MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geokon | 2025-09-29 08:49:05+00:00
The original post was asking if he needs Chinese to "follow these Chinese scientific innovations". That would pretty much entail reading publications from Chinese scientists - which for the most part will be in English.

> It's consistent that guys in China discuss AI and OSS bugs in Chinese.

So if they internally at the lab/office talk in Cantonese or whatever seems irrelevant. If you want to work with Chinese researchers, then it's likely helpful to learn Chinese. But that wasn't the question

> Germans discovered chemical formulas in German, Soviets did metallurgy in Russian.

They published in German and Russian. Now-a-days they do not
by pfexec | 2025-09-29 08:49:09+00:00
AFAIK this is all based on hearsay. I rarely if ever have seen thin plastic bags "in nature", no one is chucking them out a moving car window.

Anyone who litters single-use bags is also littering other trash elsewhere, most people can be trusted to place them in a responsible place for rubbish.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which is often cited in defense of bag bans) is mostly Chinese trash.

Grocery bag bans are a feel-good distraction that makes no measurable environmental impact.

"Reusable" bags also have some fewer use cases for reuse; for example truck drivers are known to poop in the single use bags. Can't do that in a reusable bag.
by ArcHound | 2025-09-29 08:49:14+00:00
Good luck anon. I think you've nailed it in the last sentence.

For me it was liberating to realize that my life isn't that special and it's not a huge tragedy to lose it. I'll do what I can while I am here. Not even gods can ask me for more. And death doesn't take away all the things I did in the meantime.
by xandrius | 2025-09-29 08:49:28+00:00
You got to take a small toll on comfort if you want anything not backed by a huge evil corporation to have a chance.

Before it was Linux and now it's Ubuntu Touch, sure it's not perfect but it's a very much usable system which needs more people to try it out as their daily driver. I made the shift a month or so ago because I don't want to have to choose between two evils.
by Tade0 | 2025-09-29 08:49:31+00:00
> And there were no pensions to be had for those people well into the 1980s anyway, meanwhile everybody in those rural places knows everybody else since children...

Hailing from a much poorer country than Italy I can assure you, you can have everyone in on it.

I've spent four years in (northern) Italy and was impressed by the level of cleverness they displayed going around their overbuilt bureaucracy and tax system. It was both impressive and familiar really.

Not something normally admirable, but the Italian government (whichever might be in power at the moment) seems to think it's still 2005 or so and that the middle class will just take whatever is thrown at them.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-09-29 08:49:56+00:00
I agree there's tons of problems with journals as well, I think an entirely different system could probably be better. Even preprints with some sort of public facing moderated comments could be more effective.

However, I think this notion of a paper becoming "obsolete" if it isn't published fast enough speaks to the deeper problems in ML publishing; it's fundamentally about publicizing and explaining a cool technique rather than necessarily reaching some kind of scientific understanding.

>In the conferences I typically submit to (*ACL) the review quality is more consistent than in journals

I got to say, my experience is very different. I come from linguistics and submit to both *ACL as well as linguistics/cognition journals and I think journals are generally better. One of my reviews for ACL was essentially "Looks great, learnt a lot!" (I'm paraphrasing but it was about 3 sentences long, I'm happy for a positive review but it was hardly high quality).

Even in *ACL I find TACL better than what I've gotten for the ACL conferences. I just find with a slow review process a reviewer can actually evaluate claims more closely rather than review in a pretty impressionistic way.

That being said, there are plenty of journals with awful reviewing and editorial boards (cough, cough Nature).
by solid_fuel | 2025-09-29 08:50:15+00:00
That's a rather poor choice for an example considering Gemini Robotics-ER is built on a tuned version of Gemini, which is itself an LLM. And while the action model is impressive, the actual "reasoning" here is still being handled by an LLM.

From the paper [0]:

> Gemini Robotics 1.5 model family. Both Gemini Robotics 1.5 and Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 inherit Gemini’s multimodal world knowledge.

> Agentic System Architecture. The full agentic system consists of an orchestrator and an action model that are implemented by the VLM and the VLA, respectively:

> • Orchestrator: The orchestrator processes user input and environmental feedback and controls the overall task flow. It breaks complex tasks into simpler steps that can be executed by the VLA, and it performs success detection to decide when to switch to the next step. To accomplish a user-specified task, it can leverage digital tools to access external information or perform additional reasoning steps. We use GR-ER 1.5 as the orchestrator.

> • Action model: The action model translates instructions issued by the orchestrator into low-level robot actions. It is made available to the orchestrator as a specialized tool and receives instructions via open-vocabulary natural language. The action model is implemented by the GR 1.5 model.

