MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philistine | 2025-09-03 14:34:48+00:00
The first thing to consider is that the island nation of Japan is geographically small. Small enough that a single satellite could serve the whole island with broadcast signal for satellite television.

Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.

That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
by cs702 | 2025-09-03 14:35:01+00:00
The OP claims progress in AI is stagnating. The author is, no surprise, Gary Marcus. Even if you tend to disagree with him, as I do, the OP worth reading.

My two cents: Progress in AI seems inevitable but its timing is unpredictable. There's no law in the universe guaranteeing that the rate of progress must be constant. It's possible that we will need new breakthroughs. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs do not come along on a nice, predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one.

Progress seems inevitable to me because the human brain is physical proof that an intelligent machine that consumes the same energy as an incandescent light bulb to power 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons is possible. Today's largest AI models, by contrast, consume many orders of magnitude more energy to power only around ~1 trillion interconnections, each with a parameter specifying its weight. We have a long way to go, but we now a human brain equivalent is physically possible.

Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 14:35:03+00:00
Okay, good, just making sure :) Fun to hear that at least some photo gear places are aware of ML!

I have done a stint in QA, as well as highly aggressive security testing against a big C codebase, so I too care a lot about quality. And you can do it in C, you just have to put in the effort.

I'd like to get Valgrind or ASAN working with our code, but that's quite a big task on an RTOS. It would be more practical in Qemu, but still a lot of effort. The OS has multiple allocators, and we don't include stdlib.

Re firmware / software, doesn't all software run on a device? So I suppose it depends what you mean by a device. Is a Windows exe on a desktop PC firmware? Is an app from your phones store firmware? We support cams that are much more powerful than low end Android devices. Here the cam OS, which is on flash ROM, brings the hardware up, then loads our code from removable storage, which can even be a spinning rust drive. It feels like they're firmware, and we're software, to me. It's not a clearly defined term.

The main reason I make the distinction is because we get a lot of users who think ML is like a phone rom flash, because that's what firmware is to most people. Thus they assume it's a risky process, and that the Canon menus etc will be gone. But we don't work that way.
by soulofmischief | 2025-09-03 14:35:04+00:00
Increasing the fidelity and richness of training data does not go against the bitter lesson.

The model can learn 3D representation on its own from stereo captures, but there is still richer, more connected data to learn from with stereo captures vs monocular captures. This is unarguable.

You're needlessly making things harder by forcing the model to also learn to estimate depth from monocular images, and robbing it of a channel for error-correction in the case of faulty real-world data.
by t0b1 | 2025-09-03 14:35:14+00:00
This is in relation to their TPCH benchmark which can be due to a variety of reasons. My guess would be that they can generate stencils for whole operators which can be transformed into more efficient code at stencil generation time while LLVM-O0 gets the operator in LLVM-IR form and can do no such transformation. Though I can't verify this because their benchmark setup seems a bit more involved.

When used in a C/C++ compiler the stencils correspond to individual (or a few) LLVM-IR instructions which then leads to bad runtime performance. Also as mentioned, on larger functions register allocation becomes a problem for the Copy-and-Patch approach.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-09-03 14:35:38+00:00
and acting like someone is being bigoted because you don't agree with the popular definition of a word is needlessly argumentative and works counter to any real issues.

Every woman I know IRL says "you guys" even when referring to a group of all women. There is no way you're going to convince me that is oppression. Like you said, language is ours to shape, and quite a few of us are shaping guy to be gender neutral.

This high on mighty attitude of pretending that not adhering to prescribed etiquette is oppression only serves to create more actual oppression. How do you expect someone to take your other viewpoints seriously when you're essentially shaming their accent?
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-03 14:35:57+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out - I guess I was a bit hasty with that source. It's not showing quite what I thought it was. Live data and percentages which can total more than 100%. Here is a better one that shows in 2023 solar was 4.7% of the overall electricity mix. And another source showing 5.2% in 2024.

[0] https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity

[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/news-and-resources/press-release...
by ale42 | 2025-09-03 14:36:13+00:00
For such an operation like an ownership registration for a washing machine, this is totally true. But for some things (e.g., asking details about an invoice) I need to speak to someone, not to fill a form I receive an answer to in 3 days (and possibly not what I need). I say this because some companies are actually removing the option to call them in the first point, or hide it so it's very hard to find the number to call.
by squigz | 2025-09-03 14:36:32+00:00
The loss of expertise does not mean the loss of a need for expertise. We'll still need experts. We'll also still need people who are... not experts. To that point...

