MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Loughla | 2025-09-04 23:38:50+00:00
I have to present to a group of pissed off college faculty tomorrow. They're pissed because we ended our contract with the AI checking software.

We ended it because it checks not for AI but for professional writing, good grammar and spelling, and professional non-conversational word choice. WHICH ARE THE THINGS WE'RE TEACHING THESE STUDENTS IN OUR CLASSES.

I have to look at a room of mostly out of touch faculty and tell them to be better at their jobs. I have to tell them that they simply cannot do what they've done for the last 30 years (which is only being forced because of AI, but should've been a thing the entire time). I have to, in five minutes, explain pedagogy and modern instructional design.

And I have no idea what to say that won't make this situation worse.

I'm thinking of leading with an explanation of what adaptation and evolution are as concepts. That should go well. I'm pretty excited.
by guhcampos | 2025-09-04 23:38:54+00:00
The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels.

Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.
by mingus88 | 2025-09-04 23:39:04+00:00
This is often the case where one side is an expert at contracts and business and the other side is an artist.

I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.

Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.
by orlp | 2025-09-04 23:39:33+00:00
With all due respect, have you actually used the Polars expression API? We actually strive for composability of simple functions over dedicated methods with tons of options, where possible.

The original comment I responded to was confusing Pandas with Polars, and now your blog post refers to Numpy, but Polars takes a completely different approach to dataframes/data processing than either of these tools.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-04 23:40:07+00:00
I don't know a ton of the specifics for music, but I am not sure if I agree your statement is always true. A lot can go into producing and distributing music, and I don't think it is fair to say the artist should always make more than all the other people who work on making the music happen combined. It isn't just a 'company' making that money, it is all the people working behind the scenes, all the investment in equipment and things, etc. I would need a lot more info on cost breakdown before I say the blanket statement of "the artist should make more"
by mreid | 2025-09-04 23:40:16+00:00
On your site you make the claim that: "Our thesis is that there is 100 years of physics and math research that has gone unnoticed by the CS/ML communities and we intend to rectify that."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially considering that a decent fraction of the CS/ML researchers that I know have solid physics and math backgrounds. Just of the top of my head, Marcus Hutter, David MacKay, Bernhard Scholkopf, Alex Smola, Max Welling, Christopher Bishop, etc. are/were prominent researchers with strong math and physics backgrounds. More recently Jared Kaplan and Dario Amodei at Anthropic also have physics backgrounds, as well as plenty of people at DeepMind.

To claim that you have noticed something in "100 years of physics and math research" that all of those people (and more) have missed and you didn't is pure hubris.
by itchingsphynx | 2025-09-04 23:40:17+00:00
Unfortunately the article doesn’t make it explicitly clear what the inner ear has to do with the eyes and visual system. When the ear motion signals become unreliable the brain increasingly depends on visual signals for motion detection. Since visual motion could be interpreted as self motion rather than external motion, user interfaces should be able to minimise motion cues, because the user might interpret that as self motion.
by sfRattan | 2025-09-04 23:40:43+00:00
Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.

It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.

If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:

* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.

* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.

If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-09-04 23:41:03+00:00
The point of due process is to ensure that INNOCENT people are not killed. What if they got the wrong boat? What if that boat was filled with women and children? Everyone is on board with killing murderous thugs, that's not the point of the article. That could have been a fishing charter going to deep water. No nobody knows. Due process protects us all.
by kulahan | 2025-09-04 23:41:07+00:00
There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.

I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.

Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.
Show HN: CompareGPT – Trustworthy AI Answers with Confidence and Sources
by tinatina_AI | 2025-09-04 23:42:03+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Tina I’ve been exploring how to make large language models more reliable. One persistent issue is hallucinations — models can produce confident answers that are factually wrong or based on non-existent sources. This is especially risky for fields like finance, law, or research where accuracy matters. To address this, I’ve been building CompareGPT, which focuses on making AI outputs more trustworthy. Key updates we’ve been working on: Confidence scoring: every answer shows how reliable it is. Source validation: highlights whether data can be backed by references. Multi-model comparison: ask one question, see how different models respond side by side. Try it here: https://comparegpt.io/home It currently works best with knowledge-based queries (finance, law, science). We’re still ironing out limitations — for example, image input isn’t supported yet. I’d love to hear what you think, especially where it fails or where it could be most useful. Brutal feedback welcome Thanks!
by BizarroLand | 2025-09-04 23:42:13+00:00
I'm a fan of this theory.

You basically have 2 chances:

1: the media hits you like a ton of bricks and enraptures the audience from the start

2: you watch it a few times (or in TVs case you catch a few episodes), think about it, ponder the lore for a bit, and get invested over time

Outside of that, media will blow by you and never leave a mark.
by adamnemecek | 2025-09-04 23:42:21+00:00
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Cliche phrase is cliche. And yeah, no shit, we are working on it.

Re: your other points: cool, yeah there are people in ML that studied physics. Do you feel like much of physics has made it to ML? Do we have scalable energy-based models? If not, why not?
by brunoTbear | 2025-09-04 23:42:35+00:00
I think Shape Security qualifies for this list. They raised $100M before having a customer, seemed to die, quietly got adopted by a large pool of F50 companies, and exited to F5 for a $1B valuation. That’s a big chunk of change for a security play, especially back in 2019.

