MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jitl | 2025-08-22 04:02:19+00:00
For a project a while back, I needed to turn many-gigabyte Postgres CSV table dumps into SQLite databases. I turned to Go as its a great language for easy parallelism combined with enough memory layout control to get relatively good performance.

I quickly ruled out using database/sql drivers as the indirection through interface types added a bunch of overhead and stymied my attempts for reasonable memory layout. For my use-case, I found the crawshaw driver performed the best, but I ended up forking it as well as the Golang standard library CSV parser as I found defensive copying & allocation was the largest bottleneck. I ended up cycling several very large arenas among a CSV parser thread that filled the arena with column bytes and several threads writing to different temporary sqlite databases. Then at the end I ATTACHED them together and copied them into one big file (idk exactly why this is faster, but my profiles showed most cpu time spent in sqlite doing query binding things so MOAR CORES).

One notable optimization was exposing a way to bind borrowed bytes to query parameters without inducing a copy in either Golang caller code, or SQLite library code. The crawshaw driver upstream only exposes sqlite_bind_blob with SQLITE_TRANSIENT mode, which tells SQLite to copy the input to a private allocation before returning from the sqlite_bind* call. I added a version that passes SQLITE_STATIC, which means "trust me, I won't touch these bytes until the query is done, and I'll free them afterwards". This is safe in Rust who's "borrow" and "lifetime" concept models this perfectly, but I guess in Golang its dicey enough to not expose in your public package.

Here's the relevant commit in my fork: https://github.com/crawshaw/sqlite/commit/82ad4f03528e8fdc6a...

I'm curious how OP's https://github.com/cvilsmeier/sqinn would fare, I'm somewhat sus about copying 200GB to stdin but the benchmark results are pretty good so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ask HN: Should primary care doctors be replaced with AI?
by digitcatphd | 2025-08-22 04:02:24+00:00
Recently, I needed to do a blood test so I could upload the results to an LLM.

In order to get this done, I needed to have a call with my primary care physician essentially as a hurdle to get their authorization.

Then, when the results came back, I uploaded them to the LLM and found I had dangerously high LDL for my age. The LLM recommended a statin since it was likely hereditary, which my additional research suggests is the correct suggestion.

To get a second opinion I scheduled another call and got a dismissive response that essentially concluded there was nothing to be done.

First, she misdiagnosed it directly assuming it must be my diet and gave me the generic 'eat healthy' routine, until I told her I already did, the LLM first asked some clarifying questions before jumping to conclusions, so I guided her later to realize it was hereditary to correct her.

Now I need to call her again to re-rest in another month, then again a forth time to get a statin.

The strange ethical question is should primary care doctors, which typically only route the patient to diagnostics and specialty care physicians be replaced by an LLM entirely?

The paradox is we seem to be of the belief they are needed and superior, but is it not the case they are often wrong?
by throwawaymaths | 2025-08-22 04:04:59+00:00
yes of course JFK jr is brainwormed to hell but he's not setting back the US decades. many things he tears down will be rebuildable and some things he puts in are fine, actually. what is far far more dangerous is the rot in the science infrastructure. because that will take decades to unwind (if we even do), and it's not an obvious problem like the way anything in politics is. people implicitly trust science, which is the problem. people implicitly distrust at least the politics on the other side of the aisle so there's some adversarial challenging going on and the opportunity for growth and integration. science is devoid of that right now.

the FDA is all fucked up anyways and if you doubt that, look up propublicas expose on serious drug safety lapses there.

> Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine

it wasn't perpetual motion level fraud, but it was bad. you weren't there. everyone doing work in the salt mines was like why the fuck arent my experiments working but nobody really stood up to say this is bullshit, because that would be the end of your career if you were a junior researcher... much easier to half ass a result, get the publication, and move on with your life.

