MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-07 20:17:05+00:00
They're highly unlikely to be ripe at the same time. The idea is to basically do it the same way the native Americans did, except using robots instead of humans. Which is how gardeners do it today. You regularly walk the field, removing the ripe ears and pods, leaving behind the stalks and unripe ears/pods to check again in a day or two. Then after all the ripe ears/pods are gone you can mulch the stalks.
by zahma | 2025-07-07 20:17:57+00:00
Except they aren’t merely reading and reciting content, are they? That’s a rather disingenuous argument to make. All these AI companies are high on billions in investment and think they can run roughshod over all rules in the sprint towards monetizing their services.

Make no mistake, they’re seeking to exploit the contents of that material for profits that are orders of magnitude larger than what any shady pirated-material reseller would make. The world looks the other way because these companies are “visionary” and “transformational.”

Maybe they are, and maybe they should even have a right to these buried works, but what gives them the right to rip up the rule book and (in all likelihood) suffer no repercussions in an act tantamount to grand theft?

There’s certainly an argument to be had about whether this form of research and training is a moral good and beneficial to society. My first impression is that the companies are too opaque in how they use and retain these files, albeit for some legitimate reasons, but nevertheless the archival achievements are hidden from the public, so all that’s left is profit for the company on the backs of all these other authors.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-07-07 20:18:07+00:00
> The public healthcare system still has months-long wait times.

I pay an expensive monthly premium and I still have monthly-long wait times in the US. (Putting this here because many people think that the "benefit" of the US healthcare model is that you get "fast/immediate" care instead of "slow/long waits" in those "socialist" countries.
by const_cast | 2025-07-07 20:18:11+00:00
> For all of human history people have got along just fine, happily in fact, without “universal access to mental health care”

Can we please stop with these incredibly low-effort arguments that are just blatantly untrue with about 5 seconds of inspection? If I have to hear "well humans did just fine before!" one more time I'm going to lose my mind.

No, no they did not. We can't ask them because they're dead now. The ones we can ask are the ones who survived. We might call this a "survivorship bias".

There's practically infinite graphs showing the trends of survivability and quality of life throughout time. Less infants die now, less adults die now, we live longer, we live happier, we live with less illnesses. There's less polio, less measles, less tuberculosis, you fucking name it.

I mean, for god's sake before modern medicine infant mortality was close to 50%. Women would have 10 children, maybe 4 would make it to adult hood, and she'd die giving birth to the 10th. That's assuming she didn't get unlucky and die on the first one because her body wasn't perfectly set to give birth. Shoulder dystocia? Too fucking bad, you lost the lottery, go die now.
by hdb385 | 2025-07-07 20:18:54+00:00
You can REEEE-search away. The facts show that we are in a general period of cooling, with a possible move North soon.

The rEcEnT sCiEnCe tends to show a spike in correlation with fossil fuel usage. But these studies cant be trusted as they are created by the same people who have a bridge to sell us.

Science studies in the 70s, 80s and some of the 90's showed the opposite. You have to acknowledge this and weight it all up.

Yeah, you're going to get mad but that isn't important.
by gavmor | 2025-07-07 20:19:16+00:00
Yes, beware the Barnum/Forer effect!

> a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a broad range of people. [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
by bigyabai | 2025-07-07 20:20:14+00:00
1. You're lying for flattery, which isn't a good start in the business world. I've seen healthy balance sheets before, you don't need to pretend you're holding all the cards. Trust is more fungible than cooked books.

2. You're using HN (repeatedly) for self-promotion and ought to be prepared for the responses this site will garner your product. This isn't natural propagation of your business, it is first-party advertising orchestrated by you.

3. The product you have made is a nothingburger and I guarantee it won't exist in 3 years' time. If you lack the foresight to acknowledge that, then I look forward to the related Tell HN posts detailing the struggles you face.
by ssutch3 | 2025-07-07 20:20:39+00:00
AI coding tools aren't equally effective across all software domains or languages. They're going to be the "best" (relative to their own ability distribution) in the "fat middle" of software engineering where they have the most training data. Popular tasks in popular languages and popular libraries (web dev in React, for example). You're probably out of luck if your task is writing netcode for a game engine, for instance.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-07 20:21:06+00:00
The short answer is, you can't

If we're talking about pixel perfect rendering there are various issues in the Web APIs that conspire against you.

devicePixelRatio (dpr) - This is supposed to tell you how many CSS pixels = one device pixel. This particular demo ignores it. On my Windows PC my dpr is 1.25 and the site looks horrendous with every other pixel 4th pixel of a font being double wide (or something along those lines). Not dissing the demo, it's cool. It's uncommon for Web devs to be aware of these issues as like 99.99% are on a Mac and never set zoom to anything other then 100%

The idea was supposed to be, you could take the CSS size and multiply by devicePixelRatio to get the display size. Unfortunately that does not work for various reasons.

