MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by larub_ | 2025-08-04 08:55:33+00:00
Smart moves for marketers who want to show up in AI results. Ever wonder how AI decides what to include in an answer? It’s not magic. It’s math. Reciprocal Rank Fusion is a method to combine searches into final ranked lists. Instead of focusing on the #1 result, it rewards the items that show up again and again, even if they’re ranked lower.
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-08-04 08:55:52+00:00
Me(2010 ish): Hey can I get my x-ray pictures before I leave?

Doc: No, there's no way to get pictures off of this computer

I had the pictures saved on a flash drive about 30 seconds after he left the room. They were using some awkward browser-based system where everything was served as an html page. It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills.Just a personal anecdote.
by ChrisGreenHeur | 2025-08-04 08:56:11+00:00
A better point is that the consumer 3d cards were created specifically because SGI was designing 3d machines the wrong way. It became obvious that the way to design a consumer 3d card was to create a small multithreaded chip that you could scale up and down based on the workload. SGI instead created special designs for every computer, sometimes multiple graphics board designs for every computer.

Sometimes (such as VICE in an O2) SGI would also put old processors in odd configurations inside new computers in the hopes they could offload things such as dvd decompression, but then drop dvd support before releasing the machine while keeping the hardware.

SGI was just very unfocused around 1998-2204 when this whole consumer 3d chip became realistic and they just refused to do things in a sane way. they even knew it but did it anyway. Betting the company on web servers instead.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-04 08:56:22+00:00
Good point - I also think we have a race to the bottom w.r.t housing. When homes were abundant one income could support a household (ish). Then we added more women to the workforce at the same time NIMBYism took hold and peer competition meant you needed two incomes. Then fewer people had kids and you needed two stressed out incomes without the expense (in time and money) of kids to support one. Hell, the “who’s hiring” thread sometimes has companies talking about massive overtime being expected, hard to raise a kid like that.

Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs…

(These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
by toyg | 2025-08-04 08:57:00+00:00
> It started with these scientific libraries.

I disagree. The scientific libraries were just one of many niches, and an awkward one at that. One could equally say "it started with xml libraries" or "it started with file-handling libraries" or "it started with http libraries" -- all of which were in the Standard Library very early, unlike the horrible-to-build numpy/scipy. All of these made the language popular initially across a number of different crowds. Numpy/scipy reached traction relatively late when Python was already well-established in niches like sysadmin, web, education, 3D, and many others. By 2001 we already had multiple web frameworks, Zope, even WSGI...

It is occasionally annoying how this or that crowd tries to appropriate Python's success, hence flattening its purposes and aims.
by linguae | 2025-08-04 08:58:52+00:00
In addition, NeXT had a successful pivot to selling a web server framework named WebObjects, which had many big-name customers such as Dell (which infamously abandoned WebObjects once Apple purchased NeXT due to the optics of having an Apple competitor’s web store backed by an Apple product).

It’s conceivable that had Apple not purchased NeXT, even though NeXT probably would’ve ended up getting purchased by another company, its technology would’ve likely lived on. Perhaps a 1998 or 1999 NeXT could have open-sourced the OpenStep API and WebObjects as a Hail Mary move…talk about a completely different “what if” path for the Linux desktop and server!
by Zealotux | 2025-08-04 08:59:26+00:00
I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.
by sky2224 | 2025-08-04 08:59:27+00:00
> Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.

I don't think this is true. If anything, we'd have ipads with no stylus. Steve Jobs was a visionary, but most importantly a good business man. It's not like everything that made the iPhone was in house and strictly an Apple invention. Apple was lucky in that it bought a company that had developed the multi-touch technology the phone so heavily relied on. Without that, the iPhone wasn't going to happen when it did.

Additionally, a lot was sacrificed to make the iPhone happen. People took some serious physical and mental tolls in order to help ship that product. Marriages crumbled. The pressure was ruthless.
by jupin | 2025-08-04 08:59:47+00:00
> Assuming everything is well behaved and you have a reasonable parser for PDF objects this is fairly simple. But you cannot assume everything is well behaved. That would be very foolish, foolish indeed. You're in PDF hell now. PDF isn't a specification, it's a social construct, it's a vibe. The more you struggle the deeper you sink. You live in the bog now, with the rest of us, far from the sight of God.