> For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

There are lots and lots of programmers and other IT people who make a living that I wouldn't say fall into your first bucket.
Unconventional ideas based startup: seeking advice on early funding
by gsudhakar | 2025-09-03 14:36:44+00:00
I recently founded a company around a provisional patent I drafted myself. The invention is a queue-free parallel computation framework rooted in Sanskrit grammar and numeric transformations, with applications in HPC, ML, and hardware.

I have 27 US patents in systems software and have been working on this concept for more than a decade.

What is the most effective early path in this situation? Should I approach family offices, IP-backed lenders such as BlueIron, or global incubators? How can I frame an ask while keeping my preference for low visibility?

Any candid advice or introductions would be appreciated.

Website: www.spgamt.com
by Steltek | 2025-09-03 14:36:55+00:00
You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.

Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?

Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.
by the__alchemist | 2025-09-03 14:36:59+00:00
> Maybe I'm wrong and the market oversaturation has pushed most of positions "underground", where people get hired through their network, and the position is never advertised. It might also be due to me only looking in Trondheim, which is not really that big of a city (150k, but considerable technical market due to the biggest technical university in the country being located here).

100% of my empmloyer's hires are through connections, and we never hired juniors.
by infecto | 2025-09-03 14:37:04+00:00
You’re right that in the strict physics sense a battery doesn’t generate anything new. But in energy markets and system ops, classification is less about first principles and more about how resources interact with the grid. That’s why most ISOs/TSOs register a battery as both a load and a generator, it consumes on charge and supplies on discharge.

So when people talk about the “generation mix,” batteries get bucketed alongside gas, wind, solar, etc. Not because they magically create energy, but because from the grid operator’s perspective they look like a dispatchable generator when discharging.

It’s one of those cases where common-sense semantics (“it’s storage”) diverge from industry practice (“it’s modeled as generation”).

Please let me know what’s confusing.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-03 14:37:20+00:00
Possible, but I think unlikely. New languages already suffer this uphill battle because they don't yet have a community to do Q&A like entrenched languages; their support is the documentation, source code of implementations, and whatever dedicated userbase they have as a seed for future community. People are currently utterly reliant on community-based support like StackOverflow, and new languages continue to be born.
by aengelke | 2025-09-03 14:37:28+00:00
The paper is rather selective about the used benchmarks and baselines. They do two comparisons (3 microbenchmarks and a re-implementation of a few (rather simple) database queries) against LLVM -- and have written all benchmarks themselves through their own framework. These benchmarks start from their custom AST data structures and they have their own way of generating LLVM-IR. For the non-optimizing LLVM back-end, the performance obviously strongly depends on the way the IR is generated -- they might not have put a lot of effort into generating "good IR" (=IR similar to what Clang generates).

The fact that they don't do a comparison against LLVM on larger benchmarks/functions or any other code they haven't written themselves makes that single number rather questionable for a general claim of being faster than LLVM -O0.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-03 14:37:40+00:00
I'd say the framing is wrong. Do we call delivery drivers lazy because they take the highway rather than the backroads? Or because they drive the goods there rather than walk? They're missing out on all that traffic intersection experience.

Perhaps the issue of cognitive decline comes from sitting there vegetating rather applying themselves during all that additional spare time.

Although my experience has been perhaps different using LLM's, my mind still tires at work. I'm still having to think on the bigger questions, it's just less time spent on the grunt work.
by rhet0rica | 2025-09-03 14:37:55+00:00
Generally the matter is one of blood purity, as with all racism. Southern Spain, Italy, and Greece were all occupied at one time by Arabs, which contributed certain hair textures, skin tones, and facial features to the local gene pool. Those with no knowledge of history or civilization tend to be terrified of acknowledging the artistic and cultural contributions of al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. As you probably know, the northern reaches of Italy are more German than Romance, on account of those pesky invasive Lombards.

Of course the true absurdity of all this comes when two people from the same parents end up with different physiognomical and racial labels; since these traits are rarely as simple as idealized Mendelian characteristics, it is entirely possible for them to be passed on a couple of generations before re-coalescing. (The case of Summer on The Sopranos comes to mind—while her parents both have fairer skin than she does, the result is otherwise not all that unrealistic.)
by boesboes | 2025-09-03 14:37:59+00:00
Apparently we are all fish. Or fish don't exist.

