MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-09-11 09:00:41+00:00
> What is actually new lately, in my experience, is that AI tools are a huge help for situations where you don't have either Type 1 or Type 2 knowledge of something

IMO, this is the whole point of the article: AI tools "help" a lot when we are completely uninformed. But in doing that, they prevent us from getting informed in the first place. Which is counter-productive in the long term.

I like to say that learning goes in iterations:

* First you accept new material (the teacher shows some mathematical concept and proves that it works). It convinces you that it makes sense, but you don't know enough to actually be sure that the proof was 100% correct.

* Then you try to apply it, with whatever you could memorise from the previous step. It looked easy when the teacher did it, but when you do it yourself it raises new questions. But while doing this, you memorise it. Being able to say "I can do this exercise, but in this other one there is this difference and I'm stuck" means that you have memorised something.

* Now that you have memorised more, you can go back to the material, and try to convince yourself that you now see how to solve that exercise you were stuck with.

* etc.

It's a loop of something like "accept, understand, memorise, use". If, instead, you prompt until the AI gives you the right answer, you're not learning much.
by vbilopav | 2025-09-11 09:00:51+00:00
What an awful query example! This should and is simple. Here:

select jsonb_build_object( 'title', title, 'genres', genres, 'actors', json_agg( jsonb_build_object( 'name', actor_name, 'characters', actor_characters ) ), 'directors', directors, 'writers', writers ) from ( select t.primaryTitle as title, t.genres, actor_person.primaryName as actor_name, array_agg(pc.character) as actor_characters, array_agg(director_person.primaryName) as directors, array_agg(writer_person.primaryName) as writers from title t left join principal actor on t.tconst = actor.tconst and actor.category = 'actor' left join person actor_person on actor.nconst = actor_person.nconst left join principal_character pc on actor.nconst = pc.nconst and actor.tconst = pc.tconst left join principal director on t.tconst = director.tconst and director.category = 'director' left join person director_person on director.nconst = director_person.nconst left join principal writer on t.tconst = writer.tconst and writer.category = 'writer' left join person writer_person on writer.nconst = writer_person.nconst where t.tconst = 'tt3890160' group by t.tconst, actor_person.primaryName, t.primaryTitle, t.genres, actor.ordering, director_person.primaryName, writer_person.primaryName order by actor.ordering asc ) main group by title, genres, directors, writers;

Here: https://i.postimg.cc/zB1Bgg1L/movies.png
by mikae1 | 2025-09-11 09:01:09+00:00
> something with lower effort would be welcome

This is a major reason I ended up with https://getaurora.dev. I layer a few things, but it comes with bells and whistles (like NVIDIA drivers, if you need that).

I can't see myself going back to a "normal" distro. I don't want to spend time cosplaying a sysadmin, I have things to do on my computer.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-11 09:01:16+00:00
A sad thing about these kinds of economic backfires through incompetent, ideological showboating is that Trump could order them in such a way that they utterly ruin the domestic economy, cause massive job losses and miseries for his blue collar base, and these people would still continue to support him while swallowing much of his blame game about the cause of the problems being something else even after years of suffering. People tend towards enormous ideological stickiness when admitting mistaken loyalty means feeling stupid for having condoned its excesses.

I can't count the number of third world countries where local politicians, in power for decades sometimes, depend on exactly the above rules. They abuse their systems in the same ways, say similar lies to their supporters, and keep winning enough votes to stay in power for years or even decades.

The same has been the case of certain democrat and republican party machines in major US cities that went utterly to shit across many election cycles in which the same ideological bases kept winning. It's just a shame that it has to happen at a national level now with similar results brewing.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-11 09:02:06+00:00
You've now watered down your frankly crazy statement of "Nazis were socialist, actually" to "Nazis and socialists a group of people that make policies to improve the wellbeing of that group". This fits every single other form of governance, outside of anarchy or extreme versions of libertarianism.

There's absolutely no good reason to ever make the statements you've made, outside of trying to make Nazis look better.
by dragonelite | 2025-09-11 09:02:08+00:00
I think its only the US that's an outlier in the west.

Here in the Netherlands your biometrics are registered with your ID card. Anyone that has gotten a new dutch ID card pretty much had to scan their fingerprints. Your bank account is also linked to your ID card etc. Reporting of big amounts is also standard practice in the west Europe. Know people that had to work on those system.