Their moat ended up being two fold. One, they were the only tech stack that could handle the scale needed back then. Two, they had a crazy culture of never letting adversaries win and would push daily updates to keep attackers off their customers. Both took a long time to iterate and build towards and nobody thought it was cool while they worked through it.
by jamiek88 | 2025-09-04 23:42:58+00:00
I’d argue we won’t get those anti aging breakthroughs unless we take it seriously as a disease.

It’s just biology. It can be fixed with enough research. There’s nothing magical or spiritual about aging it’s just another thing for humans to beat.

Lots of people get viscerally up feelings about it though for some reason. Not sure why. I’ve had people spitting purple angry when I say the above.
by woah | 2025-09-04 23:44:00+00:00
In the US, you are required to pay taxes on your income. If the IRS takes an interest in you and you are not able to prove in court that you properly paid taxes on the income you turned into your assets, they will take all your money.

None of this has anything to do with the format of any invoices. If you wrote a receipt on a piece of toilet paper, that's fine as long as you can prove that you then sent 30-50% of the money you received to the US government. I believe this is more generally a feature of common law legal systems which prioritize honest intentions over box-checking.

Whatever other requirements exist in other countries are not really a US business's concern, unless those countries start turning their merchandise away at the border. In any case, expecting a random payment processor to act as world paperwork policeman for the EU is hilariously ridiculous.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-04 23:45:13+00:00
All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.

That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-04 23:45:26+00:00
> I thought "taxes" is the English equivalent to the German "Steuern". A "Steuer" is definitely a thing to regulate inefficiencies due to external costs.

They are equivalent, but your English description of the definition of Steuern is not accurate, so I'm not sure what to tell you.

Your English is good enough that I wasn't 100% sure you weren't a native speaker, but there are a number of misunderstandings in the rest of your post that I don't think I'm going to be able to explain.

You're also just inventing reasons for taxes in many cases, rather than just accepting the government sees them as activities that create an opportunity to collect revenue.
by red369 | 2025-09-04 23:45:35+00:00
I'm getting quite off-topic, but this reminds me of the original Fallout game manual: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/38400/manuals/...

It contains a section describing the effects of a nuclear explosions. There was a cartoon I really liked with the caption "if you see the flash, duck and cover!". I interpreted it as clearly tongue-in-cheek, but I was never sure whether that was intended to be an accurate representation of what was thought to be best practice in the '50s, or just made up in imitation of it.

Looking at it now, it might even have just been good advice with a silly picture!

Edit: Just re-reading, I'm surprised how much detail they went into on the effects of nuclear explosions. Also, did anyone ever cook the recipes from either the Fallout or Fallout 2 manuals? :)

There have been a lot of great manuals over the years that included huge amounts of info that was entirely unnecessary for the game, but really added to the experience. As well as the small instructions for the game, Hellcats over the Pacific included a huge manual with info which Wikipedia tells me was taken from the F6F pilot's manual or an FAA flight training manual.
by al_borland | 2025-09-04 23:46:20+00:00
Can you elaborate on that? Are you saying we're doing kids a favor by having them grow up with single parents, because that will force more housing to be built, so they can grow up and be single parents too? Is this a good future for them?

I get the population will still grow, and we will likely still need some amount of housing growth over time, but we don't need nearly as much as we think we do.

We also don't need to avoid the middle of the country. The population has been moving to the coasts, while the Midwest has lost a ton of people since the manufacturing moved elsewhere. With a lot of companies, there is no reason they can't be in the midwest where there are a lot more affordable homes, and a lot of space. We should be looking to draw people from these HCOL areas to help bring back these cities. It seems like a win-win situation.
by cherry_tree | 2025-09-04 23:46:23+00:00
You say “there’s no profit” and then describe the most tremendous business opportunity in a hundred years.

There’s no profit for the current oligarchy; but to say there is no profit to be made from electrifying a billion plus parking spots; to install and manage infrastructure for millions of small business partners, to build new power plants with ever increasing demand — it sounds like a free markets entrepreneurs wet dream.

Of course to admit such would be to admit we are in a oligarchic structure that is antithetical to a supposed “free market” and so the capitalists must conjure stories about how electricity just is impossible to produce and electrical lines literally cannot be added to the American infrastructure or it will all suddenly topple over.

Differentiating this narrative from the expansion of high speed internet is difficult. Woe is me the oligarchic natural monopoly subsidized or wholly compensated by the taxpayer but unable to advance at all; change is impossible.
by nsoonhui | 2025-09-04 23:46:23+00:00
>> The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.

What evidence you have to justify your accusation?

From another poster here

Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...: "We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)

So I would say you need to backup your claim _really_ well instead of just interpreting things in the worst way possible according to your imagination.
by amlib | 2025-09-04 23:46:25+00:00
If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-04 23:47:01+00:00
It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".

Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.