> String Theory, It seemed promising in the beginning

maybe it shouldn't have been. there is a heuristic for what actually makes discoveries in science. and the string theory approach is not it. people were sounding the alarm at the time, like, among others some guy named richard feynman. but nobody was listening to them evidentally.
by _aobj | 2025-08-22 04:05:28+00:00
Well after just dishing out at "Elon Musk" on my profile. "Looky here", a Dept of website design. This is something Australia should embrace. But I doubt they could find anyone, that wasn't a former politician to head it, that had modern High school knowledge. It would be interesting to find out if Mr AirBNB, can secure government websites, without causing a Spanish style protest movement. Strange choice coming from hotelier "Donald Trump". But judging from the exported USA website, designs being offered to Australians, long overdue.
by jmogly | 2025-08-22 04:06:08+00:00
Right now you have this awesome new dynamic capability that doesn’t mesh with how we are used to building software; well defined, constrained, correct. Software products are close ended. Imagine if they weren’t. Imagine if you were playing an open world game like Skyrim or runescape and new areas were created as you explored, new weapons, entirely new game mechanics spontaneously arose as you played. Or imagine an intent based business analytics app, that had a view on your company’s database and when a user wanted a report or a visual it generated it on the fly. We’re only limited by our imagination here.
by d0mine | 2025-08-22 04:07:07+00:00
One can find repos using `make format` / `make lint`/ `make typecheck` / or similar

I remember David Beazley mentioning that code with Makefiles were relatively easier to analyze based on ~Terabyte of C++ code and no internet connection (pycon 2014) https://youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8
by axiolite | 2025-08-22 04:08:50+00:00
You can also take a wrench with you, to quickly remove the locking wheel from your cart. Maybe replace it with a non-locking wheel from another cart.

Shouldn't be difficult to find carts left near or beyond the edge of the parking lot.

I find the locking wheels annoying, because they're so often defective and make it a noisy struggle to get your cart through the store. But years ago I also had a neighbor in my apartment complex who would walk home with a cart every week, and would just leave (a dozen of) them there... she couldn't be bothered to push the empty carts back to the store, not even once. I'd think a $1 deposit/return system for carts would work better, and give the homeless in the area some gainful employment.
by fumeux_fume | 2025-08-22 04:09:18+00:00
I will always remember when my Dad bought a vertically flat, 27in Trinitron back around 1998. I miss those buttery-smooth pans. Probably my biggest gripe with any modern television is how awful panning or tracking shots look. Similarly, I enjoyed this quest to obtain a (the?) 43in Trinitron: https://youtu.be/JfZxOuc9Qwk?si=9XcP5-4lwzrvpvpF
by EliasLittle | 2025-08-22 04:09:44+00:00
I’m no expert, but looks like you can represent chebyshev polynomials as the determinant of a square matrix, and if they’re all the same size then multiplying the polynomials should be equivalent to multiplying the matrices and taking the determinant afterwards. Given that the matrices follow a very predictable form, this should also be pretty hardware performant I think.

Just some quick thoughts though :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_polynomials?wprov=sf...
by zywoo | 2025-08-22 04:10:05+00:00
I believe it absolutely should be, and it can even be applied to rare disease diagnosis.

My child was just saved by AI. He suffered from persistent seizures, and after visiting three hospitals, none were able to provide an accurate diagnosis. Only when I uploaded all of his medical records to an AI system did it immediately suggest a high suspicion of MOGAD-FLAMES — a condition with an epidemiology of roughly one in ten million.

Subsequent testing confirmed the diagnosis, and with the right treatment, my child recovered rapidly.

For rare diseases, it is impossible to expect every physician to master all the details. But AI excels at this. I believe this may even be the first domain where both doctors and AI can jointly agree that deployment is ready to begin.
by RossBencina | 2025-08-22 04:10:37+00:00
What's wrong with the approach is that it goes against basic principles of the Python ecosystem. Python has always followed the policy of standardising mechanisms and allowing implementations to develop and peacefully coexist. The Python way fosters diversity of implementations. Note that uv itself would not be a reasonable project if not for Python's approach to diverse tooling.

You cite good examples where other languages have chosen to standardise tooling. We can discuss the pros and cons of that choice. But it is a choice, and Python already made a different choice.
by smcin | 2025-08-22 04:10:42+00:00
Is this only for 1-on-1 conversations, or also group?

- There are also conversation groups (Zoom/Teams/FB/face-to-face/hybrid), and ideally I'd like a calendaring tool to at least track both, and be able to offer both types of slots to speakers of language X.

- Currently conversation groups IME tend to use Meetup or Discord (not luma) to schedule. Meetup is dying a screaming death these days, but still helpful to interface to it.

- handling the Zoom invite + URL/meeting code/password is also useful secretarial (who is hosting? depends on who's in a fixed location with solid wifi, for that timeslot); Zoom also has audio dialin in various area codes; I only want the ones local to me, not all twenty.

- Having each participant self-rate level in each language is useful for trying to auto-calendar things.

- you might like to optionally link to Duolingo, at least to show each participant nickname, level in languages of interest, maybe thumbnail avatar.