AI researchers have been trying to discover workable architectures for decades, and LLMs are the best we've got so far. There is no reason to believe that this exponential growth on test scores would or even could transfer to other architectures. In fact, the core advantage that LLMs have here is that they can be trained on vast, vast amounts of text scraped from the internet and taken from pirated books. Other model architectures that don't involve next-token-prediction cannot be trained using that same bottomless data source, and trying to learn quickly from real-world experiences is still a problem we haven't solved.

[0] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini-robotic...
by t43562 | 2025-09-29 08:53:11+00:00
I couldn't say emacs developers have poor taste but I could say its' not my taste. I don't have to disrespect them. People think in different ways and get used to different things.

e.g. I might decide that some clothes, although well made and possibly even very fashionable, are not my taste. The superiority/inferiority of taste is something that insecure people focus on IMO. A tasteless thing would be something that doesn't seem to show any overall philosophy of design or something which is bombastic - it goes to town on some aspect at the expense of all others - there's a lack of balance. Even then, who cares?

If I wear a bright tomato-coloured suit because I like colour, why should that make me a bad person? It's only when other people have to accept your tastes because they work with you that they're going to moan about them.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-09-29 08:53:12+00:00
> Because we wrap one packet in another packet, and this overhead takes up space. And that's not good.

This is totally fine, because you must set the interface MTU in the first place. WireGuard is already running at 1420 and there is no problem with SMB over it despite all network participants having the default 1500. I'm get the whole 100Mbps SMB transfers over my connection over WireGuard and that's because I have only the two pairs in my UTP.
by steve_gh | 2025-09-29 08:54:00+00:00
There are estimated to be ~100k people employed in the JLR supply chain, mainly in the West Midlands with another ~60k jobs directly dependent on supply chain worker spending (source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn82edrrknjo). Many of the companies in the supply chain are heavily dependant on their JLR contracts. The UK Govt is looking at various options to ensure the supply chain don't go bankrupt because JLR have suddenly stopped buying. UK Givt is looking at how to support the Tier 1 supply chain, including options such as purchase of JLR parts to keep the factories working, and direct loans to the supply chain to keep their cashflow going.

From a strategic perspective, there is no way that any UK Govt could allow that sort of gutting of its manufacturing capabilities, especially given the current hybrid war with Russia.
by tim333 | 2025-09-29 08:54:42+00:00
I think that may be something that LLMs are lacking. They've got the make up a story bit but not the limbic system.

I've got a theory that the experience of consciousness is down to something like that - different systems in the brain interacting, like it being a bit of the brain that brings together info from the senses and memory recall and thinking outputs and then makes up a story/model of it.
by alexgieg | 2025-09-29 08:55:11+00:00
That's a misunderstanding of the intention of that provision. Back in the day slave owners had as many "votes" as they had slaves (the slaves themselves didn't vote), under the assumption they "cared for" those slaves and were representing them. This gave them immense political power.

To curb the power of slave owners the anti-slavery States managed to approve, against slave owners' interests, the rule their slaves didn't count as full votes. This way slave owners had less total votes, strengthening the abolitionist camp.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-29 08:55:16+00:00
Why are environmentalists generally mocked, while "counter-environmentalists" who complain about birds getting killed by windmills, the nasty chemicals in solar panels or EV batteries, or the extreme environmental cost of cotton tote bags(!) not greeted similarly?

My theory is that everyone knows they are lying and don't care about the environment and just want to attack the real environmentalists.

People point out that he's factually wrong but no one would argue that Trump is sacrificing green energy jobs and cheap clean energy for birds, because no one believes he actually cares in the first place.

But I'm open to other theories.
by pabs3 | 2025-09-29 08:55:32+00:00
The Aurora Store lets you access Play Store apps without having a Google account by using their shared accounts, it is recommended on GrapheneOS (a privacy/security Android fork).

https://auroraoss.com/

Of course government, banking, McDonalds and other apps ban non-Google versions of Android, so you might be stuck with either Google or Apple until lawmakers catch up with this situation.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
by ragebol | 2025-09-29 08:56:12+00:00
Interesting, the Simplifier dude. Curious when he and John Plant of Primitive Technology will meet with their content.

The tech tree both of these people have under their belt are huge, but the work Primitive Technology has to put in to get close to Simplifier's start is still huge. So much work required to get even a bit of metal.

