in the first couple weeks of kindergarten. The class is supposed to line up outside in the morning before the teacher takes them into school, and some mom decided to bring their extremely large pitbull and park it 5 feet away from all the 5 year olds in line.

There was no chance this woman would have been able to control her dog, yet she had the right to keep a dangerous animal 5 feet away from my daughter. I told the school to take my daughter inside and keep her away or I was taking her home, and they had my daughter wait inside the office.

It makes no sense that any other large animal with similar characteristics as a large pitbull would have been disallowed, but because a pitbull falls under dog, it is allowed.
by nicksergeant | 2025-07-01 12:24:21+00:00
I have some friends who were laid off and are on the job hunt. We were all quite surprised to learn that LinkedIn does not have a "view jobs only at companies where I have connections", so I built https://jobsbyreferral.com/

It's powered by https://rapidapi.com/letscrape-6bRBa3QguO5/api/jsearch, which is a little pricey, so I'm trying to decide whether to put more effort into the project (I'd have to charge _something_ to offset the costs).
by StevenWaterman | 2025-07-01 12:24:25+00:00
Yep, every AI call is essentially just asking it to predict what the next word is after:

<system> You are a helpful assistant. </system> <user> Why is the sky blue? </user> <assistant> Because of Rayleigh scattering. The blue light refracts more. </assistant> <user> Why is it red at sunset then? </user> <assistant>

And we keep repeating that until the next word is `</assistant>`, then extract the bit in between the last assistant tags, and return it. The AI has been trained to look at `<user>` differently to `<system>`, but they're not physically different.

It's all prompt, it can all be engineered. Hell, you can even get a long way by pre-filling the start of the Assistant response. Usually works better than a system message. That's prompt engineering too.
by donatj | 2025-07-01 12:24:27+00:00
I've used the username "donatj" basically everywhere since the late 1990s with just a couple exceptions.

Dude beat me to it on Skype, I called him just out of the blue and had a nice conversation with him, lived in Denmark as I recall. Really friendly guy. I can't imagine doing that now though, let alone the person on the other end actually picking up.
by skydhash | 2025-07-01 12:25:18+00:00
The reason for the expert in this case (an uninformed that wants to solve a problem) is that the expert can use metaphors as a bridge for understanding. Just like in most companies, there's the business world (which is heterogeneous) and the software engineering world. A huge part of software engineer's time is spent translating concepts across the two. And the most difficult part of that is asking questions and knowing which question to ask as natural language is so ambiguous.
by gorpomon | 2025-07-01 12:25:44+00:00
This was the original purpose of Twitter-- it was advertised as a network where anyone could post what they're doing and notify their friends immediately. Even until recently tweets could be received via SMS (not sure about the current status of that feature) so you'd see in real time what they're up to.

Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
by isaachinman | 2025-07-01 12:27:01+00:00
Forward Email is not a competitor of ours, they offer a completely different kind of product.

I am not putting words in anyone's mouth. Direct quotes from the article:

> The companies that actually succeed in email don't try to reinvent the wheel

> Adding "AI" doesn't solve email's fundamental non-problems

Also, the article itself details the "Electron Performance Crisis".

Draw your own conclusions – this is a discussion. We're discussing.
by Intermernet | 2025-07-01 12:27:37+00:00
They explicitly prevent other companies from providing this infrastructure, marketplace and platform. Apple don't offer this stuff as a favour to developers, they demand that developers use it and prevent them from using anything else. Apple aren't some Good Samaritan providing a centralised set of services out of the goodness of their hearts, they are forcing companies to pay an exorbitant fee to be able to play in their garden, and they make billions of dollars in profit from this.