This put a smile on my face:)
by stdbrouw | 2025-08-04 09:00:03+00:00
Even so. I read a lot of reports about educational policy (and occasionally produce them) and even if there are only 2-3 major decision makers you'd expect the report to be read by various cabinet members of those decision makers, by committee members in parliament, by academics, by other teams or colleagues or institutions that would have liked to write the report in your stead or that produce "competing" reports, by folks at think tanks, and by journalists and politicians in general. Because the executive summary is almost always inlined in these kinds of reports, the intended audience is generally quite broad. I'm not saying that attaining only a couple hundred downloads of a report necessarily show that money was wasted on superfluous research, but it definitely can be an indicator of waste.

I think this is one of those things where you can really overthink it and convince yourself that "the report was read only once, by the one person who had to read it" is an ideal outcome, but really it isn't.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-04 09:00:12+00:00
the reports are written by people who are not in the same wage category. that is why they don't reflect the lived experiences of these people.

facts and experiences are two very different things. Despite wages going up, poor people can still experience hardship and the feeling of always missing out / having less. it's a matter of contrast, not numbers. And that contrast, that's formed by lived experiences, not some report numbers or percentages thrown around here n there.

Policies should aim to elevate lived experiences of people, not change some numbers here and there to make the facts more confortable morally -_-.
by joakleaf | 2025-08-04 09:00:13+00:00
I sort of agree... I do the same.

We also parse millions of PDFs per month in all kinds languages (both Western and Asian alphabets).

Getting the basics of PDF parsing to work is really not that complicated -- A few months work. And is an order of magnitude more efficient than generating an image in 300-600 DPI and doing OCR or Visual LLM.

But some of the challenges (which we have solved) are:

• Glyphs to unicode tables are often limited or incorrect • "Boxing" blocks of text into "paragraphs" can be tricky • Handling extra spaces and missing spaces between letters and words. Often PDFs do not include the spaces or they are incorrect so you need to identify gaps yourself. • Often graphic designers of magazines/newspapers will hide text behind e.g. a simple white rectangle, and place new version of the text above. So you need to keep track of z-order and ignore hidden text. • Common text can be embedded as vector paths -- Not just logos but we also see it with text. So you need a way to handle that. • Dropcap and similar "artistic" choices can be a bit painful

There are lot of other smaller issues -- but they are generally edge cases.

OCR handles some of these issues for you. But we found that OCR often misidentifies letters (all major OCR), and they are certainly not perfect with spaces either. So if you are going for quality, you can get better results if you parse the PDFs.

Visual Transformers are not good with accurate coordinates/boxing yet -- At least we haven't seen a good enough implementation of it yet. Even though it is getting better.
by lnsru | 2025-08-04 09:00:49+00:00
I am also there. Geographically I am in Germany. It’s a bit scary to think, that the same motherboard I design right now can be designed in other country 6 hours by car away for the half the price. And there is nothing special about me. The guy elsewhere will have similar education, same skills, same software and probably will be more hungry to work hard.
by graemep | 2025-08-04 09:00:52+00:00
That is all the more reason to make an effort to break the addiction. That is what people do with nicotine.

I do not know of any countries that have banned nicotine. Almost all countries banned sales to kids from a very long time ago, so that was not what changed.

One thing I remember from looking at the industry (I was an investment analyst back then) about 25 years ago, and from my own observations, is that there was a cultural change. Smoking became uncool, a mark of a lack of education. First in the west, and then later globally. Sales of more expensive brands declined, market share moved to cheap brands.

That motivated people to break their addiction and a lot of people gave up as a result. However, everyone with an addiction had to struggle to break it.

Maybe we need more support for people trying to break their social media addiction. Social media addiction anonymous? I guess it still feels like someone trying to give up smoking when everyone did it.

