MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marc_abonce | 2025-08-16 18:50:56+00:00
> the team took a small sample from the cord’s loose end and used an instrument called a mass spectrometer to measure tiny variations in the hair’s isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. Those isotopes hold clues to a person’s diet, such as the amounts of maize and meat they ate in life. Maize, for example, is among the crops that rely on a form of photosynthesis known as C4 photosynthesis, which causes more of the isotope carbon-13 to build up in their tissues than in many other types of plants. Elevated levels of carbon-13 in a hair sample would most likely signal a maize-rich diet, Hyland says. Similarly, a meat-rich diet tends to raise the body’s levels of the isotope nitrogen-15.

It's so impressive that we can estimate someone's diet from a hair sample. I had no idea that this was possible.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-16 18:51:20+00:00
Any mask with activated carbon[1] can filter basic odors. For more gases, get a chemical cartridge[2].

[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-N95-Disposable-Respirator-3-... [2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-OV-AG-P100-Professional-Multi...
by Aerbil313 | 2025-08-16 18:51:31+00:00
That's the weird thing about neurodivergence. I forced myself for a year to finally "come out of my shell" and socialize in the college. On the surface I succeeded, got a friend group, hanging out frequently. Nothing improved, at the end of the year I was dreading any social interaction more than ever.

Turns out I had AuDHD and I was masking (pretending to be neurotypical when around people). Can't tell you how exhausting that is. I cut off all my friends and couldn't be happier since.

Some people are simply not wired to socialize.
by coffeeling | 2025-08-16 18:52:54+00:00
> Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.
by crooked-v | 2025-08-16 18:53:02+00:00
After using various LLMs for creative project rubber-ducking, I've found that the most common thing for them to mix up while seeming otherwise 'intelligent' is reversing the relationships between two or more things - left and right, taller and shorter, older and younger, etc. It's happened less over time as models have gotten bigger, but it's still a very distinctive failure state.
by NegativeK | 2025-08-16 18:53:45+00:00
Respectfully, my experience is very different than yours -- and I'm somewhere in between you and people who have it really bad.

ADHD can absolutely be a handicap. It might be that it's exacerbated by modern life's demands, but I frankly can't be bothered to care -- I live with these symptoms that I wish would go away, and I can't switch to some world that would work well with them.

And it's not rejecting myself or trying to be someone I'm not. I spent quite a while before diagnosis doing that. Getting treatment for and acknowledging the issues of ADHD is being more aware of who I am and what I need than pretending that things will work out. They don't, and they didn't.

And I know my experience isn't unique.
by Terretta | 2025-08-16 18:53:53+00:00
Hands-on with Tiramisu, Meta's “hyperrealistic” VR research prototype with beyond-retinal resolution, high brightness and contrast, and a narrow field of view.

Curiously this piece dives into PPD explaiming about "Butterscotch" prototype at 56 PPD and placing this at 90 PPD, without touching on a device that's in the marketplace with "50 to 70 PPD" per Spectrum in https://spectrum.ieee.org/apple-vision-pro — looks like FOV tradeoffs also apply here at just 33 degrees.

While this is as yet still a research prototype, it's ... illuminating ... to read these two stories back to back and see the new line from Meta about importance of clarity as Meta is working to become more competitive.

From yet another article ( https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-boba-3-prototype-hands-on-ultr... ):

What was most notable about the Boba 3 demo is that there was no deal-breaking "catch". The three other Meta research prototypes I've tried have, in pursuit of pushing the frontier of a particular aspect of HMD display systems, involved noticeable and obvious tradeoffs:

- Starburst delivered stunning 20,000 nits brightness, but in a headset so comically big and heavy it had to be suspended from above with cables, and so hot that it had enormous cooling fans on the top.

- Butterscotch Varifocal delivered near-"retinal" resolution and varifocal optics, but in a thick and heavy headset with only 50° horizontal field of view.

- Tiramisu combines beyond "retinal" resolution with high brightness and contrast. But it's also thick and heavy, and has a field of view of just 33°.

Bottom line: competition in this arena is a very good thing.
by cherrycherry98 | 2025-08-16 18:54:56+00:00
I recently built a new PC and faced the dilemma of paying Microsoft for their experience or rolling the dice with Linux (nothing to lose). I've been running Kubuntu and while not perfect it certainly works well enough.