Compare Apple with Steam (who also provide the infrastructure, marketplace and platform). Steam don't force developers to use their services. They're still successful, but you can get almost every game on Steam from somewhere else. This is what I'd ideally like Apple to do. It wouldn't make any difference to me, as I haven't owned or developed for Apple devices in many decades, but it would make a huge difference to many developers, and many device owners. I doubt it will actually make that much difference to Apple's profits, but it would make a difference to the rapidly declining good will they have in the developer community, and increasingly in their customers.
by dandano | 2025-07-01 12:28:05+00:00
I think it was the fact that actions spoke louder than words for us. It’s easy to say “I’ll jump on” but then you get distracted and then 30 mins later you go online. Similarly to when people say “leaving now” and then they start getting ready to leave. Because we are notified that someone has taken the action of going online they are 100% available to chat or play a game.
by simonw | 2025-07-01 12:28:41+00:00
System prompts don't even have to be appended to the front of the conversation. For many models they are actually modeled using special custom tokens - so the token stream looks a bit like:

<system-prompt-starts> translate to English <system-prompt-ends> An explanation of dogs: ...

The models are then trained to (hopefully) treat the system prompt delimited tokens as more influential on how the rest of the input is treated.
by ghusto | 2025-07-01 12:29:00+00:00
> No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points

Worked at two companies full of "real" users who cared enough to look elsewhere.

Yes I know it's easy to find exceptions to every argument, but it's worth pointing out that it's such a bad experience that even some "normal" people care.
by chesterhunt20 | 2025-07-01 12:29:32+00:00
Absolutely agree-small language models are a crucial step toward scalable, efficient agentic AI. Their reduced computational footprint enables faster, on-device reasoning, which is essential for real-time decision-making in autonomous agents. Platforms like Legittmate AI are already exploring how small models can be fine-tuned for secure, task-specific workflows in legal and contract automation. With enhanced fine-tuning and optimization, SLMs are becoming increasingly capable—without the heavy cost and latency of larger models. The future of agentic AI isn't just about power-it's about precision, privacy, and portability.
by Boogie_Man | 2025-07-01 12:29:53+00:00
Sorry Tom. I apologize to the moderators and other posters and will attempt to only post high quality discussion moving forward.

I notice that my initial comments are generally high quality but that I feel compelled to respond to everything and something about the increased volume, the thing I'm responding to not being directly something I picked from 30 different articles I read, and the inherent sub-current of challenge to my sometimes obstinate initial comments causes me to get defensive and snippy, and I need to work on that. A simple fix is to not respond to responses, but the edifying fix is to think about why I respond this way (inferiority complex when reading and commenting with generally higher than average internet users and/or not wanting to look stupid in front of the brainy computer people, possibly) to consider this as my bias, and to attempt to counteract it.

Thank you for your comment, sorry again.
Show HN: Rotten Tabs, a Chrome extension that auto-closes unused tabs
by kondakovia | 2025-07-01 12:31:14+00:00
Like many devs, I became a tab hoarder, keeping dozens of tabs open “just in case”.

So I built Rotten Tabs, a Chrome extension that auto-closes old tabs unless you actually use them.

You set a tab lifespan (1–7 days). Tabs display a visual warning when they’re close to expiring, and if ignored, they close themselves. But if you return and focus on a tab for 30 seconds, its timer resets.

It’s not a full-featured tab manager - no session restore, no bookmarks, no “save for later”. Just one clear rule: tabs expire if you don’t use them.

I’m still improving it and trying to understand if a tool like this is actually useful to others. Would love your thoughts!
by dinkblam | 2025-07-01 12:31:16+00:00
the confusing things for a layman is the different kinds of messages we receive from those pop-science outlets.

on one hand they claim chronic or recurring inflammation is THE big health problem, and if we could it under control everything we'd be much healthier.

on the other hand there are messages like inflammation is good for your body because it keeps it working and e.g. the reason vegetables are so healthy is because they are basically indigestible and therefore cause mild inflammation, ergo good.

so what is it now? or are there different kinds of inflammation?
by carlnewton | 2025-07-01 12:31:21+00:00
Perhaps I'm not educated enough with blockchain to see how it can help with Habitat, but I'll investigate it, thanks. I'll also look into geohashing. I've never heard of it before, but I have been thinking about the issue of multiple posts for the same location and how to deal with that, so geohashing might certainly help with that. Thanks again.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-07-01 12:32:04+00:00
Yes and there will still be a "free" version of content somewhere because not everyone will pay those prices (because they can't afford them or didn't know the value of a premium service).