There's zoom. Firefox and Chrome change the devicePixelRatio in response to zooming. Safari does not. Even if Safari supported this it's not enough. You can maybe repo how bad the site looks on my Windows PC on a Mac by zooming in on any browser (pick zoom from the menus, not pinch to zoom - see below)

Next there is pixel snapping. The short version is, imagine your window is 3 pixels wide and you ask the browser to make 2 elements side by side each 50% wide. If you check the CSS width both elements will say they are 1.5 pixels wide (getContentBoundingRect().width). But the browser won't display a 1.5 pixel element. I will snap one element 2 pixels and the other 1 pixel. To find out which is which you're supposed to use ResizeObserver with devicePixelContentBoxSize, but again Safari doesn't support this. It's not just with splits, that just the easiest way to demo the issue. Get this wrong and your checkerboard background will have a stripe somewhere where the checkerboard is missing a row or column.

Next there is pinch to zoom. It's separate and reported no where in the Web API AFAICT. The browsers will re-render text/svg to a higher resolution when you pinch to zoom but they don't pass that info to the page so it can not re-render canvases in response.

So: tl;dr, you can't - partly because of Safari. Partly because the Web is missing functionality
by no_wizard | 2025-07-07 20:21:08+00:00
now to get designers to actually use these things.

Figma has a bunch of good tooling, but getting designers to use it, and use it consistently, is the real problem.

Designers exist in a realm seemingly, where outside pressure can't really be put on it from an organizational level to get them to uniformly adopt a set of standards they will always adhere to. Every company I have worked at, big, medium, small, seems to have this problem
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-07 20:21:26+00:00
Probably quicker to sell $10M worth of other peoples offerings at a 10% commission.

If you're really good it might not take the entire year.

If I was going to do $1M worth of technical work in one year I would definitely want a sales associate who could deliver on the same scale themself.

OTOH, if I was going to try for $1M in technology sales over the next year, I wouldn't consider an engineering associate fully adequate unless they're coming up with offerings that are well worth that, or already has them under their belt.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-07 20:21:45+00:00
plate tectonics is a good one. I definitely remember my mom telling me as a kid how South America and Africa look like they fit together, and my dad talking about Pangea being the name when the pieces were fit together. it wasn't until much later that I realized that my parents were not taught this in school, but my dad just kept up with current events much more. It is weird to think that something is so new that even your parents were not taught it.
by spandrew | 2025-07-07 20:22:22+00:00
Amazon has been doing this since the 2000's. Fun fact: This is how AWS came about; for them to scale its "LOOK INSIDE!" feature for all the books it was hoovering in an attempt to kill the last benefit the bookstore had over them.

Ie. This is not a big deal. The only difference now is ppl are rapidly frothing to be outraged by the mere sniff of new tech on the horizon. Overton window in effect.
by timbit42 | 2025-07-07 20:22:38+00:00
The worst thing about Windows 3.x was Program Manager. The second worst thing was File Manager.

I always install IBM's Workplace Shell for Windows on Windows 3.x which replaces PM and FM with a shell that looks and works like the OS/2 Workplace Shell.

It's open source and the installer is available here: https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-workplace-shell/151
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 20:22:48+00:00
Here is the thing. Your initial claim was that English is the programming language. By virtue of making that claim you are claiming LLM has deterministic reliability equivalent to programming language -> compiler. This is simply not true.

If you're considering the LLM translation to be equivalent to the compiler abstraction, I'm sorry I'm not drinking that Kool aid with you.

You conceded above that LLMs aren't deterministic, yet you proceeded to call them an abstraction (conflating). If the output is not 100% equivalent, it's not an abstraction.

In C, you aren't required to inspect the assembly generated by the C compiler. It's guaranteed to be equivalent. In this case, you really need not write/debug assembly, you can use the language and tools to arrive at the same outcome.

Your entire argument is based on the premise that we have a new layer of abstraction that accomplishes the same. Not only it does not, but when it fails, it does so often in unexpected ways. But hey, if you're ready to call this an abstraction that frees up your cognitive load, continue to sip that Kool aid.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-07 20:23:02+00:00
It's not really that unbelievable. The pasta just has to be in hot water, whether it's 99.9C or 95C doesn't make much of a difference. I use this technique to boil eggs - boil water, turn off heat, add eggs. It seems to help avoid cracked eggs.