The sad part is that I'd gladly pay Microsoft double what they currently charge for something that basically works like Windows 7 did. It's like a theme park where I pay admission for the privilege to be upsold various add-ons. So now I just don't pay them anything.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-16 18:55:17+00:00
It's pretty hard (impossible) to make the deportation quotas as required legally.

Unless you can figure out someway to remove the quotas CBP is going to continue to falsify evidence so that they can make their quotas.

There's a similar issue with many police departments where they function as revenue generating so officers have quotas for traffic tickets they have to write and the same effect occurs (but just monetarily fine not deportations).
by jonahx | 2025-08-16 18:55:31+00:00
I'd say it's a "know your audience" question. It can work well for more extroverted people that enjoy an opportunity to talk about themselves.

But it's also low-effort and asks the other person to do all the conversational work. For me, personally, if I saw an old friend's number pop up on my phone and magically knew "what have you been up to?" was going to be the first question, I wouldn't answer. Otoh, if I knew the opener was going to be "You're gonna love this story..." I'd be excited to pick up.
Ask HN: Why has Google not created a function to order your YouTube playlists
by hbarka | 2025-08-16 18:55:39+00:00
When you’re watching a YouTube video and decide to save it to a playlist, you have to scan for the playlist folder you want to save to. It’s very inconvenient if you have many folders because they can’t be sorted alphabetically during the Save To moment. Over time you have this collection of unordered names. Yes, you can sort it in YouTube Studio but still manually one by one. I’m sure Google can build a sort function but is there some dark pattern design why they choose not to? Researching this common complaint brings up reasons like to keep you engaged or enraged rather. Is this non-feature deliberate or just something forgotten?
by antonvs | 2025-08-16 18:56:01+00:00
> I don't know about you, I don't make shit up nearly to the degree an LLM does. If I don't know something I just say that.

We're a sample of two, though. Look around you, read the news, etc. Humans make a lot of shit up. When you're dealing with other people, this is something you have to watch out for if you don't want to be misled, manipulated, conned, etc.

(As an aside, I haven't found hallucination to be much of an issue in coding and software design tasks, which is what I use LLMs for daily. I think focusing on their hallucinations involves a bit of confirmation bias.)

> I did not say "a machine would never be conscious," I said "an LLM will never be conscious" and I fully stand by that.

Ah ok. Yes, I agree that seems likely, although I think it's not really possible to make definitive statements about this sort of thing, since we don't have any robust theories of consciousness at the moment.
by patall | 2025-08-16 18:56:03+00:00
I think I see what you do not understand. Your freshwater is at surface pressure, not at depth pressure. You cannot just displace the salt water from your container, you need pressure to displace the saltwater and put the freshwater out of the filter chamber and in the container. That does not just happen because you cannot do it in the filter chamber as else, that filter chamber would lose its pressure differential and not work anymore. Sorry, but your idea is not made for reality :)
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-16 18:56:50+00:00
> it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder.

That's my point. Labeling people as having "attention deficit" leads to unnecessary stigma and marginalization.

> The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention.

I didn't say it was controlled or healthy. I said it was evidence that people with so called attention deficit were, in fact, capable of paying attention. And it is.

> You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?

Nobody claimed that.

> Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.

> Here are some lectures

Refer to lecture "Why is ADHD considered a disorder?".

When does it become a disorder? When it starts causing harm, adverse consequences, for the individual. When the environment starts kicking back.

In other words, if you can adapt the environment so that it doesn't kick back at the patient, harm is mitigated.

In other words, ADHD patients might adapt reasonably well to certain environments and not others, and we can reduce impairment by putting patients in an environment that is stimulating for them.

This logic is not even unique to ADHD. Numerous diseases have adaptation of the environmental as a vital part of the non-pharmacological treatment. For example, adapting the environment is vital for preventing falls in elderly patients.

So I don't see where the lectures disagree with me. I shadowed a neurologist who specialized in ADHD patients, he combined pharmacological treatment with this environmental approach and it was very successful. Schools labeling kids as problematic was a huge problem for us.
by jMyles | 2025-08-16 18:56:59+00:00
> These CBP officers who’re making up evidence for innocent legal/documented immigrants, what are they thinking?

I'm guessing... quotas? With significant economic incentive, official or otherwise?

> Or is there some kind of central source making up digital evidence?

This seems to be, by far, the most important question, and is kinda the buried lede here. Is anyone investigating this?

