MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2025-07-29 21:51:25+00:00
I had RadioShack's "ScienceFair"-brand (co-branded with RadioShack) "Advanced Electronics Lab - 300 projects" kit when I was very young. https://www.ebay.com/p/2254341989

I just found it again yesterday at a very old-school electronics shop. The kind of delightful place packed wall-to-wall & floor-to-ceiling with stuff where each category (test equipment, passive & active components, motors, motor drivers, audio, video, hobby-everything) is either super well organized (passive "jellybean" components) or a giant pile of eclectic offerings stretching across 40 years of technological history (test equipment).

I bought it for nostalgia, and I might fix it up or even upgrade it to give to my niece when she's old enough. But looking through it confirmed something I'd long suspected:

1) Things like LRC circuits don't make sense without an oscilloscope. I have one now but REALLY wish I had one as a kid, even a crazy-cheap incredibly low quality one would have been amazing.

2) The book was VERY poorly written, seemed rushed and minimally thoughtful - there was no real explanation of fundamentals that could be used to drive creativity and exploration. I wish I'd had a book which explained concepts better. I didn't start understanding electronics in any interesting way until I took calculus-based electromagnetic physics in college.

Using the kit was mainly fun for me to blow up old-school red LED's. It gave me familiarity with electronics schematic symbols, breadboards, and some very basic tinkering. That young childhood familiarity made me much more comfortable around electrical pursuits throughout my life.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-29 21:52:03+00:00
I never said they give *all* the aid to Hamas.

The thing is there's no relationship between Israeli actions and the actual food supply in Gaza. They were supposedly on the verge of starvation, Israel cuts off the supplies for a while while they shift over to the GHF and it isn't bring out your dead time? Gaza famine is the new wolf. Look at the real famines in the world (places like Sudan), look at Gaza.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-29 21:52:04+00:00
They can, but they don't. You missed the point. Awareness through exposure to beekeeping can change human behavior in a beneficial way. If you read some of the previously linked articles, you will see that it is still debateable if the competitors are actually causing any real problems for native bees. If the problems are debatable and on a low scale, then it's possible the benefits are a net positive.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-29 21:52:15+00:00
There are huge differences in principle and practice between "no bad person should benefit" and "we should minimze the number of bad people who benefit and the extent to which they benefit."

The former makes basically anything impossible and whatever you release will be an accession to the latter. I think the only way you can get to "no bad person" is to shut down. The latter means putting in some higher amount of work and continuing to look for ways to reduce the amount of bad enabled or created.
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-29 21:52:50+00:00
> These terms are very well defined. https://opensource.org/osd

Yes. And you're using them wrong.

From the OSD:

< The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. >

So, what's the preferred way to modify a model? You get the weights and then run fine-tuning with a relatively small amount of data. Which is way cheaper than re-training the entire thing from scratch.

---

The issue is that normal software doesn't have a way to modify the binary artifacts without completely recreating them, and that AI models not only do have that but have a large cost difference. The development lifecycle has nodes that don't exist for normal software.

Which means that really, AI models need their own different terminology that matches that difference. Say, open-weights and open-data or something.

Kinda like how Creative Commons is a thing because software development lifecycle concepts don't map very well to literature or artwork either.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-29 21:53:08+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745439

benbendc on April 1, 2020 | next [–]

Thanks Don for that mention of the old paper, which is still on the right track. My new paper appeared on line Friday and will be temporarily freely accessible:

> Shneiderman, Ben (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction,36, 6 (Published Online March 27, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.04087

I have spent a year developing these ideas, but the evolution was dramatic, based on thoughtful feedback from the 25+ people mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Speaking at U-W, Stanford, UBC, NSF & ONR and elsewhere helped repeatedly reshape my arguments. All that commentary added to the journal editors’ confidence that this was an important paper, so they fast tracked reviews & production and gave it priority in the publication queue. Please send this link around to your colleagues, where appropriate.

Feedback welcome... Stay healthy... Ben
by jcdentonn | 2025-07-29 21:53:09+00:00
Because I understand the technology and what it can and can't do.

It can invent text, images, video and code. It looks very convincing. Sometimes it even works correctly.

Sometimes when you ask it a question it can answer it correctly. Sometimes when you ask it the same question it will give you a different answer, a false one. Some may say that humans do the same thing. But computers and computer programs shouldn't always have fuzzy logic. Sometimes there is only one right answer and I like my computer programs to be deterministic so that I know I can trust them.