To explain: if you want to define a taxonomy in which all things that look like fish and swim are 'fish' then we are too. We are more closely related to most 'fish' than sharks are. I.e the last common ancestor of herring AND sharks is older than our & herring's LCA.
by Bender | 2025-09-03 14:38:15+00:00
If you are saying that they should also be banned, I completely agree. The qualifiers should be based on sugar and low quality vitamins but of course that gets into the rabbit hole of things like real bread vs. highly processed bread a.k.a. WWII rations a.k.a. American bread. Real bread only contains three to five ingredients. Real foods are getting harder to acquire due to fake foods having a much higher profit margin and longer shelf life.
by nicoche | 2025-09-03 14:38:59+00:00
Yes definitely as an operator, you want to oversubscribe hosts. What I was mentioning is that there are still small benefits when an host is not full: the CPU gains _and_, for users, the fact that they're not paying/paying less (even though the operator is still paying for the full underutilized hypervisor, but hey, that's the game)
by theamk | 2025-09-03 14:39:14+00:00
I feel author has a pretty narrow view of the software one can write, I am still not sure what they mean by "app".

My first idea was that it could be an local application, as in win32/linux/macos binary with Qt. But then all those hoops to bypass limitations makes no sense - you make a config file and you are done, or you can discover other applications on same PC...

The other idea could be a an Android or iPhone app.. but then author started to talk about tailscale and I got confused - surely they are not running tailscale active _all the time_ on their phone?

So now I am maybe thinking author means a "web app", as in a page full of javascript. This explains a need for extreme hoop jumping - the browser sandbox is very strict. But then I can't understand why not do the discovery on backend, which has no restrictions?

this post has _a lot_ of background missing.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-09-03 14:39:17+00:00
This is the basically just the floor puzzle from Silph Co. in Pokemon Red and Blue, but without consequences for picking the wrong path. The floor puzzle was a very small part of the game, something that would add about 15 seconds to the gameplay. I don't think it'd work for a full game meant to engage the player for more than a few minutes total.
by athorax | 2025-09-03 14:39:50+00:00
Hank Green recently did a couple of videos on the topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On2V_L9jwS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C3lR3pczjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElpRJQ2FZiM
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-03 14:39:53+00:00
When Chrome started, it was the best because it introduced the process-partitioned model that allowed it to completely avoid a common failure-mode among its peer browsers at the time: one bug in the processing of one tab would crash the entire browser (a problem exacerbated by the existence of a now-defunct plugin ecosystem where third-party code was running inside the browser process; we basically don't do that anymore). That was becoming brutal on users as more and more of the work they did every day transitioned over to web-based.

The other browsers have picked up the partitioning since then as a feature so the playing-field is far more level.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-03 14:39:53+00:00
Not criticising the article or the decision to buy a new washing machine (20 years is a long time), but just noting that the old machine was likely fixable. If spare parts are even still available, that is. Whether it's deemed worth fixing is another matter.

This must be the case for so many discarded appliances these days, especially underengineered ones with common issues.

Also, not using the QR code protocols properly is a pet peeve of mine. I recently scanned one that was just a URL in plaintext (no web link protocol). If I was on an iPhone or using a simpler QR scanner, it would not work at all.
by driscoll42 | 2025-09-03 14:40:05+00:00
I looked into this a bit earlier this year. I'm mixed on it. While the FOSS in me wants it all open-source and available to use given that I'm basically labeling training data for them for free, and they are funded by donations/grants, I get value out of it for free.

My desire was to combine something like iNaturalist with BirdWeather for a bird tracker of audio and visual. BirdWeather does make it free which is great, but there's no great free API of iNaturalist quality for diverse bird tracking.

That being said, I am certain that if iNaturaist made their model public, tons of competitive apps would spring up and it'd be commercialized regardless of license immediately and would take people away from iNaturalist without giving iNaturalist anything in return.

Plus I know iNaturalist has issues with that they don't want autolabeled data uploaded as matched. They only want manually labeled data, which opening the API I'm sure would flood their server with ML labeled data. Which on the one hand, could be useful, but also a ton of noise.

I'm in favor of whatever option is most in line with keeping a long term success of a free, high quality plant/animal identifying app out there, and I don't know enough to take a definitive stance on that, and unfortunately those that do, probably have a vested interest in one of the outcomes.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-03 14:40:16+00:00
> Apple absolutely should be forced to allow alternate browser engines, presuming those browser engines are not Chromium/Blink based.

The last phrase still lets Apple gatekeep, and offer only the selected “fig leaf” alternatives it chooses.

Tuned:

Apple absolutely should be forced to allow users to choose alternate browser engines, and alternate apps in any category, by not using its App Store to gatekeep alternate implementations.

Or, if Apple chooses to continue curating choices on its app store, by allowing alternate app stores not under Apple curation to exist.