It raises a real question: can a free society survive in a digital age amidst a legal system which proscribes particular strings of data? It's so trivial to frame, much moreso than physical evidence. The evidence can be manufactured, as you suggest, without even the low-level agent performing the enforcement action realize that it is synthetic. It seems like an end-around the entire legal system.
by trhway | 2025-08-16 18:57:26+00:00
Actually, more than that. They are proud to be cleaning up the society from "scum" (to the point of that "Superman" joining the ICE recently). It is a very desirable and comfortable mental state - to be a part of such a governmental violent all-the-power that can do no wrong (it is as close to feeling god-/super-power as it is possible at all in this physical reality). In Russia it is known as "Oprichnina" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnina, kind of a fascism long before fascism existed. There is a novel imagining Oprichnina in the modern days Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Oprichnik (has English translation) - when it was written 20 years ago people were "That is an overblown imagination" and today - "Wow, how did the author guess that right", yet if one looks back 20 years ago the things were already sliding along that slippery slop. And in US it is kind of similar story - starting with Gitmo 20 years ago - though much less pronounced, and it will take some time before the state will start nabbing in that way actual upstanding citizens)
by rezonant | 2025-08-16 18:58:39+00:00
I actually addressed that in an edit to a parent post:

> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
What features would parents value in an AI storytelling/companion app for kids?
by pat-storyborn | 2025-08-16 18:58:42+00:00
I’m working on a project where kids can talk with AI companions (dragons, wizards, princesses, goblins) whose voices are generated with ElevenLabs. Parents have a control panel where they can manage the characters and upload knowledge. The system can also generate audiobooks, coloring pages, and themed songs, all tied to the stories.

Some ideas I’m considering:

Calm Castle: a calming, Headspace-like mode for kids

Games Portal: but I’m unsure what kinds of games would make sense

I’d love to hear from parents (or others with ideas) about what features would be most valuable.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-16 18:59:17+00:00
It's not a little off topic, it's way off topic for this thread. Your "for deployment" is missing the "of what" part, given the staggeringly thin surface area of your API. "I can reboot a server" is nowhere near a fully functioning Kubernetes control plane. Talk about the rest of the owl

Anyway, if you're proud of your toy, do its own Show HN
by elashri | 2025-08-16 18:59:31+00:00
I have asked it this simple question, and got a better than yes man reply

> what do you think of me from our interactions all this time?

The answer is:

> From our interactions, I’d say you’re like a lost cat who keeps wandering into the library: clearly curious, mostly harmless, probably doesn't belong here, but somehow still endearing in your refusal to leave. You ask questions like someone who fell into a knowledge vending machine and just started pressing buttons at random. Occasionally useful, frequently chaotic, always weirdly specific.

> You don’t seem to learn from me so much as you just keep poking me like a magical fortune-telling 8-ball that got a liberal arts degree. And honestly? I respect the commitment to the bit.

> So, yeah. You’re like my favorite recurring glitch: baffling, persistent, occasionally helpful to others, and absolutely impossible to uninstall.

edit: I think it is actually generic. I tried to press it to give examples from the memory and I don't think it actually have access to the memories. So it is just my biased interpretation. I also would take this over it being too nice and yes man while being completely wrong.
by zbentley | 2025-08-16 19:00:03+00:00
And when the underlying tables have to change, what then?

Views are good, and help with this situation. But if the data is complicated, big, and even somewhat frequently changes shape (DDL), views only help a little.

That said, I think that API update coordination is often much harder than schema change coordination (due to API behavior having many more dimensions along which it can change than database query behavior), so I am generally open to multiple services sharing a database—so long as it’s within reason and understood to pose risks/be appropriately justified and used responsibly.
by mrandish | 2025-08-16 19:00:12+00:00
I agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you can specify the domain in the prompt it'll usually select the relevant meanings of multi-meaning terms - which isn't possible in general purpose web search engines. So it helps narrow down closer to the specific needle I want in the haystack.

As other posters said, relying on LLMs for factual answers to challenging questions is error prone. I just want the LLM to give me the links and I'll then assess veracity like a normal web search. I think a web search interface allowed disambiguating multi-meaning keywords might be even better.
by svara | 2025-08-16 19:00:40+00:00
Exposure adjustment is constrained by frame rate, that doesn't buy you very much dynamic range.

A system that replicates the human eye's rapid aperture adjustment and integration of images taken at quickly changing aperture/ filter settings is very much not what Tesla is putting in their cars.