Also you don't want foreign money being able to transact freely its a disaster recipe to get regime change going. Especially a country like Vietnam that could be used as a battering ram against China. Which makes it a prime target for western NGOs.
by arethuza | 2025-09-11 09:02:14+00:00
Obviously I know nothing about navigation - but is relying on AIS a good idea, I was surprised the other week to observe quite a large vessel in the Firth of Forth that looked unusual so I checked an app that uses AIS and it didn't show it. However, what it did show that it was surrounded by three tugs - which I hadn't noticed at first. I concluded that it was being towed by the tugs and wasn't powered up (or whatever the nautical term is) and therefore didn't show in AIS? No idea if that is correct or not.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-11 09:02:14+00:00
I mean, clearly it wasn't an _ideal_ outcome, and at least in theory it could have skipped the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. But also, clearly, after those (and, really, even during Napoleon) it left the average French person in a far, far better place than they would have been under the near-feudalism of the old system.

Very few countries get out from under totalitarianism without significant bloodshed. The US had its revolution and civil war. The UK had a bunch of civil wars. Germany had _both World War 1 and World War 2_ (it didn't take the first time). You could call the Reign of Terror actually comparatively mild; it only killed about 25,000 people, so far fewer than the comparables.

I do wonder if the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is the big glaring _exception to the rule_, revolution-wise, and also the most recent large-scale example, has misled the younger generations on this.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-11 09:03:35+00:00
I use Vim with SLIME. Multiple splits, multiple tabs, multiple applications, can type stuff into a buffer and then SLIME can send that as commands to the applications.

For example, I use `psql` in a split, and doing `C-c C-c` sends the statement in my current buffer (delineated with newlines) to `psql`. I do the same with all other console applications.
by musicale | 2025-09-11 09:04:19+00:00
You can examine the Mona Lisa to study Leonardo's actual brush strokes, materials, underpainting, etc. It's hard to make an exact copy of it that can provide the same insight, though high-resolution 3-d scans (including x-ray/MRI/etc.) could help.

However, some artwork is lost to time and all we have are copies. Those copies may have lost important features from the original work, though they may provide additional insight into the artists who created the copies.

With digital works, one can usually trivially create an exact copy.
by epolanski | 2025-09-11 09:04:40+00:00
Idk, as an European, coming to US 20/10 years ago was cheaper than traveling Europe.

Today? You're easily paying 3/400$ per night in Manhattan and other cities. Same is true for dining, museums, transport.

Everything is insanely expensive compared to what it was just few years ago.

Services are even more expensive.
by olau | 2025-09-11 09:05:24+00:00
I enjoyed reading most of that.

One thing to watch out for with immutability is that if you're dealing with personal information about people, immutability is probably illegal. You must be able to forget information, and not just simulate you've forgotten it.

I don't how universal this is at the moment, but I think it's likely to be more universal in the future.
by palata | 2025-09-11 09:05:25+00:00
I once saw a comment that said "AIs are great for things that are hard to find, but easy to verify". Which I agree with.

In order to verify, we need knowledge.

If the AI is the last stop ("I asked my LLM and it said that"), it's the wrong way to do it. If the AI is part of the process ("The LLM mentioned this, which made sense, and I confirmed it by [...]"), then it may (or may not) be useful.

In any case, "knowing it" is always more efficient than "having to search for it". So the more you know, the better.
by colechristensen | 2025-09-11 09:05:31+00:00
Sigh. Nobody reasonable would think I was suggesting that a dictionary definition change would be helpful.

In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and an amendment in 1940 established the minimum wage and the 40 hour work week by requiring overtime pay beyond 40 hours for non-exempt employees. [1] Many other countries have many similar things.

What I'm talking about is amending the FLSA down from 40 to 30 hours per week for mandatory overtime and reducing the scope of exemptions so that many more people in professional positions are covered by this or a similar set of requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19...

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
by lproven | 2025-09-11 09:05:54+00:00
> 64-bit kernel and 32-bit userspace

That's what the Raspberry Pi Desktop did.

It's the Pi project's x86 OS, a drastically cut-down Debian with LXDE. It was pretty much the smallest full-desktop distro I've seen.

(Excluding specialist things with window managers like antiX or TinyCore.)

Sadly never made it off Bookworm. I wish they'd update it, or someone took over maintenance.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-11 09:06:37+00:00
> Lots of investment in public transit in the Nordic countries.

This is my favourite phrase. "lots of investment". Crime, drugs and violence gets worse, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in police — just meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.

Public transport gets more expensive and worse every year, but there is a "lots of investment" in public transport — meaning we keep sending more money and getting worse results.

Energy is getting more expensive, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in energy — meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.