I also hadn't thought to boil pasta that way though.
by aranelsurion | 2025-07-07 20:23:02+00:00
> However, I don't see how a bankrupt studio can release their server code

This feels like trying to poke small holes for no reason.

Let’s say bankrupt studios are off the hook. What then? Most games still be saved. EA just announced they are killing Anthem in 2026. EA won’t be bankrupt next year. There you have one game already immortalized thanks to regulation.
by int_19h | 2025-07-07 20:23:16+00:00
> phonemes (sounds the mouth makes)

This isn't entirely correct. A distinct sound that the mouth makes is a "phone". A phoneme is almost always a group of several phones - allophones - that native language speakers perceive as a single sound. Another way to phrase it is that if you change one phoneme to another one, it makes a different word (possibly a non-existing one, but regardless the native speakers would consider it distinct), but changing from one phone to another doesn't change the word.

For example, in English, the phoneme /t/ has allophones [t], [tʰ], [ɾ], or [ʔ] depending on context. OTOH [ɾ] is a distinct phoneme in Spanish, and [ʔ] is a distinct phoneme in Arabic.

Unfortunately these two are often confused, so one should be careful with such counts and comparing them - it's not uncommon when people count phonemes in their native language, but phones in other languages (when those phones sound distinct to them).

This can also vary significantly from dialect to dialect, since one very common thing in language evolution is for two similar phonemes to collapse into a single one while retaining the original distinction as allophones. For English, in particular, the number of phonemes varies a lot between American and British English (with the latter having more distinctions).
by adamcharnock | 2025-07-07 20:24:41+00:00
> 2-5x pipeline performance at 1/2 cost just by using self-hosted runners on bare metal rented machines like Hetzner

This is absolutely the case. Its a combination of having dedicated CPU cores, dedicated memory bandwidth, and (perhaps most of all) dedicated local NVMe drives. We see a 2x speed up running _within VMs_ on bare metal.

> And knowing how to deal with bare metal/utilize this kind of compute sounds generally useful skill - but I rarely encounter people enthusiastic about making this kind of move

We started our current company for this reason [0]. A lot of people know this makes sense on some level, but not many people want to do it. So we say we'll do it for you, give you the engineering time needed to support it, and you'll still save money.

> I just don't see why going bare metal is always such a taboo topic even for simple stuff like builds.

It is decreasingly so from what I see. Enough people have been variously burned by public cloud providers to know they are not a panacea. But they just need a little assistance in making the jump.

[0] - https://lithus.eu
by forty | 2025-07-07 20:24:45+00:00
On Firefox for Android on my phone, with the native keyboard the button to hide the keyboard is usually replacing the back button. With your own keyboard, the button to hide the keyboard is on the top right, but my muscles memory goes to hit the back button (which brings me back to the previous page rather than hiding the keyboard).

I'm not sure if that would be worth it to add an history element so that the back button can hide the keyboard, but for me that would make things more natural.
by bumby | 2025-07-07 20:24:54+00:00
>What if it was the last remaining copy?

Or even the only copy ever in existence of an original manuscript?

I think these still remove the copyright of the author. As it stands, I have the right to write the best novel about the human condition ever conceived and also the right (if copyrighted) to not allow anyone to read it. I can light it on fire if I wish. I am not obligated to sell it to anyone. In the context of the above, I can stipulate that nobody can distribute excess copies even if they would be otherwise destroyed. You may think that’s wasteful or irrational but we have all kinds of rights that protect our ability to do irrational things with our own property.

>That's a very good sign that probably an entire book of regulations needs to be thrown out instead, and a new law written to replace it with something more sensible.