It also doesn't "learn". It forgets everything when the tokens are cleared from memory. And memory is limited. It only "learns" when the model is trained again by its maintainers.

And many other things.
by Findecanor | 2025-07-29 21:53:49+00:00
Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger [0]. It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to track visitors)

0. https://privacybadger.org/
by somerandomdude2 | 2025-07-29 21:54:19+00:00
I've heard that too. But, from my experience, it's mostly insecticides: people want mosquito-free and flea-free (and ants, roaches etc) yards, and spray/spread poison that kills them. Unfortunately, it kills everything. I cancelled my yard service and noticed that birds started coming back, chasing the food supply. Butterflies cover my lantana, and I see fireflies at night.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-29 21:54:23+00:00
I'm actually against the leetcode style coding tests. They're exceedingly lopsided against more experienced developers further from school or younger learning where memorizing various memory structures is/was more emphasized.

I prefer a paired interview scenario with actual questions about approach to working through problems. As an interviewee I do horribly with the leetcode questions, there's no opportunity for clarifying questions, and some systems penalize you for looking away from the screen even. It's unnerving and I refuse to do them any more.

I also don't mind the "here's a task/challenge that should take a half hour or so." where you simply create a solution, commit to github, etc.

As an interviewer I prefer the walkthrough interviews as well... I usually don't get into pedantic exercises, or language/platform nuances unless the applicant uses "expert" on more than one or two subjects.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-07-29 21:56:09+00:00
> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed.

Given that humanity has been able to go from living in caves to sending spaceships to the moon without LLMs, let me express some doubt about that.

Even without going further, software engineering isn't new and people have been stuck on concepts and have managed to get unstuck without LLMs for decades.

What you gain in instant knowledge with LLMs, you lose in learning how to get unstuck, how to persevere, how to innovate, etc.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-29 21:56:11+00:00
They keep warning. Israel cuts off supplies while changing strategies, nothing changes. That could not have happened if the original situation had been dire.

You claim there's nothing to buy but where's the evidence? They've managed to find another "starving" baby--once again, serious medical issues. As before, the relatives look fine.

And your "market" solution assumes there is a fair market. It can never work in the face of Hamas taking enough to cause scarcity.
by gt0 | 2025-07-29 21:56:16+00:00
In Australia, C# feels more popular than Java. I used to take on freelance projects in both and had far more work in C#.

I agree it'll pop up more with "evangelical users" though, 100%.

I've often thought that when you see Mac and Linux more strongly represented than you'd expect, I do wonder when people dual boot Windows 95% and Linux 5%, are they ticking the box for Linux? Does the VB.net hostage even bother to fill in the survey?

Agree on VS Code, it's OK if you can't find support elsewhere, but the JetBrains stuff is just in a different class.

My beard is only partially grey, but I agree with you.
by mym1990 | 2025-07-29 21:56:25+00:00
"It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed."

There seems to be a gap in problem solving abilities here...the process of breaking down concepts into easier to understand concepts and then recompiling has been around since forever...it is just easier to find those relationships now. To say it was impossible to learn concepts you are stuck on is a little alarming.
by wishfish | 2025-07-29 21:56:32+00:00
This is why my iPad Mini is my main travel device. Small enough that it fits in my pockets. But the screen is big enough that it's comfortable to use. More comfortable than the Pro Max. Have a cheap bluetooth keyboard with integrated stand so the mini can be used as a laptop. Take the mini with me when I go places and leave the keyboard in the hotel. Would make me sad if someone stole the keyboard but it's a far smaller loss than if a laptop was stolen. Gives me a more peace of mind.

If only the Mini had true 4k output, it would be absolutely perfect. But it only does screen mirroring which limits it when plugged into a monitor or hotel television.
by thecosmicfrog | 2025-07-29 21:56:37+00:00
One of the biggest factors for any flight simulation add-on is performance, and so most of the major add-on developers are building C++ modules (compiled to WASM) to eek out as much performance as possible. My understanding is that it's also possible to write some things in JavaScript (and perhaps TypeScript), but performance takes a hit. I would assume Lua falls into that same performance trap, as I know Lua can be used for X-Plane add-on development, but it's (again) considered the less performance-centric approach as compared to C++.

I recall at least one add-on developer for X-Plane (Zibo [1]) migrating some of their Lua code over to C++.