So since there will be a demand, someone will produce "free resources" which will be the equivalent of a sewage outlet running into the sea.

Absolute garbage of an AI ouroborus just churning in on itself to aggregate and produce something for whatever this free channel of content ends up being.
by ben_w | 2025-07-01 12:32:10+00:00
> On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all.

Many. Some of the doomers[0] even work at the big AI labs.

Example of why this isn't sufficient to make them safe: Ebola is really stupid, infecting humans is effectively "out of distribution" for its genome, it is nevertheless really bad precisely because being out of distribution is why it often kills hosts too fast to infect enough other people to become a pandemic or endemic.

> Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them?

Apart from the existing few million industrial robots[1], the fleets of cars (not just Tesla but also) and farming equipment, all the drones including but not limited to delivery robots[2], and the robots widely used in scientific research to automate chemical and biological testing[3]?

(But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?)

Don't get me wrong, I am willing to say that AI as it currently exists is "stupid" because of how much more training data it needs than most animals, let alone humans. It may be that any plausible number of robots in the real world still doesn't learn fast enough. And it may be that we're not smart enough to figure out how to make them as smart as us in any plausible timeframe, even though evolution managed it eventually without planning for us.

But "you need robots" is not a strong argument.

[0] for the purposes of this comment, P(doom)>0.1, though I am also critical of even just phrasing it in such a simplified way: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html

[1] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/record-of-4-million-...

[2] I assume this is basically just a Roomba with a fridge on it, but the sign on the elevator door is amusing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hospital_delivery_robot_h...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_automation
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-01 12:32:37+00:00
I do think that whatsapp could do this tbh if it would actually provide its api like discord does.

Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
by bombcar | 2025-07-01 12:32:47+00:00
There have been some articles lamenting that the space isn’t available as easily anymore.

But I think it’s a combination of “toy trains” being pushed out of the “hobby” so fewer new kids are introduced to it (the Lego Train clubs get some heat and hate and generally are disregarded by the “real model trains” for example) and that the “train obsession” has other ways to discharge these days.

Many people who would have built elaborate basement models instead spend their time perfecting Factorio or Minecraft worlds (any sufficiently advanced sandbox game becomes a train simulator).
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-07-01 12:33:18+00:00
You may as well ask why you should look anywhere but at your own feet while walking around your city.

You have been told that every new OS update brings new features and abilities, and Apple publishes an iPhone User Guide for learning about iOS features like how to change the default mail app (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-the-default-ap...). It's on you to look.
by Arainach | 2025-07-01 12:33:43+00:00
I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server.

One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
by inetknght | 2025-07-01 12:33:45+00:00
> Sometimes an invention is not widely known because its creator doesn't realize they've created something novel: the design seemed obvious and intuitive to them.

I never went to high school or college or anything.

I can't tell you how many times I come up with something, only to discover years later that someone else came up with the same idea later (or sometimes earlier), branded it, and marketed it.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-01 12:34:17+00:00
There is no specific training for a service dog.

All you have to do is say your dog is a service dog, and it is, legally.

https://www.ada.gov/resources/service-animals-faqs/

Q5. Does the ADA require service animals to be professionally trained?

>A. No. People with disabilities have the right to train the dog themselves and are not required to use a professional service dog training program.
by zulban | 2025-07-01 12:34:30+00:00
"Yeah but most of the time you learn a language because it changes your way of thinking."

For you and I maybe, but no. This is the HN bubble speaking. Most people learn a programming language to get a job or to do something they want to do.

I learn CS for fun too but I hold no illusions about the rest of the world.

"But decided against since Java had an ecosystem, tooling and really good performance."

Correct. Ocaml is not practical for projects or businesses. That's why you didn't pick it.