On the other hand, I would encourage you to try. I am very fond of quoting the serenity prayer, and this is something you can control (although its not easy).
by thiago_fm | 2025-08-04 09:01:00+00:00
Good luck for the fellow Americans that will pay up that 120%+ GDP/debt ratio, with 7% deficits and no spending cuts in sight.

The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes.

If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.
by yorkie | 2025-08-04 09:01:04+00:00
Thank you for your suggestion. I will update the examples on the landing page very soon.

By the way, I've already added a download page at https://m-creativelab.github.io/jsar-runtime/download.html. There, you can download the macOS application which allows you to open supported HTML files. You can also find sample HTML files here: https://github.com/M-CreativeLab/jsar-runtime/tree/main/fixt....
by antirez | 2025-08-04 09:02:05+00:00
LLMs also write good C, if well directed. My feeling is that this is not really about C or something inherent to Python (where I get not stellar results), but to the large low quality Python code bases that are out there. Basically my hypothesis is that, within the training set, there are languages with better examples and languages with worse examples. I found that to write better Python, prompt engineering goes a great length: especially stressing of not using not really needed dependencies, to write simple, avoid trivial asserts that are not really useful, and so forth.
by yorkie | 2025-08-04 09:02:31+00:00
I've added a download page at https://m-creativelab.github.io/jsar-runtime/download.html. There, you can download the macOS application which allows you to open HTML files. You can also find sample HTML files here: https://github.com/M-CreativeLab/jsar-runtime/tree/main/fixt....
by svara | 2025-08-04 09:02:53+00:00
Insightful and thanks for the comment, but I'm not sure I'm getting to the same conclusion as you. I think I lost you at:

> It's not just that all models are wrong and some are useful but that many models are useful but wrong. What used to be considered edge cases do not stay ...

That's not a contradiction? That popular quote says it right there: "all models are wrong". There is no model of reality, but there's a process for refining models that generates models that enable increasingly good predictions.

It stands to reason that an ideal next-token predictor would require an internal model of the world at last equally as powerful as our currently most powerful scientific theories. It also stands to reason that this model can, in principle, be trained from raw observational data, because that's how we did it.

And conversely, it stands to reason that a next-token predictor as powerful as the current crop of LLMs contains models of the world substantially more powerful than the models that powered what we used to call autocorrect.

Do you disagree with that?
by rikroots | 2025-08-04 09:04:07+00:00
I've shown a product on HN in both human-authored, and LLM-assisted, versions. Neither got traction. When I showed my human-authored submission to LLMs they summarised it as "not a good post likely to gain traction" because, basically "too British in tone". The initial attempt at generating post copy for the LLM-assisted version was surprisingly similar to the OP's critique. Maybe it would've gained more traction - but I hated it (far too boastful) so I told the LLM to pull back on the marketing crap and make it shorter.

Of course the most obvious response is that the product is too niche for general interest. Still, I'll stick to human-authored in the future because HN always needs more "British".
by account42 | 2025-08-04 09:05:17+00:00
It isn't inevitable. It's only inevitable if you care about timestamps being correct which for many users of those ABIs doesn't matter too much - they e.g. only care about relative time.

It also isn't strictly necessary until 2038 (depending on your needs for future timestamps) so you'd be creating problems now for people who might have migrated to something else in the 13 years that the current solution will still work for.
by ralfd | 2025-08-04 09:06:51+00:00
The Greek Tyrannis is often fitting:

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

> A tyrant (from Ancient Greek τύραννος (túrannos) 'absolute ruler'), in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means.[1][2] The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-04 09:07:07+00:00
> Had to install a daemon to power down the hard disks when not in use

It depends on the drives you buy, of course, but unnecessary spin-up/spin-down cycles will wear out drives faster. Many NAS drives will keep running intentionally for this reason. If the drives didn't spin down by themselves, it's possible they weren't designed to start/stop that often.

My personal NAS solution is a combination of Debian (for stability and unattended updates) with a motherboard that's in low-power mode, with ZFS + the usual software for accessing the NAS installed. I could write a script that reboots the system based on /var/run/reboot-required but a monthly scheduled reboot works fine too.