- not every interaction needs to be calendared; sometimes it could be as simple as "You're online and available for next 30min, so is your friend X, do you two want to speak?" and handle the two-sided poll and if both vote yes, set up a call. Like Doodle only better.
by keepamovin | 2025-08-22 04:11:57+00:00
This is cool. But I like how the FFX bug tracking this (and general attr work that morphed into this through spec) is 17 years old: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435426

Browser bugs are so cute. Just sitting there for decades, comments accreted over time. Tasks spinning for eternity. These are truly the cicadas of bugs.
by starwatch | 2025-08-22 04:12:03+00:00
> That's statistical. A small number will start their exponential degrade at 80%, but most won't. Some might get to 60% before they start it.

The paper that underpins the 80% claim is paywalled and I'm cheap so don't have the numbers to hand. But in the abstract sense being statistical could go the other way too - i.e. some might get to 90% before they start their exponential decay.

> And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast.

True, exponential doesn't mean much other than e^n where it's implied that n > 1. However the value of n does matter, for example a decay rate for n=100 is quite different than n=1.1. Again, we're talking in general terms as I don't have the value of n for this. For better or worse, I'm taking the paper at face value when it talks of end of life at 80% - however it has been peer reviewed and is in a "proper" journal so to my mind that adds some credibility.

It's worth mentioning that the current DoE guidance on lifetimes is: "12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates)". Of course that guidance is also based on a statistical analysis that doesn't seem to account for modern battery management systems [1]. There are additional factors at play that govern battery degradation, including things like: battery chemistry, environment, EV charging habits, etc.

Ultimately the real test of EV battery life will come with time. It'll manifest as the change in average age of scrapped vehicles with large fleets of EV's on the road. In Norway right now it's about 18 years (for a mostly internal combustion fleet) [2]. However as of this year all private vehicles sold must be zero-emission - so in 10-20 years we'll have some interesting data [3].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530000446/https://afdc.ener...

[2]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/05522/tableViewLayout1/...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530115356/https://www.regje...
by fluidcruft | 2025-08-22 04:12:07+00:00
One thing I wonder about is what happens in pyproject? Do you use tool.ruff/tool.ruff.format or tool.uv.format or what? Are people who only know "uv format" supposed to understand that part? Does ruff start honoring tool.uv.format? Which have priority over which in search. Does it behave differently when you run uv format vs ruff format? etc
by rramadass | 2025-08-22 04:12:57+00:00
Jacques Ellul's classic The Technological Society is very relevant here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

What he said in the 1950's has come true now;

From Confronting the Technological Society - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...

Rather, it [i.e. Technique] is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency … in every field of human activity. ... The machine has created the modern, industrial world, but it was originally a poor fit for society; technique was the process of adapting social conditions to the smooth churning of the machine,”

Ellul distills the essential characteristics of technique to a list of seven. The two most obvious ones, he says, have been addressed so often by other scholars that he can set them aside: rationality (for example, systematization and standardization) and artificiality (subjugation and often the destruction of nature). The other five characteristics of technique are less widely discussed. They are automatism, which is the process of technical means asserting themselves according to mathematical standards of efficiency; self-augmentation, the process of technical advances multiplying at a growing rate and building on each other, while the number of technicians also increases; wholeness, the feature of all individual techniques and their various uses sharing a common essence; universalism, the fact that technique and technicians are spreading worldwide; and autonomy, the phenomenon of technique as a closed system, “a reality in itself … with its special laws and its own determinations.”

Also see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society Overview - https://medium.com/@NimaCheraghi/jacques-ellul-the-technolog...
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-08-22 04:13:29+00:00
I don’t know the same people, so I can’t really speak to common sentiments in the industry. I think the issue with the way that Sabine goes about it is that she uses string theory as a cudgel against the entirety of academia. She kind of frames it as though string theory is the only game in town, and as though they’re all deliberate liars or stupid. To me, it reads the same way any us-versus-them grifter message does, which is unfortunate because a couple years ago I would watch all her videos. That was back when she would just explain physics concepts and trash talk quantum computing.
by jruohonen | 2025-08-22 04:13:41+00:00
And, of course, the solution proposed is to bring more AI and "AI literacy" even though:

"Still, 40% of the more than 2,000 teachers polled say they don't use AI at all. And more than half believe weekly use of AI by students would decrease their ability to think independently and critically."