[1] https://forums.x-plane.org/forums/topic/138974-b737-800x-zib...
by jlawson | 2025-07-29 21:56:40+00:00
There is not a government-wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of white British people. That conspiracy is what people are most horrified by. I don't know how to say this any clearer.

>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush

Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.

You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.

>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis

It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.

Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
by riedel | 2025-07-29 21:56:47+00:00
At least in Germany all the SMS 2FA has been shut off, but replaced with tons of custom 2FA apps. The security argument is certainly that they can check for 'insecure' devices. But I wonder what the empirical evidence here is and how often (compared to phishing/social engineering) a TOTP token was actually stolen. Worst thing is IMHO Microsoft now which seem to have also shut off the TOTP option and use some other propriatary 2FA scheme now. IMHO banks should simply use FIDO2 HW tokens, but with all that passkey bullshit it becomes unlikely...
by ewoodrich | 2025-07-29 21:57:23+00:00
Yep, this is why I just don’t enjoy or get much value from exploring new topics with LLMs. Living in the Reddit factoid/listicle/TikTok explainer internet age my goal for years (going back well before ChatGPT hit the scene) has been to seek out high quality literature or academic papers for the subjects I’m interested in.

I find it so much more intellectually stimulating then most of what I find online. Reading e.g. a 600 page book about some specific historical event gives me so much more perspective and exposure to different aspects I never would have thought to ask about on my own, or would have been elided when clipped into a few sentence summary.

I have gotten some value out of asking for book recommendations from LLMs, mostly as a starting point I can use to prune a list of 10 books down into a 2 or 3 after doing some of my research on each suggestion. But talking to a chatbot to learn about a subject just doesn’t do anything for me for anything deeper than basic Q&A where I simply need a (hopefully) correct answer and nothing more.
by arianvanp | 2025-07-29 21:57:29+00:00
Looked at this briefly and especially the lower level MCPs the code gives a very AI generated vibe. It also wraps a lot of APIs without actually exposing all of the features. Which is frustrating.

Amazon internally has this super nice description of all their APIs in a protocol neutral format called Smithy. I wonder if they would've gotten something nicer if they would've added JSONRpc support to smithy instead and then generated the code through there instead of this.
by drc500free | 2025-07-29 21:57:49+00:00
Israel / Palestine is a collision between two internally valid and mutually exclusive worldviews. It's kind of a given that there will be two camps who consider the other non-reputable.

FWIW, the /r/AskHistorians booklist is pretty helpful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeast...
by Julien_r2 | 2025-07-29 21:58:21+00:00
Super good idea!!

Luc Julia (one of the main Siri's creators) describe a very similar exercice in this interview [0](It's in french, although the au translation isn't too bad)

The gist of it, is that he describes this exercice he does with his students, where they ask chatgpt about Victor Hugo's biography, and then proceed to spot the errors made by Chatgtp.

This setup is simple, but there are very interesting mechanisms in place. The student get to learn about challenging facts, do fact checking, cross reference, etc. While also asserting the reference figure of the teacher, with the knowledge to take down chat gpt.

Well done :)

Edit: adding link

[0] https://youtube.com/shorts/SlyUvvbzRPc?si=2Fv-KIgls-uxr_3z
by andrepd | 2025-07-29 21:58:38+00:00
> History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a vaguely difficult period in history it will just give you one side and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there is another side, it will paint them in a very negative light which often is poorly substantiated

Which is why it's so terribly irresponsible to paint these """AI""" systems as impartial or neutral or anything of the sort, as has been done by hypesters and marketers for the past 3 years.
by m11a | 2025-07-29 21:58:54+00:00
Email is pretty difficult to reliably self-host though, and typically a PITA to manage. And you really don’t ever want to lose your email address or the associated data. Fewer people could say they properly secure, manage and administer a VPS on which they can host the email server they eventually setup, over say a 10yr period.

Most people I saw offer self-hosted emails for groups (student groups etc), it ended up a mess. Compare all that to say ollama, which makes self-hosting LLMs trivial, and they’re stateless.

So I’m not sure email is a good example of commodity not bringing price to the floor.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-29 21:59:01+00:00
And that just in the UK. For the EU's own shenanigans, we have persistent attempts such as these examples of fuckery:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720103

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240

There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-07-29 21:59:14+00:00
> Institutions subscribing to ACM Open receive full access to the Premium version of the ACM Digital Library, providing their users with unrestricted access to over 800,000 ACM published research articles, the ACM Guide to Computing Literature (which indexes more than 6,500 3rd party publishers with direct links to the content), advanced tools, and exclusive features.

