MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 14:17:16+00:00
> Though there are any number of nonstandard things you can do over HTTP to restrict your community from the unwashed eternal september noobs from joining it.

But why would you bother with that, when your whole goal is to create an ecosystem that's separate from the web in the first place?

> Consider the fact that TFA is already proxied over HTTP just so more than 3 people will read it. Seems more sane to be HTTP native.

Podcasts are often rehosted on YouTube, blog content is often reposted to social media, etc. Making content viewable from the other medium without making it native to the other medium is a common practice, and wouldn't defeat the purpose of trying to build a distinct ecosystem on top of the same foundation that underlies the ecosystem you're trying to avoid.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-16 14:17:49+00:00
the purpose of this tool isn't to "accelerate" python or whatever - it's to bind cpp.

> AFAICT this does not quite produce true binaries, but rather interprets C++ via Cling, is that right?

yes but to be very clear: it's not designed to interpret arbitrary cpp but calls and ctors and field accesses. the point is binding. also it can use cling or clang-repl.
Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores
by ghita_ | 2025-07-16 14:17:54+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm Ghita, co-founder of ZeroEntropy (YC W25). We build high accuracy search infrastructure for RAG and AI Agents.

We just released two new state-of-the-art rerankers zerank-1, and zerank-1-small. One of them is fully open-source under Apache 2.0.

We trained those models using a novel Elo score inspired pipeline which we describe in detail in the blog attached. In a nutshell, here is an outline of the training steps: * Collect soft preferences between pairs of documents using an ensemble of LLMs. * Fit an ELO-style rating system (Bradley-Terry) to turn pairwise comparisons into absolute per-document scores. * Normalize relevance scores across queries using a bias correction step, modeled using cross-query comparisons and solved with MLE.

You can try the models either through our API (https://docs.zeroentropy.dev/models), or via HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/zeroentropy/zerank-1-small).

We would love this community's feedback on the models, and the training approach. A full technical report is also going to be released soon.

Thank you!
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-07-16 14:18:10+00:00
> numbers in the response are real.

OpenAI very well may have a bug, but I'm not clear on this part. How do you know the numbers are real?

I understand you know the name is the company is real, but how do you know the numbers are real?

It's way may than anyone should need to do, but the only way I can see someone knowing this is contacting the owners is the company.
by _flux | 2025-07-16 14:18:20+00:00
I used to have a similar setup, but I replaced the dual head setup (24" 9:16 and 30" 16:9) with one ultrawide one.

I suppose just as wide 16:9 display would have been even nicer, but it's fine. There are some benefits in window placement in having just a single screen, even if window managers could work better for this use (e.g. have a "second screen" region where there are separate workspaces).
by Nemo_bis | 2025-07-16 14:18:37+00:00
It's conceivably part of the reason.

Earlier reporting on Windows MAU noted "400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanish... ). As Windows 11 wrecks havoc on older PCs, many may just sit unused or get discarded, thereby increasing the relative share of the surviving PCs (including Linux PCs).
by ashvardanian | 2025-07-16 14:18:40+00:00
In case you are searching for fun use-cases, here's how one experiment with weird similarity metrics & kNN data-structures via Cppyy (for C++ kernel), Numba (for Python), or PeachPy (for x86 Asm), interacting with a precompiled engine: https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch/blob/main/python/READM...
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 14:19:10+00:00
Many chatbots are good at this, including Microsoft Copilot and they can answer questions about languages too if you want to understand the structure, such as "which characters mean 'new-type' in 国家新型都市化計画?"

Personally I'm interested in Japanese and Chinese culture and I frequently find Japanese speakers engage with my photos on Bluesky so I frequently use it to read responses and write replies where: (1) I can specify tone and context, and then (2) I use a different chatbot to translate my reply back to English to check that it translates properly.
by SebastianKra | 2025-07-16 14:19:11+00:00
I'm to young for Netscape, but do you mean this [^1] interface, that's truncating the subject and hiding the body?

Also, which use-cases do you have where you need to see 20 emails at once?

[^1]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/ns_4_email.jpg
by waltbosz | 2025-07-16 14:19:32+00:00
Reminds me of "The Langoliers"

My first exposure to a toy app like this was called face.com (.com was the file extension for an executable, not a domain name). It was a DOS program that made these face text characters (Code-Page-437) walk around on your text console, while you could still interact with your console. This was the late 1980s before Windows.