"Another recent survey by Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures found that nearly half of Generation Z students think AI will hurt their ability to think about information carefully."
by 747fulloftapes | 2025-08-22 04:13:45+00:00
A late 90s Trinitron would have been 4:3, so 1280x1024. I found it more important to run a trinitron at the native resolution for the shadow mask. Otherwise things got blurry and gross. A bit like using an LCD at its non-native resolution where things get unevenly stretched and squished.

I seem to remember my Sony G220 had a native resolution of 1024x768 and I could run it up around 100Hz. I think the max was 1600x1200@60Hz.

Often my maximum refresh rate was limited by my graphics card's dot clock rather than the CRT specs.
by Fr0styMatt88 | 2025-08-22 04:16:35+00:00
I primarily work in C# during the day but have been messing around with simple Android TV dev on occasion at night.

I’ve been blown away sometimes at what Copilot puts out in the context of C#, but using ChatGPT (paid) to get me started on an Android app - totally different experience.

Stuff like giving me code that’s using a mix of different APIs and sometimes just totally non-existent methods.

With Copilot I find sometimes it’s brilliant but it’s so random as to when that will be it seems.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-22 04:18:21+00:00
I used to get the print edition of The Economist. It really does feel a lot different from browsing reddit/HN/etc.

* You're reading in a linear format. Fewer distractions.

* No tabsplosion. No clickbait titles.

* Little to zero internet drama.

* You're leaned back on the couch instead of hunched over a computer or phone.

* You're closer to reading about a random/representative sample of what's going on in the world, as opposed to the "dog bites man" internet story of the week. Fewer breathless takes on everything.

The nice thing about a print magazine is that it actually does its job of giving you a break from your day, instead of turning into a distraction timesuck. It's easy to put down after reading an article or two that strikes your interest.

Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 04:20:30+00:00
Tell that to Reddit. They’re AI translating user posts and serving it up as separate Google search results. I don’t remember if Reddit claims copyright on user-submitted content, or on its AI translations, but I don’t think Reddit is paying ad share like X is, either, so it kind of doesn’t matter to the user, as they’re (still) not getting paid, even as Reddit collects money for every ad shown/clicked. Even if OP did write it, an AI translated the version shown.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44972296
by dang | 2025-08-22 04:20:31+00:00
Oh for sure you can talk about this, it's just a question of how you do it. I'd say the key thing is to actively guard against coming across as personal. To do that is not so easy, because most of us underestimate the provocation in our own comments and overestimate the provocation in others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This bias is like carbon monoxide - you can't really tell it's affecting you (I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us), so it needs to be consciously compensated for.

As for those other comments - I take your point! I by no means meant to pick on you specifically; I just didn't see those. It's pretty random what we do and don't see.
by dcre | 2025-08-22 04:21:32+00:00
The other commenter is more articulate, but you simply cannot draw the conclusion from this paper that reasoning models don't work well. They trained tiny little models and showed they don't work. Big surprise! Meanwhile every other piece of evidence available shows that reasoning models are more reliable at sophisticated problems. Just a few examples.

- https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

- https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

- https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/google-deepmind-earns-gol...

Surely the IMO problems weren't "within the bounds" of Gemini's training data.
by d0mine | 2025-08-22 04:22:42+00:00
The whole premise of uv that you don't need to know that you can install specific python version using eg pyenv (`uv python install` or `uv run` may do it implicitly), you don't need to know about `python -m venv`/virtualenv (`uv venv`), or how to create lock files pip-tools / pipenv / poetry / etc(`uv lock`), or pipx (`uv tool install`) or `pip install`/ `pipenv install`/`poetry add` / many others (`uv add`), or how to build artifacts setuptools / hatchling / poetry way / etc (`uv build`). Other commands such as `uv sync` didn't break new ground too.

`uv format` is similar (you don't need to know about `ruff format` / black / yapf ).
by mulmen | 2025-08-22 04:23:07+00:00
To be clear women gained the right to have bank accounts in 1974.

American Indian parents didn't gain the right to decide on their children's schooling until 1978.

The recency of these atrocities never ceases to surprise me. It's incredible how long we keep up barbaric practices and then how quickly they finally come to an end.

Marriage equality in the United States is only 10 years old. Anyone remember the debates as recently as the early 2010s? How many of us have high school diplomas older than any gay marriage certificate in the United States of America? It's absolutely ridiculous to look at arguments made barely over a decade ago about a thing that is now completely normalized and benign.