What does this mean? The 800,000 previously published articles will stay paywalled and only the new stuff will be open? Or will stuff be open to individuals while institutions have to keep paying? Or what?
by henriquegodoy | 2025-07-29 21:59:49+00:00
It's cool to see the perspective that many problems (somekinda communication problems, look at lawyers, compliance and etc...) can be solved by treating AI less as agents and more as modular components within a larger system. Once we build a working process—monitored through evals—we can then reduce costs by distilling these modules. That means starting with superintelligent models and later distilling them down to just a few billion parameters, instead of needing hundreds of billions.
by jononor | 2025-07-29 21:59:59+00:00
The wealth tax in itself probably does not explain the issues you see. They are more likely related to the global increases in interests.

Now the recently introduced exit tax has some serious problems, in that is has triggered and exodus both of genuinely rich people, and of prospective founders who can easily get rich on paper and have massively disproportionate tax effects. That law is very stupid - especially that unrealized gains are taxable 100% at shares market rate.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-07-29 22:00:06+00:00
That was an anecdotal example. I watched a pod (i believe that is what is called when several parents get together for a specific topical teaching) instructed by the grocery store manager when I was there.

> Many your points do not sound like something uniquely possible because of homeschooling.

I am open to elucidate if you give me details you think that is not possible.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-29 22:00:15+00:00
> The older I get the more I fear I am turning into Richard Stallman

You and me both. I always preferred and promoted FLOSS where possible but still had a bit of a pragmatic approach, but now the older I get the more I just want to rip out everything not free (as in freedom) from my life, and/or just go become a goat farmer.

Stallman was right from the beginning, and big tech have proven over and over again that they are incapable of being good citizens.

I'm probably a few more years away from "I'd like to interject for a moment..."
by johnisgood | 2025-07-29 22:00:24+00:00
Thank you for summing it up. Now, why do people still buy and/or use Google products? Lack of care? Lack of availability (Android vs iOS)? Not that Apple is that much better. Seems like we are f*cked from all fronts. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. We really need better alternatives with similar prices (and we need people to somehow care and care enough to switch, but we would need a network effect). For example, for a phone, I would buy Librem, but their hardware sucks and it is too pricey.

https://github.com/geraldohomero/best-foss-alternatives

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/w6w7x7/awesomepri...

https://codeberg.org/hydis/awesome-alternatives

https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy

There was a better site but I cannot find it right now. Can anyone remember? It has "privacy" (or something like that) in the URL (or domain, even).

Additionally, with Chat Control coming to effect soon enough in EU, among other laws passed in various countries like UK and Australia, we really are losing our freedom and privacy. Sad times ahead (with an already sad present).
by bluescrn | 2025-07-29 22:02:43+00:00
Search YouTube for '10 cent microcontroller' to learn about the absolute cheapest chips.

For £3.50 you can get an ESP32 module with WiFi and Bluetooth (e.g. https://thepihut.com/products/esp32-c3-mini-development-boar...)

(A regular Arduino board might still be the best choice if you're just learning/tinkering though)
by progbits | 2025-07-29 22:02:49+00:00
> 99.99%+ uptime is the standard we need to meet, and lately, we haven’t.

Four nines is not what I would be citing at this point. (That's less than an hour per year, so they burned that for next three decades)

Maybe aim for 99% first.

Otherwise a pretty honest and solid response, kudos for that!
by djeastm | 2025-07-29 22:03:12+00:00
I tried out the quiz function asking me about the Aeneid and despite my answering questions incorrectly, it kept saying things like "Very close!" and "you're on the right track!".

For example, the answer to a question was "Laocoön" (the guy who said 'beware of Greeks bearing gifts') and I put "Solon" (who was a Greek politician) and I got "You’re really close!"

Is it close, though?
by mattgrice | 2025-07-29 22:03:39+00:00
I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?”

I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.

I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.

I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.
by geekedcoder | 2025-07-29 22:04:45+00:00
Points made in the rant part:

* Security bugs are not more interesting than other bugs. * Lol, why do people even care about security when they upload everything into the cloud. * Stop crying and start fixing bugs. * Security measures are unreasonable, they prevent development progress and consume too much runtime. * Common negative impression of the C memory model is skewed by surviorship bias. * Many weak links in the chain.