The were two controls (besides add/remove faces) that I can remember, one made the faces all gather together in a big clump. One made them dance in a circle wherever they were currently on the screen.
by gruez | 2025-07-16 14:20:13+00:00
>and the implication that they leak all queried hostnames ("secret hosts, like for your work, will be leaked").

The part about sharing data with "a very few carefully vetted security researchers" doesn't preclude them from leaking domains. For instance if the security researcher exports a "SELECT COUNT(*) GROUP BY hostname" query that would arguably count as "summary form", and would include any secret hostnames.

>https://quad9.net/privacy/policy/#22-data-collected

If you're trying to imply that they can't possibly be leaking hostnames because they don't collect hostnames, that's directly contradicted by the subsequent sections, which specifically mention that they share metrics grouped by hostname basis. Obviously they'll need to collect hostname to provide such information.
by unconed | 2025-07-16 14:20:19+00:00
"What promises were made, by whom?"

Technically true, but practically tone deaf.

WebGPU is both years too late, and just a bit early. Wheras WebGL was OpenGL circa 2005, WebGPU is native graphics circa 2015. It shouldn't need to be said that the bleeding edge new standard for web graphics shouldn't be both 10 years out of date and awful.

Vendors are finally starting to deprecate the old binding model as the byzantine machinery that it is. Bindless resources are an absolute necessity for the modern style of rendering with nanite and raytracing.

Rust's WGPU on native supports some of this, but WebGPU itself doesn't.

It's only intuitive if you don't realize just how huge the gap is between dispatching a vertex shader to render some triangles, and actually producing a lit, shaded and occlusioned image with PBR, indirect lighting, antialiasing and postfx. Would you like to render high quality lines or points? Sorry, it's not been a priority to make that simple. Better go study up on SDFs and beziers.

Which, tbh, is the impression I get from webgpu efforts. Everyone forgets the drivers have been playing pretend for decades, and very few have actually done the homework. Of those that have, most are too enamored with being a l33t gfx coder to realize how terrible the dev exp is.
by eadmund | 2025-07-16 14:20:31+00:00
> Quite some emotions, also in the linked article about XLibre, from someone not emotionally invested in software.

An emotional impact from a piece of software’s failures is not the same as being emotionally invested in a piece of software.

I have not emotional investment in my NIC’s firmware: I honestly don’t care about it, I don’t think about it. But if it stops working, or starts flooding my LAN with random packets, then I will care.

Likewise, I am not personally invested in Wayland vs. X11. I am emotionally invested in the way I use my computer, in my editor, my terminal, my web browser and my window manager: as long as a Wayland implementation supports all of them without regressions, then I really don’t care if my distribution continues to support X.org.

But when no Wayland implementation supports my software stack, I care that my distribution continues to support X.org. And if folks associated with Wayland were to try to smuggle needless incompatibilities with X.org into software I use then I would be upset.
by happymellon | 2025-07-16 14:20:42+00:00
By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.

Can I so that with a Switch?

I can plug in a USB dock, with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and edit images with GIMP.

Can I do that with a PS5?

If I like the Steam Deck UI, I can install a package on my desktop and pick it on login, thus gaining basically all of this functionality. I in fact do have the SteamOS 3 UI installed on a gaming PC, and it works really well.

Can I install the PS5 UI and the ability to play PlayStation games on a BSD box?
A Treatise for One Network – Anonymous National Deliberation [pdf]
by simurgh_beau | 2025-07-16 14:21:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I am the author of this white paper, posting under the pseudonym Simurgh. Thank you for taking a look.

The Motivation: This project comes directly from my experience watching the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran and the subsequent efforts by the state to fragment and divide the opposition. I felt that if people could only talk to each other at scale and discover their common ground, they would be less susceptible to this strategy.

The Project: This white paper outlines a protocol for doing just that. It's a structured, multi-stage deliberation system designed to be built on a platform with an existing network, like Telegram. It uses three core principles:

Absolute Anonymity: To protect participants. Structured Process: A tiered funnel to distill signal from noise. Meritocratic Promotion: To ensure the most well-reasoned ideas rise to the top.