But it's okay, you should be happy, at least there is "lots of investment", what are you going to do with your money anyway, after all you can't go anywhere because it's unsafe, the public transportation is probably not working, and you don't have money for it after paying your bills because of all the "investment" anyway, and even if you did the government can always find more things to "invest" the money in.
by momchilg | 2025-09-11 09:06:38+00:00
It has gotten worse. As a daily user myself I can tell you that the performance degradation, at least for me, began somewhere after 20th August, with scrappy results in the web interface and in the cli (not following instructions, forgetting instructions, to-do list not working, not following claude.md orders, code artifacts being half-done or not rendering at all and so on).
by dnissley | 2025-09-11 09:06:44+00:00
Here's an attempt to steelman just one of the things you bring up: the great replacement theory.

The United States, like many developed nations, is experiencing a fertility crisis: it doesn't produce enough families and resulting children to sustain it's current population.

The US could take steps to address the underlying problems that result in declining fertility for it's current population, but it's unlikely to do so for several reasons that all boil down to political realities where the people that are most incentivized to vote (retired people who earn social security) would probably bear the brunt of the (significant) costs of such solutions. See the idea of "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs".

So instead the US uses immigration to fill the gap left by declining fertility rates (an option not equally available to all developed countries), resulting in young US citizens continuing to struggle to form families, and producing a fraying of the social fabric that such an inability to form families is likely to have on a society.

So you can see why some people would be duped into such a conspiracy theory, which purports to explain what people are seeing with their very eyes.
by menaerus | 2025-09-11 09:06:59+00:00
> But why aren’t LLM inference engines deterministic? One common hypothesis is that some combination of floating-point non-associativity and concurrent execution leads to nondeterminism based on which concurrent core finishes first. We will call this the “concurrency + floating point” hypothesis for LLM inference nondeterminism. For example, a recent arXiv preprint writes

I'm honored to see that Mira and co. appreciated my feedback on the very topic I made 7 months ago here :D

> You don't need RNG since the whole transformer is an extremely large floating-point arithmetic unit. A wild guess - how about the source of non-determinism is coming from the fact that, on the HW level, tensor execution order is not guaranteed and therefore (T0 * T1) * T2 can produce slightly different results than T0 * (T1 * T2) due to rounding errors?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952605#42960047
by gbalduzzi | 2025-09-11 09:07:04+00:00
Also, their core development team is in Italy and they are considered by many the best company in the IT space in Italy.

What it means is that they have the top Italian talent, they pay them a very good italian salary that is still way lower than an american one.

So basically they have very capable people working on their engineering, at a fraction of the cost of the original staff.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-11 09:07:20+00:00
I often wonder whether modern advanced battle systems might be more easily disabled as they have more complex and delicate sensors, etc. but this is on a different level. Not sure if any ship is designed to survive this but a total power failure disabling comms (and thus modes of restoring control) seems to be a weak point here.

As always, communication and coordination are crucial, so they should have been prepared to fall back to older comm methods (the "runners" manually carrying messages). With the steering gear still working, this might have changed the outcome of the incident.
Show HN: A web app for trying on clothes with nano banana
by Jefro118 | 2025-09-11 09:08:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I've had this on my side project todo list for a while but was waiting until image editing models got good enough to make something that really works.

Here's the link: https://fitpic.app

At first I just wanted to spend a couple of days having fun building a basic demo but I was so impressed with the results that I decided to spend another week making this into a real product.

It's all powered by Google's new Nano Banana/Gemini Flash Image 2.5 model, with the catalog powered by https://trychannel3.com/ (recently on HN) and Google image search.

It does require signup to use once for free and then credit purchases (I would like to have it be usable without signup but the model is not cheap and I don't want to bankrupt myself by opening it up to abuse).

I did throw a quick page together with some examples here though: https://fitpic.app/examples

I know HN is very well-dressed and style-conscious so I hope someone here finds it interesting or useful.
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-09-11 09:08:35+00:00
> we support 0-day retention, and we don’t train models on customer data.

Checks out the website[1]:

> By default, all media associated with a recording is retained indefinitely. If needed, you can request early deletion of this data at any time via our API.

Data shared with 25 "subprocessors", some of who also retain data indefinitely. Yikes!

[1]: https://security.recall.ai/
by password54321 | 2025-09-11 09:09:44+00:00
Of course it couldn't. Go and compare these two. You may as well compare fruit loops to wagyu beef.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyAqMIZdX5g ("Charlie Kirk Hands Out L's")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVQ3l5P0A4 ("Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Power vs Justice")
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-09-11 09:11:03+00:00
I think you are on to something. Chasing AGI is - I believe - ultimately useless endeavour, but we can already use the existing tools we have in ingenious and creative ways. And no I don’t mean endless barrage of AI lofi hip hop or the same ”cool” album cover with random kanji that all of them have. For instance, it is pretty amazing to have a private tutor which with you can discuss why Charles XII of Sweden ultimately failed in his war against Russia or why roughly 30% of people seems to have a personality that leans toward authoritanianism - this is how people have learned since the very beginning of language. But conversation is an art and you get out from it what you bring into it. It also does not give you a readymade result which you can immediatedly capitalise on, which is what investors want, but what could and can ultimately be useful to humanity.