Getting back to the level we're in as as society right now after a global catastrophe is going to a take quite a while. Some of the information to get going again is digital, so accessing might be impossible if things are bad enoguh
by lelanthran | 2025-09-29 08:58:09+00:00
> You can use C++ libraries from Rust.

I doubt it. You can use C libraries from Rust, and emit C libraries in C++.

> because they themselves don't want to learn a new thing or because they don't want their employees spending time learning a new thing.

Whining about others not wanting to learn when you could have learned how Rust FFI works is, really, hilarious :-)
by imiric | 2025-09-29 08:58:13+00:00
> You break up things when it makes sense, not for the sake of it.

I never claimed otherwise.

> Having to jump out of the code you're reading comes with its own downsides and tends to compromise maintainability where you are increasing the shallowness of your code (higher api surface).

I don't buy this argument. The code you're reading should do one thing according to what it says on the tin (the function name). When the code does something else, you navigate to that other place (easily done in most IDEs), and change contexts. This context change is important, since humans struggle with keeping track of a lot of it at once. When you have to follow a single long function, the context is polluted with previous functionality, comments, variables, and so on, not unlike the scope of the program at that point. If you're changing the code, it becomes easier to shadow a previous variable, or to change something that subsequent code depends on. Decomposing the large function into smaller ones avoids all of this.

As well as aiding in testability, which you conveniently ignored from my previous comment.

The criteria for determining what is "short" and "long" is subjective, of course, and should be determined by whatever the team collectively agrees on. But there should be some accepted definition of these.

> Stanford professor Jon Ousterhout

Eh, I'm not swayed by arguments from authority. Jon's opinion is as valid as mine or yours.
by goku12 | 2025-09-29 08:58:29+00:00
Thinking that you can litigate every matter of user freedom against two ultra-wealthy co-monopolies of mobile OSes is frankly short sighted, if not misguided. They throw around lots of money to lawyers, lobbyists and politicians on every case. They may not win every case. But they don't need to. Each case they win is a step forward for their ambitions of total device control and indefinite money grab. On the other hand, we need to win every case with meager resources to keep our freedoms. At best, this will slightly delay our inevitable surrender to corporate greed.

We really need to get off these abusive rent-seeking spyware platforms and go for something similar to how Linux distros or various BSDs work. The main hurdles are the hardware, drivers and essential applications like banking and transportation. The hardware is an even bigger problem than the OS platform itself. But this is getting desperate. We really have to start moving in that direction before we're left with nothing else.
by ok_dad | 2025-09-29 08:58:45+00:00
I said

> but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.

Which I assumed the person I was talking to originally would see, read, and understand to mean that their comment was rude but I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way.

Instead, a bunch of others jumped in to interpret it a different way. I don’t see how I supposedly have assumed malice when I literally said that the OP probably wasn’t being malicious in a slightly different way!
by antongribok | 2025-09-29 08:58:57+00:00
I know I'm going to sound crazy here, but there is one more alternative. How about: Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle?

I recently got a sewing machine for an unrelated project and around the same time I ordered it I had one of these cloth reusable bags rip, because I put too many heavy things in it. When I got the sewing machine, for practice I decided to see if I could fix the bag. It turned out to be surprisingly quick and easy. I didn't use any extra material besides the thread, and I believe the bag is much stronger now.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-29 09:01:38+00:00
> The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility.

Yes and no, it's a lot more nuanced. There can be higher fertility and the very low high and very high end of wealth, but it's also not consistent nor a solid link.

This article looked at as an well illustrated one to me:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...
by Gareth321 | 2025-09-29 09:02:20+00:00
> That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to. I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very chill.

I wish that were also my experience with Lemmy. Even the communities and posts not focused on American politics are often about American politics. Discussion quickly devolves into some pretty extreme (and often violent) leftwing American political rhetoric. I understand Piefed can block whole instances, so maybe I should try that before I give up.
by cowboy_henk | 2025-09-29 09:02:51+00:00
Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.
by alentred | 2025-09-29 09:03:35+00:00
Most of the time, as a regular user, I agree with having smarter ordering. And smarter all features for what its worth. Except when it doesn't work because of some corner case. In which case the "smart feature" becomes a kind of a leaky abstraction - now as a user I have to figure out how the machine works, so that I can trick into doing what I need.

Give the user an option: have both "by name" lexicographic ordering, make it default by all means, but also provide a way to switch to an alphabetical order one for power users. Same applies to other features.

It is disappointing that apps and even some Linux Desktops today take the flexibility away from users, in the name of usability. By all means, I like and benefit from all the smart features, and I want them and will keep the on by default, but leave me an option to do the simpler, dumber and more predictable things too, for the case when I need to fallback to it.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-09-29 09:03:38+00:00
Is this an intentionally offensive post?