This sentiment implies that you do not think the owner has those rights. That’s fine, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who think those are reasonable rights. Intellectual property clause is in the first article of the US Constitution for a good reason, although I do think it can be abused.
by hibikir | 2025-07-07 20:25:17+00:00
And don't miss those that have wider use than one town. Sta Maria del Carmen, patron of mariners, is celebrated in the same day in July in many a coastal town that had a fishing industry. The statue leaves the church and is paraded around in people's shoulders, taken to the port, and often sent on a short trip on one of the boats. The locals prayed for plenty fish, and for the fishermen to avoid dying at sea. You can trace that kind of thing to a polytheistic world quite well.
by ricksunny | 2025-07-07 20:25:46+00:00
I think that's the crux of the cognitive dissonance we all experience when described the trope for the first time. 3% of group B's genes persisting eons later in the combined genome A+B isn't necessarily reflective of the original relative size of the population of B vs. A. Evolution only countenances which genes conferred a survival benefit edge to persist. Suppose population A was one million individuals, and population B was only one hundred (a 10000X disparity). Assume complete absorption of B into A over an instantaneous period of time. The proportional genetic representation argument, if it were operative, would imply that eons later, only 0.01% of the combined genome is from population B. Only that's not how genetics works - what matters is how much of a survival benefit did population B's genes confer on the inheriting offspring? To put up a concrete example, if population B had a gene conferring immunity to a regionally endemic pathogen, then that pop. B immunity gene is going to quickly saturate representation in the offspring populations as pathogen-vulnerable population members die off from disease.
by getwcag | 2025-07-07 20:25:50+00:00
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by spandrew | 2025-07-07 20:26:08+00:00
It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
by anchpop | 2025-07-07 20:26:16+00:00
I love the liquid glass look and have helped multiple non-techie people install the developer beta just because they were excited to experience "the frutiger aero update". (frutiger aero is a bit of a meme on tiktok right now so that might be why.) It's fun to hate on apple and the ridiculous level of glass on the control center was pretty funny, but I do think they knocked it out of the park with this one, in terms of mass appeal.

The one issue is that everyone on the beta says their phone is slower now. Which is probably not because of the liquid glass effect, since I think that should be doable with just a couple of texture lookups. (One of those funny things about computer graphics is that often the most visually impressive effects are the simplest computationally - compare this to a "proper" gaussian blur, which is quite expensive.)
by dingnuts | 2025-07-07 20:26:29+00:00
Lots of IKEA furniture is real wood, and lots of "expensive" brands are still flat packed particleboard. Ever bought anything from West Elm?

I'm curious where people are buying "real" furniture, even even they spend "real" money. I've had the best luck with the Amish and at estate sales, but that's not super repeatable.

All the major furniture stores like Ashley or whatever are similar in quality and construction to IKEA -- I don't really think the "cheap" reputation is deserved just because IKEA has $10 LACK side tables available.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-07 20:26:45+00:00
I had a teacher get in trouble for discussing plate tectonics in the 1990s, in a public school. Turns out it still upsets a lot of religious groups and also was tied to some peculiar schools of climate change denialists in the 90s. I still don't entirely know how denying plate tectonics was useful for climate change denial that decade, I just remember how weird it was for the teacher to suggest to forget a whole science lecture because people didn't want us to know it. Come to think of it, that probably also was around the time we watched Jurassic Park in class.
by lumost | 2025-07-07 20:27:05+00:00
Raising requirements in the US is prohibitive due to the lack of options individuals have when they cannot drive. A 16 year old often needs, or wants to work for an income. Owning a car is often a job requirement due to the distances involved in american cities. Getting a job within walking distance is often a non-option due to availability of employers, and biking is of limited safety profile depending on the area. If the only way to get to your job is through a state highway - driving may be the only safe method.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-07 20:27:27+00:00
How simple? Simple to who?

The quip you're referring to was meant to be inspirational. It doesn't pass even the slightest logical scrutiny when taken at its literal meaning. Please. (Apologies if this was just a reference without any further rhetorical intent though.)

It's like claiming that hashes are unique fingerprints. No, they aren't, they mathematically cannot be. Or like claiming how movie or video game trailers should be "perfectly representative" - once again, by definition, they cannot be. It's trivial to see this.
by Anthony-G | 2025-07-07 20:27:50+00:00
Upvoted. As a beginner guitarist, I find that Rocksmith’s approach doesn’t work well for learning songs. I prefer to turn up the difficulty to 100% and turn the tempo down to something I can play comfortably and then gradually increase the tempo. This has the drawback that the song sounds very different when played at 25%. It’d be nicer if they were more judicious in their choice of notes to play for their lower difficulty levels.

At the moment, I’m focussing on working on my timing by playing rhythm instead of lead guitar.
by ssutch3 | 2025-07-07 20:28:09+00:00
It's going to depend heavily on what you're doing. If you're doing common tasks in popular languages, and not using cutting edge library features, the tools are pretty good at automating a large amount of the code production. Just make sure the context/instruction file (i.e. claude.md) and codebase are set up to properly constrict the bot and you can get away with a lot.

If you're not doing tasks that are statistically common in the training data however you're not going to have a great experience. That being said, very little in software is "novel" anymore so you might be surprised.
by int_19h | 2025-07-07 20:28:29+00:00
An orthography that surfaces (non-phonemic) assimilation would be phonetic rather than phonemic. For example, many languages assimilate "n" to "m" before "b", but the phoneme is still /n/, and native speakers are often not even aware that this assimilation occurs (which is what indicates that it's still the same phoneme).