The full architecture, including mitigations for risks like state-level manipulation, Sybil attacks, and bad actors, is detailed in the paper.

My Ask of the HN Community: I am not a cryptographer or a large-scale systems architect. I am posting this here because this community has an incredible depth of expertise. I am looking for your honest feedback, especially on:

Potential failure modes and security vulnerabilities in the protocol design. Suggestions for strengthening the system against manipulation. Any thoughts on the overall concept from those who have experience building social or secure messaging protocols.

I am here to listen and answer any questions you may have. Thank you for your time and consideration.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-16 14:21:50+00:00
It has nothing to do with propaganda. It's such an inherently unbelievable achievement that many have indeed begun to doubt we ever actually even did it. And that doubt is very easy to understand because in modern times many have lost the ability to think big, let alone actually do big things. I mean can you believe we put a person on the Moon, let alone at a time when a "super computer" would have had a millionth of the processing power of that cheap phone in your pocket? It's nothing short of stupefying.

It's similar to how we still marvel at how people managed to build the pyramids. There, at least, there can be no doubt that they truly exist - but people have been debating, and aweing, at them for literally thousands of years. The Greeks, no amateurs to construction themselves, were debating how they such a thing could have been constructed all the way back in the 5th century BC!

These great achievements are what define humanity. In the blink of an eye on the scale of time, most of every company, person, and thing you know of today will be gone and completely forgotten. The very few things that will stay with us are these grand achievements that define not only an era of humanity, but humanity itself.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-16 14:22:17+00:00
I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.

90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.

Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.

Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.

My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.
by superb-owl | 2025-07-16 14:22:28+00:00
As with most cognitive biases, there's an inverse to this, where we ignore low-probability high-impact scenarios. E.g. people drive drunk or without a seatbelt, because it'll *probably* be fine. And they repeatedly have that assumption confirmed--until one day it isn't.

I had one friend who would leave his bike chained partially blocking a fire exit, because "what are the odds the fire inspector will come today?" But the fire inspector comes once a year, and if your bike is chained there 99% of the time, odds are you're going to get a fine. He couldn't see the logic. He got fined.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-16 14:22:51+00:00
Add Japan's volcanoes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis...

At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI...

A select quote:

> Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 14:23:05+00:00
Reasoning is chained what-if prediction, together with exploration of alternatives (cf backtracking), and leans upon general curiosity/learning for impasse resolution (i.e. if you can't predict what-if, then have the curiosity to explore and find out).

What the LLM companies are currently selling as "reasoning" is mostly RL-based pre-training whereby the model is encouraged to predict tokens (generate reasoning steps) according to similar "goals" seen in the RL training data. This isn't general case reasoning, but rather just "long horizon" prediction based on the training data. It helps exploit the training data, but isn't going to generate novelty outside of the deductive closure of the training data.
by schiffern | 2025-07-16 14:23:25+00:00
>13.6 kWh battery. 39mile EPA range... 915 Wh... 2.86 miles, not 3-6

If we're picking nits, the usable capacity is only 10.5 kWh (11.5 kWh with AC-to-DC losses), so it should be 3.40 miles. Not 2.86, or even 2.62 (= 39/13.6 * 0.915).
Show HN: I built a logic AI simulator with pen, paper, and no code
by symbol_reasoner | 2025-07-16 14:24:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on an experimental AGI-like logic simulator using nothing but *pen, paper, and a structured table system*.

*What it does*: - Simulates logical relationships between concepts using a grid-based structure - Works like a hand-written neural net or rule-based system - Learns from user feedback (like reinforcement learning) by adjusting weights - Automatically generates reasoning paths and simulates calculation flows

*Why it’s interesting*: - No API, no GPU, no software required - Every reasoning step is transparent and explainable - You can literally *see the logic flow on paper*, like tracing neurons

*Use cases*: - Engineering problem solving (like mechanics or materials) - Simulating how humans think in step-by-step logic - Could evolve into a domain-specific expert system or educational simulator

Here’s a photo of the current prototype:

-> https://i.postimg.cc/4y0hB5rc/image.png

---

I’m curious if anyone here has tried similar “analog AGI” experiments — or sees potential use cases I’ve missed.