And any API that Apple uses for its own app implantations, must be available for alternate implementations.
by cj | 2025-09-03 14:40:17+00:00
Not sure what your system prompt is, but asking the exact same prompt word for word for me results in a response talking about "Zealandia, a continent that is 93% submerged underwater."

The 2nd example isn't all that impressive since you're asking it to provide you something very specific. It succeeded in not hallucinating. It didn't succeed at saying "I'm not sure" in the face of ambiguity.

I want the LLM to respond more like a librarian: When they know something for sure, they tell you definitively, otherwise they say "I'm not entirely sure, but I can point you to where you need to look to get the information you need."
by LosAlamosNerd | 2025-09-03 14:40:47+00:00
Really interesting idea. But breathomics seems tricky — breath signatures can shift with diet, time of day, stress, exercise, even the room you’re in. How do you think a stable baseline could be built across people (or even within one person) without very tight controls? Could this avoid the pitfalls that stalled other non-invasive diagnostics like urine or saliva tests?
by perihelions | 2025-09-03 14:40:50+00:00
Here's a long-form article on the same topic (the 19th century search for the spawning ground of eels)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-... ("Where Do Eels Come From?" (2020))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23265000 (56 comments)
by joenot443 | 2025-09-03 14:41:11+00:00
"SwiftUI red circle with a white outline 100px"

``` Circle() .fill(Color.red) .overlay( Circle().stroke(Color.white, lineWidth: 4) ).frame(width: 100, height: 100) ```

Is the mapping 1:1 and completely lossless? Of course not, I'd say the former is most definitely a sort of abstraction of the latter, and one would be being disingenuous to pretend it's not.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-09-03 14:41:39+00:00
> The ability to "run apps" was never even on the table in pre-iPhone era. iPhone, ofc, changed it by pioneering the app market

It was on the table, between the SymbianOS apps for Nokia or the various Java apps for other smartphones.

Meanwhile the first iPhone didn't even have 3rd party app support (or 3G capability) on release, it took around a year.

I'm not even sure I can give you the app market claim, though I presume you meant on the phone itself, rather than having to connect it to a PC ?

(Also whatever BlackBerry was doing ?)
by jve | 2025-09-03 14:41:50+00:00
For me, ChatGPT in some instances replace Google in a very powerful way.

Been researching about waterproofing techniques in my area. Asked chatgpt about products in my region. Gladly mentioned some, provided links to shop. Found out I need to prep foundation with product X. One shop had only Y available, from description felt similar.

Asked about differences between products. Provided me with summary table that was crystal clear that one is more of a finishing stuff and the other is more of a structural and can also be used as finishing. Provided me with links to datasheets that confirm the information.

I could ask about alternative products and it listed me some, etc. Great when I need to research unknown field and has links... that is the good part :)
by agos | 2025-09-03 14:42:34+00:00
I'm Just Ken (Barbie), Skyfall, Let it Go (Frozen), Remember Me (Coco), Happy (from Despicable Me 2), a Star is Born (Shallow), are all arguably wayyyyy more memorable and these are just off the top of my head. We've had quite a few memorable songs in soundtracks this millennium.

edit: I had forgotten about Jai Ho (Slumdog Millionaire) and Lose Yourself (8 mile)
by joenot443 | 2025-09-03 14:43:33+00:00
Sort of like when people argue about "what is art?", some folks find it clever to come up with the most bizarre of examples to point to, as if the entire concept rests on the existence of its members at the fringe.

Personally, I think if your farts are an abstraction that you can derive useful meaning from the mapping, who are we to tell you no?
by hn_throw_250903 | 2025-09-03 14:44:15+00:00
As someone who just replaced the bearings on a washing machine motor (carbon-commutator), I uhh… agree?

The old machines are absolute workhorse beasts and they can work indefinitely as brand new with some maintenance here and there.

However my expectation of people doing this are basically zero. So this is an anomalous post. By the time you write a blog post complaining about how a machine has a required IoT thing, you could have fixed a handful of issues short of soldering in new relays or triacs on the control board.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-03 14:44:16+00:00
No doubt that Google using their mainpage as a megaphone for the first time in the company's history made a difference.

... but that only got people in the door. What kept them in the door was this image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

... or, rather, the word-changing technology underpinning that image: the ability to sandbox individual page rendering instances into subprocesses so that a failure on one page didn't crash the entire browser. I think people sometimes forget how fundamentally unstable browsers were in 2008, and how easy it was to trip over one bad page that would bring down your bank tab, your email tab, your document tab, the three tabs of source code you had open, the seven tabs of unread blogposts... Hugely disruptive. Just didn't happen in Chrome.

Firefox popularized tabs, Chrome let us have a hundred of them open.