I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.
by DragonStrength | 2025-09-04 23:47:07+00:00
Yes, but when Marc Benioff says he laid off thousands of customer service agents, the reporting is "Salesforce cuts tech workers using AI." The narrative in media is a total mess right now, and there are many in VC and AI-related companies ready to help muddy the waters further for their own benefit. Obviously, many small companies follow the media narrative.
by nomel | 2025-09-04 23:47:25+00:00
If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener.

There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc

If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).

If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.

We live in a society.
by HICAP | 2025-09-04 23:47:54+00:00
Hey Hackers, I’m Andrés, co-founder of HiCAP.

While building agentic apps, we kept hitting provider rate limits. Tokens would run out, chats would stall, users would bounce. Painful. So we decided to fix it.

HiCAP = OpenRouter flexibility + reserved capacity + discounts + SLA guarantees.

What that means in practice:

Predictable throughput: reserve baseline + burst across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini so spikes don’t kill your app.

- Cheaper inference: convert steady PAYG into reservations and save up to ~25% (provider-backed).

- Drop-in proxy: keep your existing API calls, get enterprise security + SLAs.

- Broad model coverage: GPT, Claude, Gemini, with parity tracking.

- Coming soon: spot-market routing for opportunistic savings (private beta).

If you have used OpenRouter, you know the convenience of one endpoint plus fallbacks. HiCAP does that plus guarantees you will not get rate-limited, and your unit costs actually go down as usage grows.

We are already handling traffic at scale, on track to be one of the largest aggregated LLM usage networks this month, and seeing customers improve margins while unlocking new use cases.

Would love your feedback. What are the biggest headaches you are running into with inference costs and rate limits?

Try HiCap today: https://hicap.ai/
by alphazard | 2025-09-04 23:47:55+00:00
Were I in your shoes, I would make a point of explaining what "style transfer" is. It was one of the first things LLMs were really good at. e.g. "Write a rap battle between Shakespeare and Plato".

Academic prose is just style transfer. Academia filters pretty heavily for humans that can do this particular kind of style transfer well. Everyone on the college faculty will be 2 standard deviations of good at writing academic prose. That skill is no longer valuable. It is now a cheap commodity measured in flops.

The silver lining is that the content of one's writing is now paramount because the field has been leveled as far as style is concerned.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-04 23:48:09+00:00
>They're eigenfunctions of linear time-invariant systems

For someone reading this with only a calculus background, an example of this is that you get back a sine (times a constant) if you differentiate it twice, i.e. d^2/dt^2 sin(nt) = -n^2 sin(nt). Put technically, sines/cosines are eigenfunctions of the second derivative operator. This turns out to be really convenient for a lot of physical problems (e.g. wave/diffusion equations).
by AngryData | 2025-09-04 23:48:11+00:00
Yeah, once you get too big your blast sphere is basically in space and so that part does effectively nothing extra and your total damage per mass of fissile material drops even faster as you try to keep scaling. And even if that wasn't a problem, really big nukes are harder to launch/deliver and would be a much larger material loss if it was shot down prematurely. Having multiple warheads in place of one super large bomb is just a far more reliable attack plan.
by anyfoo | 2025-09-04 23:48:11+00:00
If you like Fourier, you're going to love Laplace (or its discrete counterpart, the z transform).

This took me down a very fascinating and intricate rabbit hole years ago, and is still one of my favorite hobbies. Application of Fourier, Laplace, and z transforms is (famously) useful in an incredibly wide variety of fields. I mostly use it for signal processing and analog electronics.
by conorbergin | 2025-09-04 23:48:37+00:00
I've being trying out SQLite for a side project of mine, a virtual whiteboard, I haven't quite got my head around it, but it seems to be much less of a bother than interacting with file system APIs so far. The problem I haven't really solved is how sync and maybe collaboration is going to interact with it, so far I have:

1. Plaintext format (JSON or similar) or SQLite dump files versioned by git

2. Some sort of modern local first CRDT thing (Turso, libsql, Electric SQL)

3. Server/Client architecture that can also be run locally

Has anyone had any success in this department?
by fnordpiglet | 2025-09-04 23:48:55+00:00
I think I touched on all this. These are advantageous to merchants for low fees and loss liability assignment. They offer very little to the payer who is banked and has credit. Of course more merchants are accepting payment methods that are highly advantageous to them, and the payment processing providers capture a better interchange by cutting out the middle men. But the person whose money is being used to transact gains nothing in this and loses repudiation (along with other incentive perks card issuers often provide for their interchange share). This was my point, and I don’t see any addressing of it. For the person paying (you) you literally gain nothing and lose card network loss insurance and other perks.

For bank transfers, again, you gain repudiation. You have a window during settlement to dispute the transfer. It’s short but it exists. This is seemingly inconvenient and not obviously useful until someone is trying to steal your money. Then it’s suddenly very useful.

As a general society the friction that transfer hold periods provide generally globally reduces financial crimes everywhere and provides global stability to the financial system that didn’t exist prior. These seem like stupid fuddyduddy things banks do but there was a time these didn’t exist and there was a reason they were created and that time was not a better time. It was materially worse for everyone everywhere. Having never existed in such a time makes it hard to understand that such a time might have existed and why it was bad - but for those interested there do exist books that explain how we got here.