Happy to answer any questions or share more detail. Thanks!
by marcuskane2 | 2025-07-16 14:24:06+00:00
As a thought experiment to check your own biases, how do you feel about people like Colin Kaepernick speaking out about police abuses and racism in the justice system?

There are people who made roughly the same argument you're making here- since this individual became rich and famous within the current system, they shouldn't criticize the flaws in the system that have victimized others who they empathize with.
by Ray20 | 2025-07-16 14:24:12+00:00
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.

Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?

> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,

I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.

In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
by booleandilemma | 2025-07-16 14:24:33+00:00
The problem when the masses come in is then we lose the whimsy. They will be offended by commands like "kill" and "fsck" and there will be stupid campaigns to change things.

It happened with git a few years ago, when people were up in arms over its use of the word "master". Stupid, pointless changes will be made to appease these people.
by FiloSottile | 2025-07-16 14:24:41+00:00
Off the top of my head, there might be some old assembly by Andy Polyakov and by Vlad Krasnov that was contributed to both Go and OpenSSL. Even there, we’ve been working for years to port hand-written assembly to higher level generators, and there’s not as much as you’d think. Everything else is original.

Besides integrating properly with Go applications, this lets us optimize for readability and correctness, with IMHO excellent empirical results.

https://words.filippo.io/a-literate-go-implementation-of-pol...

https://go.dev/blog/tob-crypto-audit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkEH3V3PkS0
by switknee | 2025-07-16 14:24:59+00:00
Unlikely, unless by "gathering" you mean scavenging kills and eating carrion. Developing the large fatty brain without a herbivorous digestive system suggests that our ancestors ate dead animals. The modern human digestive system is more similar to a wolf's than a chimp's.

There's also not much evidence that there were enough human available calories present year round to support a nomadic vegetarian population. Yes, apples existed, but the current evidence suggests humans only started eating lots of them after we wiped out the mastadon.
Show HN: ggc – A terminal-based Git CLI written in Go
by bmf-san | 2025-07-16 14:25:42+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ggc (https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc), a terminal-based Git CLI tool written in Go.

ggc provides: - A fast interactive UI (like `fzf`) for common Git operations

- Traditional subcommands (e.g. `ggc add`, `ggc commit`)

- Git-compatible config support (`ggc config` reads from `git config`)

- Built-in aliases and workflow automation (e.g. `ggc addcommitpush`)

The goal is to improve developer productivity by combining interactive workflows with scriptable CLI operations.

It's still under active development, but I'd love feedback from the community!

GitHub: https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc Demo GIF: https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc#demo

Thanks!
by thesuitonym | 2025-07-16 14:25:45+00:00
This is such a nonsense argument. Nobody is upset that that more people use Chrome than Firefox. That has never been the case. In fact, historically, Firefox users tend to like being on the outside.

The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants while ignoring problems users currently have.
by esafak | 2025-07-16 14:25:49+00:00
Countless people are increasing their productivity and talking about it here ad nauseam. Even researchers are leaning on language models; e.g., https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114139125505827565

We haven't successfully resolved famous unsolved research problems through language models yet but one can imagine that they will solve increasingly challenging problems over time. And if it happens in the hands of a researcher rather than model's lab, one can also imagine that the researcher will take credit, so you will still have the same question.
by Izkata | 2025-07-16 14:25:53+00:00
Isn't i going to be one past end on the last iteration?

I think you want either "++i <= end" or "i++ < end", and that's assuming "end" is inclusive. If it's exclusive then "++i < end", right?

(Using "<=" in a termination condition has become a code smell for me, it's been wrong more often than not, so it sticks out as "pay close attention here")
by jononor | 2025-07-16 14:26:36+00:00
It is pretty easy and convenient to write extensions using pybind11, including passing numpy arrays. It takes 10 lines in setup.py and around 10 lines in a .cpp file, run setup.py build_ext to build it. Not quite the convenience of inline - but in practice pretty nice. My only nit in that compile time is around 3 seconds on my machine.
by paganel | 2025-07-16 14:26:41+00:00
I was trying to follow my respondents' reasoning, as in, if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?

In other words, and following Eastern-European logic (which, trust me, helps in cases like this one, I'm from Eastern Europe myself), had Russia really attacked any NATO countries you and me both wouldn't be in here having this conversation over the internet.