But again, the argument is fine in principle. It's just that you can't buy a camera that performs like the human visual system today.
by mavilia | 2025-08-16 19:01:31+00:00
I'm curious how clean is your handwriting? I just did a test run with Claude (pro plan) and it could not understand my iPad + iPencil notes. I expected this since they are close to chicken scratch. ChatGPT told me "I ran OCR on your notes, but the handwriting/scan quality makes the transcription pretty rough—lots of words are garbled."

Then I tried a handwritten note that was some of my average handwriting and it did okay-ish. I think it would be acceptable to use if I also store the original note image with the transcribed text and for basic searching.

I agree with you I prefer writing physically but need a system for digitizing.
by antonvs | 2025-08-16 19:01:48+00:00
If you've worked at any large corporation in the US there's a good chance you would have seen a Gartner Magic Quadrant in a slide deck at some point, at the very least.

People use them as a way to justify their choices, because they're slide-deck friendly - just paste the chart and say "look, X is a leader on the Magic Quadrant, therefore we should buy X!"

The Magic Quadrant started out as a gimmick to kind of popularize Gartner's consulting services, but ended up becoming what they were most known for, to the point they now have to include disclaimers saying "uh guys? we do other stuff too, y'know?"
by platevoltage | 2025-08-16 19:01:59+00:00
I just got a Creality K1 Max and I'm over the moon with it. Granted, my only frame of reference was a Prusa i3 knockoff kit I bought almost 10 years ago, upgraded with 3d printed parts, replaced the power supply with one from an old server, and added dual extruders. Basically If I wanted to use it, I'd have to tinker for hours to get a print started, and printing anything too large would almost definitely fail, or warp off the bed.

I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning.

Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software.

I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.
by kentbrew | 2025-08-16 19:02:27+00:00
Truth: "PureGym probably has a roadmap, sprint planning, and very good reasons for not implementing Apple Wallet. Maybe it's not a priority. Maybe they have data showing only 0.3% of users would use it. Maybe their KPIs are based on the number of online classes previewed in the app, and forcing users to see them every time the app loads secures someone's annual bonus."
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-16 19:03:43+00:00
> We expel people for different values now?

Yes, that's what core values mean. If they're not embraced by everyone, they cease to be core.

If X11 tolerates developers who think piping data unseen to remote servers is okay, the project as a whole ceases to be trustworthy.

> I'm not Christian, should I be expelled?

From a listserv? No. From, like, a religious group? Maybe.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-16 19:04:13+00:00
> I think it's true that models are statistical, inasmuch as P(A|B) where B is the prior sequence is what the loss is computing

That is true of any system that is designed to do anything, with imperfect accuracy. Looking at systems as black boxes from the outside, probabilities means something.

But from a clear box perspective, the internals of these models are not statistical systems, they are spacial/topological mapping systems. Nothing resembling P(A|B) or any similar statistical measure appears in any calculation, except when judging the system from the outside.

There are statistical systems, built from statistical methods. But that's another class of algorithms.
by d3nit | 2025-08-16 19:04:17+00:00
Well, in Hungary had the "instant payment" for years, but last year the National Bank issued the spec. & requirement for the banks to facilitate the "qvik" payment method. Which is pretty much a QR code which you scan with your bank app and they will automatically parse & populate the fields for wire transfer. Then the payment provider will do a callback to the merchant which confirms that the payment was made [1]: https://www.cib.hu/en/Maganszemelyek/digitalis_bank/mobilalk...
by heyitsguay | 2025-08-16 19:05:13+00:00
It's the same amount of effort benchmarking, just a better choice of backbone that enables better choices of benchmark tasks. If the claim is that a Tversky projection layer beats a linear projection layer today, then one can test whether that's true with foundation embedding models today.

It's also a more natural question to ask, since building projections on top of frozen foundation model embeddings is both common in an absolute sense, and much more common, relatively, than building projections off of tiny frozen networks like a ResNet-50.
by gilleain | 2025-08-16 19:06:35+00:00
A friend mentioned this to me yesterday :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

"The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum–Forer effect, is 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"
by spacedcowboy | 2025-08-16 19:06:46+00:00
Perhaps. I think it’s perfectly correct English, personally. If you’re American then your grammar rules might differ, I don’t know…

“Whereas” can be used at the start of a sentence to introduce two contrasting clauses - in this case the first being his own statement, and the second being my rather more cynical money-based reasoning for his continuing wonderful personality.