> Collaboration is the reason why we are here, along with altruism and empathy. Autism drastically limits all three.

Autism does not reduce altruism. What are you trying to suggest by this? Autistic people are often the most altruistic people I know; going well above and beyond to help out (sometimes to a fault).

Autism does not reduce empathy. This is a common misconception due to difficulties with reading faces and theory of mind. Empathy is often felt extremely strongly.

Autism does not mean unable to collaborate. Here on HN of all places! The software world is full of asd people happily collaborating to do great things.

> at the cost of losing core human characteristics like altruism, empathy, and the potential for collaboration.

Ahh I get it now. The neurodivergent are not even properly human to you. Perhaps a little eugenics is needed to correct things?
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-29 09:04:10+00:00
He has a point.

Chinese work culture is pretty much 24/7 and extremely fast and reactive. It's not just 996, it's that something might pop up at any time on any day and you're expected to respond quickly.

That's one of the reasons why they blew European car manufacturers out of the water: Chinese manufacturers move and adapt massively faster. Before that it's one of the reasons why Huawei destroyed Western telecom companies.
by tpm | 2025-09-29 09:04:35+00:00
> They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things.

They don't have a national ID system though. Having a lot of different ID systems that are IDing other things for other purposes doesn't address this.

> My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns.

I don't know how this works in the UK but I do know a bit about how this works in other jurisdictions. The data in the current systems are there because there is a law that says what data is collected and for what purpose. You can't lawfully use it for a different purpose (there might be a loophole for public safety or whatever, but that would be an exception). Your organisation would break the law and the bosses could go to jail. But also, it was designed for one purpose and if you tried to use it for a different one, you would run into a lot of data quality issues.
by t43562 | 2025-09-29 09:04:49+00:00
I do understand the feeling. IMO it could be a bit of ageism. I think it's worse when the company (or team) management strategy is to keep everyone feeling insecure and seeing each other as competitors and potential enemies.

I also agree that you sensed the environment and avoided it and were probably right. When looking for a job this can be very dispiriting but then you occasionally do interviews where people are more friendly and secure and it reminds you that it is possible to find a reasonable place.
by username332211 | 2025-09-29 09:07:02+00:00
The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).

The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
by foxrider | 2025-09-29 09:07:50+00:00
People mourn general-purpose computing, because the writing is on the wall for future generations. The living room computer is dead, your average "normie" only has a phone, and maybe a tablet these days. What really opened my eyes to this is how kids I was teaching 3D printing design to were constantly asking if they can use a 3D printer with their phone. Laptops, desktops and servers are becoming more and more niche, and if we don't do anything it dies with our generation (or maybe a generation after that).
by imiric | 2025-09-29 09:08:04+00:00
Well, sure, but since every decision has tradeoffs, sometimes when arguing for or against a decision, it's easy for managers to side with the person they have more rapport with, who may or may not be correct, rather than decide on technical merits alone.

So, in some cases, it's more beneficial for the company to adopt a "best" practice, than to have engineers engage in arduous discussions, which can cause resentment and further problems within the team.

Needless to say, it's a delicate balance, which is why I wouldn't want to be a manager. :)
by robinsonb5 | 2025-09-29 09:08:09+00:00
Yosys doesn't do place-and-route - typically that part would be handled by nextpnr, and there's an experimental fork of that for Xilinx series 7 devices: https://github.com/openXC7/ (full toolchain)

It works well enough to build a working litex RISC-V SOC capable of running Linux, for the QMTech Kintex-7 325T board.

I don't think the Cyclone V project has got as far, but I could be wrong. (It kind of slipped off my radar after I realised I was spending way too much time on Discord and purged all but a very few servers to reduce my distractions.)
by DavidPiper | 2025-09-29 09:09:43+00:00
OP may be talking about cargo culting, but it actually just triggered two examples in my mind:

1. Someone who has only ever written code by tutorial, and has no idea of the architecture, performance considerations or usability implications of the code they're writing.

2. Someone who has got to a point in their career LLM Coding and is unable to write code without it because they don't understand what they're doing.

The problem occurs when one of these people:

- Is required to be good at the things they are not yet

- Proceeds as they always have because they are unaware of their skill gap

- (Optionally) gets promoted while things are still _just_ working

IME you hit these silent inflection points as a system begins to scale beyond the experience of the people involved. They survive for a while (Coyote time / the compass is still pointing north) until something happens (the whole thing falls off a cliff / starts to go south).