However, almost all models (worst is ChatGPT) are made virtually useless in this respect, since they are basically sycophantic yesmen - why on earth does an ”autocorrect on steroids” pretend to laugh at my jokes?

Next step is not to built faster models or throw more computing power at them, bit to learn to play the piano.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-11 09:11:19+00:00
Yesss.

It seems that public pressure pays off.

During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.

The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.
by favflam | 2025-09-11 09:11:55+00:00
I smell a digital service tax coming on all the FANG shmang companies who have been making bank off our allies.

I don't see how Zuckerberg, Bezos, or anyone in the tech industry is going to come out of this unscathed with this kind of attitude prevalent in the tech industry. Maybe they think either there will be no consequences or they can make enough money off of the US market alone.
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-11 09:12:27+00:00
And yet if you look at the public health statistics for the things _actually_ crippling children for life, "other people on bikes" are a very long way down the list - at least in most places; I don't know if Paris has a specific problem there. You can hurt yourself pretty bad in the home, after all - the major causes here seem to be cars and dogs.

(Before we even consider that - at population level and in developed Western countries - lack of physical activity, and an environment which actively suppresses it through sheer indifference if not outright hostility - is likely inflicting a far greater burden on childrens' health and wellbeing than trauma).
by rsynnott | 2025-09-11 09:13:39+00:00
Interestingly, while Denmark has very low wealth inequality, Norway's is only middling, and Sweden's is the highest in Europe, in the same range as the US, Brazil and Russia. The Scandinavian countries have very low _income_ inequality (post-transfers).

Income equality is probably more important than wealth equality in terms of quality of life, but wealth inequality isn't nothing.

(Also you have to be a bit careful with wealth inequality figures, as they can be distorted by local practices; for instance in some countries where defined benefit pensions are standard, such a pension, even though clearly valuable, may not be assessed as wealth, and in some countries it may be common to have a long-term/effectively life right to a fixed-cost rental, which again, is wealth-like, but probably not assessed as wealth.)
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-11 09:14:01+00:00
Those are interesting ideas. I still tend to think though that such fiddling is only necessary if we insist on single-member districts with first-past-the-post systems. A proportional system essentially forces each party to pay attention everywhere because every vote everywhere counts. Having districts where the overall result is an aggregate of mini-elections in each district encourages various forms of gaming the system (like gerrymandering). The states themselves are another case of such districts.

I'm increasingly skeptical of the idea that the composition of government organs whose authority extends over a large jurisdiction should be determined by mini-elections in sub-jurisdictions. It makes sense to have sub-jurisdictions insofar as they can set local policy, but if a legislative body is going to make laws for the whole US it should, as a whole, be accountable to the whole US. Especially in the modern age, the relevant constituencies are defined as much by beliefs as by geographical location.
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-09-11 09:14:07+00:00
The grass is always greener on the other side. I live in the EU and GDPR isn't much better. All it requires is "informed consent" (i.e a click or a tap on a button) from the "data subject" and people can evade privacy with impunity. The only side effect is that those of us on this side of the pond, get ugly cookie banners.
by riedel | 2025-09-11 09:15:24+00:00
They oppose breaking encryption, however, I see no true opposition to on device scanning, which is a bit worrying.

>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]

Edit: source [0] https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356
by marcindulak | 2025-09-11 09:15:56+00:00
I'm a Linux user and wanted to have a speech-to-text functionality in Claude, so I can talk to it, like Armin Ronacher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpWPEhO7RqE#t=5m37s demonstrates on macOS. I was not able to find a small codebase doing this, that I can understand.

The project I'm submitting is about 500 lines of Python, and is packaged as Docker, so facilitate the setup. When creating the project I added some security measures, like running the Docker container as non-root, and performing Whisper output sanitization before passing it to Claude.

Thes setup is Linux-only due to `/dev` device dependencies.
by prmoustache | 2025-09-11 09:17:03+00:00
Interesting. I guess the loud music and high temperature in some clothing stores is meant to achieve the same. They look like methofs law inforcement would use in an hostage situation.

In my case it gives me the urge of leaving as soon as possible. I could see how it could create impulse buy but most of the time I go to a shopping mall, it is to be able to try out clothing before buying and I will just lose patience and go away if it doesn't fit well. I tend to avoid them as much as I can anyway.