In my experience, this setup rarely requires any maintenance. It's quite boring for a homelab project. Once every few years I need to upgrade to a newer version of Debian (last time I went from 10 to 11 to 12 in one go) but even that isn't much of a spectacle if you don't mess with non-Debian package repositories.
by pyrale | 2025-08-04 09:07:44+00:00
The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities.

[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
by astrange | 2025-08-04 09:08:05+00:00
There's nothing magic about "ARM" nor is it a single thing. ARMv8 is quite different from ARMv7 and was designed for the purpose of making desktop chips like the M1. But you can make something that good for any ISA if you design it well enough.

ARMv8/v9's main advantages over Intel are in security, not performance.
by andrewstetsenko | 2025-08-04 09:08:23+00:00
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by v5v3 | 2025-08-04 09:08:59+00:00
Airpods were many years ago, as was the MacBook pro redesign.

CEOs are judged on today. Past achievements are past achievements and he was paid handsomely for it.

Tim Cook is a money guy. Saving money by reducing per device licensing costs via creating own chips and also now their own modems is a money guys domain.

Hardware and software innovation is another skill.

Tim Cook wasn't appointed on his ability to innovate. But he needs to ensure he has individuals who can do so, and that there aren't layers of management or himself obstructing them.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-04 09:09:23+00:00
> You said in the comment above

How do you read “price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply” and get that?

Going back to the top, you claimed “riding [sic] salaries do not lead to inflation.” That is nonsense. Even if we ignore that rising salaries cause the money supply to increase through increased velocity, wealth effect and credit creation. (This is why when the economy is strong central banks raise rates to keep price levels stable. You have to destroy money to make up for the money being created by the private sector.)
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-08-04 09:09:51+00:00
This is probably one of the best, and maybe the most shot-in-the-dark responses I've received on hn to the point I wish I could upvote it multiple times. I was really expecting nothing at all.

I did skim read a few papers on the subject and honestly I'm wondering how this stuff even grows naturally, everything has to be so specific it just doesn't seem possible at all.
by thiago_fm | 2025-08-04 09:10:10+00:00
Yes it's still very good if you want to toy around with it. I did it and in the end I feel like I could do simple models and understand how it works.

If you want a job, it may not be what you need.

If you want to work with ML you likely need the PhD + get lucky.

Remember that the skillset for AI jobs != ML.

If you are interested on it because of AI, it's better to focus on LLMs and more NLP related fields.
by anonnon | 2025-08-04 09:10:29+00:00
> Does China today qualify as dictatorship?

It has many of the aspects of one, like authoritarianism and centralized control, which arguably could, in the right hands, yield superior outcomes. For example, being able to undertake and complete large infrastructures projects in an ambitious timeframe that would be strangled by political opposition (like NIMBYism or environmental objections) and bureaucratic red tape in the west. Munger was, unsurprisingly, also a fan of China's system.

Again, I'm not a fan of these systems, but pretending they always yield inferior outcomes is dangerous for western democracies, as it could lead to an underestimation of our rivals.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-04 09:11:10+00:00
The actual PDF is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w340...

From the conclusion:

(I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women.

It goes on:

""" It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the

youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also

been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have

risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as

seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover,

Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some

have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs.

There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the

Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA

that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well-

being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair.

They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old

in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high

school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well-

being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15

Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years

with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014

or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including

work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage

pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across

many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole

system is rigged anyway, so why try?"

This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the

mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more.

Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """
by setopt | 2025-08-04 09:11:54+00:00
The precise state of matter studied in this paper I think is unlikely to exist "naturally".

But yes there are states of matter that exist in nature but are just not obvious until you study them carefully in a lab. For example antiferromagnets exist in nature at naturally cold temperatures (see hematite), but unless you’re looking for them, they just look like normal nonmagnetic solids. Thus they were discovered millennia after ferromagnets.

But there are more exotic states that were first discovered in labs and later theorized to exist in nature, but that have not yet been proven. One example of such a theory is that a superconductivity-like state might occur naturally in neuron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity