MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aerospades | 2025-09-04 05:15:05+00:00
I disagree with the author's thesis about data scarcity. There's an infinite amount of data available in the real world. The real world is how all generally intelligent humans have been trained. Currently, LLMs have just been trained on the derived shadows (as in Plato's allegory of the cave). The grounding to base reality seems like an important missing piece. The other data type missing is the feedback: more than passively training/consuming text (and images/video), being able to push on the chair and have it push back. Once the AI can more directly and recursively train on the real world, my guess is we'll see Sutton's bitter lesson proven out once again.
by cyberax | 2025-09-04 05:15:14+00:00
I'm using my RM2 as an e-Reader, after installing Toltec and KoReader. And it turned out to be the best e-Reader I've ever used, the sharpness of the text and the form-factor are perfect for long books.

But their note-taking software is just crap. They have very weak language support, no Chinese, no Russian, or any other languages with non-Latin scripts. They don't even have software keyboards for them!
by smokel | 2025-09-04 05:15:46+00:00
This particular machine is Z80 based and not 6502, so it's not trivial to port.

I've looked into building my own BASIC implementation and got quite far with that. Unfortunately, most games that were written back then rely on timing that is near impossible to recreate at that level. Emulating cycle exact Z80 behavior and then having the original BASIC routines on top of that is a far easier route.
by JimmyLeeJones | 2025-09-04 05:16:54+00:00
A small API + embeddable widget that shows upcoming rocket launches from all over the world, including links to webcasts (if available).

You can:

- Copy-paste embed for blogs/websites

- Filters by provider, rocket, free text search

- Export to CSV + Add-to-Calendar buttons

Helps fans to keep track and be informed
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-04 05:17:07+00:00
"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:

https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi...

But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge."

I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044

People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it

It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency

Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations

The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public
by goatlover | 2025-09-04 05:17:46+00:00
Qualia is the philosophical term for subjective sensations and feelings. It's what our experiences consist of. Why must a concept be empirical and objective? Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.

Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example. We know there are animals that have sensory capabilities we don't. But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.
by phplovesong | 2025-09-04 05:18:44+00:00
Over the last decade i went thru 4 package managers. I always hoped for a builtin one. Over the years my package dep count has decresed radically. I think i use 4-6 plugins (and one theme) really on a daily basis. The rest is nice to haves i probably use once a month making them up for deletion.
by rramadass | 2025-09-04 05:18:46+00:00
Not just Linear Algebra but every branch of Science/Mathematics should be taught as much as possible using Geometry (and other visualizations) before being mapped to abstract algebraic symbols. Basic Geometry (along with simple Arithmetic) is the oldest subfield of Mathematics for the reason that most of its concepts are intuitive and feels "natural" and mappable to the "Real World" by us Humans. While abstraction via symbol manipulation is necessary to generalize and extend mathematics it should come at a later stage after we have developed some intuition of the concepts being represented by the symbols, however limited/restricted they might be. All abstraction requires some mathematical maturity which can only happen over time.
by protocolture | 2025-09-04 05:18:57+00:00
I am kind of sick of Musicians complaining that culture is so accessible.

Its truly the case that if it wasnt for radio and the legal frameworks developed to deliver radio we would probably be looking at incredibly heavy gatekeeping for music.

Humans in general are better off with tools like this. And I for one am glad that these developers are showing off who is angry.

Heck things could be a lot better right now if it wasnt for Metallica.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-04 05:18:58+00:00
>This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit.

LLMs are not anything like Web3, not "exactly like". Web3 is in no way whatsoever "something moderately useful", and if you ever thought it was, you were fooled by the same grifters when they were yapping about Web3, who have now switched to yapping about LLMs.

The fact that those exact same grifters who fooled you about Web3 have moved onto AI has nothing to do with how useful what they're yapping about actually is. Do you actually think those same people wouldn't be yapping about AI if there was something to it? Yappers gonna yap.

But Web3 is 100% useless bullshit, and AI isn't: they're not "exactly alike".

Please don't make false equivalences between them like claiming they're "exactly like" each other, or parrot the grifters by calling Web3 "moderately useful".
by intended | 2025-09-04 05:19:08+00:00
Please lay no hopes in the establishment. There is NOTHING that will get past the FOX barrier, unless it serves a political purpose for the Republican Party.

There is no “establishment” here.

When Fox began targeting environmental efforts against global warming back in the day, they happily platformed cranks to spread FUD. Eventually it got so bad that scientists went to FOX to try and bring the case to the audience and explain things. At which point they were fed to the lions.

There is no fair fight in the media space. There can be no profitable trade in hard to produce facts, when the other side is able to sell cheaper emotionally salient content.
by patrick451 | 2025-09-04 05:19:55+00:00
> Either way, I can get arbitrarily good approximations of arbitrary nonlinear differential/difference equations using only linear probabilistic evolution at the cost of a (much) larger state space.

This is impossible. When driven by a sinusoid, a linear system will only ever output a sinusoid with exactly the same frequency but a different amplitude and phase regardless of how many states you give it. A non-linear system can change the frequency or output multiple frequencies.
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 05:20:02+00:00
This is a great question and the data points make a solid case.

I've been a "10xer" for 25 years. I've considered coding agents bullshit since my first encounter with Copilot. I work by having a clear mental map of every piece of my code and knowing exactly how everything works, to the smallest detail, and how it interacts with every other part.

Anyway, all that and a nickel. Yesterday I fired up Claude Code for the first time. I didn't ask it to build me a game or anything at a high level. Nor to evaluate an existing code base. No... I spent about 2 hours guiding it to create a front-end SPA framework that does what my own in-house SPA framework does on the front end, just to see how it would perform at that. I approved every request manually and interrupted every time I spotted a potential issue (which were many). I guided it on what functions to write and how they should affect the overall navigation flow, rendering flow, loading and error-handling.

In other words, I knew what I wanted to write to a T, because it's code I wrote in 2006 and have refactored and ported many times since then... about 370 commits worth to this basic artifact, give or take.

And it pretty much got there.

Would I have been able to prompt it to write a system like that if I hadn't written the system myself over and over again? Probably not. But it did discern the logical setup I was going for (which is not at all similar to what you're thinking if you're coming from React or another framework like that), and it wrote code that is almost identical in its control structures to what I wrote, without me having to do much besides tell it in plain English what should control what, how, when and in what order.

I'm still not convinced it would save me time on something totally new, that I didn't already know the final shape of.

But I do suspect that a reason all this "vibe coding" hasn't led to an explosion of vaporware is that "vibe coding" isn't being done by experienced coders. I suspect that if you're letting changes "flash across the screen" without reading them, that's most of the difference between a failed prompt and one that achieves the desired result.

Like, I saw it do things like create a factory class that took a string name and found the proper component to load. I said, "refactor that whole thing to a component definition interface with the name in it, make a static object of those and use that to determine what screen to load and all of its parameters." And it did, and it looked almost the same as what I wrote back in the day.

Idk. I would not want my job to become prompting an LLM. I like cracking my knuckles and writing code. But I think the mileage you get may be dictated by whether you are trying to use it as a general-purpose "make this for me" engine, for shovelware, in which case it will fail hard, versus whether you are using it as a stenographer translating a sentence of instructions into a block of control flow.
by ars | 2025-09-04 05:20:57+00:00
You are simultaneously claiming you can prove an animal made a choice, but I didn't? That's a contradiction.

In any case, a mirror test is a test of recognizing self, it does not indicate anything in terms of self awareness.

And I chose to fast for 5 days because I wanted to. Nothing forced me, it was a free choice. I simply thought about it and decided to do it, there were no pro's or con's pushing me in either direction.
by kamaal | 2025-09-04 05:21:20+00:00
On a more serious note, here in India most millennials/boomers remember taking a Engineering Drawing class in second semester Engineering courses. It would involve using a real drafter, real calculations and making real drawings. Isometric projects and all.

I remember it took me like 4 nights of standing to make Isometric projections of a landing gear strut. I wondered if pursuing an Engineering degree was even worth it. Some of my classmates did quit, as years went by.

These days they just let you use CAD software to make things work, and based on what I hear kids just Copy paste files and are done with the assignments.

I mean we all have these Kids these days talk, but somethings do matter. Making all these tasks easy has allowed lots of people who would have other wise failed in the previous generations pass.

There is now an unemployment and low pay crisis all over India due to so many Engineers passing. Sometimes when I hear the newer generations complain about how hard it is to buy a home, or get a good job. Im inclined to think, perhaps hard things should have been kept hard for a reason.
by nemanja_codes | 2025-09-04 05:21:22+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | WORLDWIDE

Location: Serbia, GMT +2

Remote: Yes

Technologies: React, Next.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Astro, TailwindCSS, Jest, Cypress, Prisma, PostrgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, C#/.NET

Resume/CV: Available on request

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Website: https://nemanjamitic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic

Email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com

I am a full stack developer with a Master's degree in Computer Science and 4.5 years of professional experience with JavaScript. My top skills are React/Next.js and I am also good with Node.js backends. I have decent experience with C# and .NET but currently it is not my main focus. I have a decent understanding of DevOps technologies (Linux, containers, IaC, automation) for a developer. I also have interest an in Python and FastAPI. Here are some of my projects:

1. Comprehensive project: full stack Next.js, Prisma, unit, integration, e2e tests, CI/CD.

https://github.com/nemanjam/nextjs-prisma-boilerplate

2. Latest project: HN job ads aggregator, Next.js, SQLite (GitHub and demo links are in the first post).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373936

I have experience working remotely for startups within globally distributed multicultural teams.

I have detailed resume available upon request. You can check out my other projects at https://github.com/nemanjam . You can tell me about your project via email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic .
by rented_mule | 2025-09-04 05:22:06+00:00
An older analog is calculators. My college intro to stats course didn't allow them. We did simple arithmetic by hand and looked up things like roots and logs in tables. I still have my copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922

I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic.

Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed.

Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.
by vintermann | 2025-09-04 05:22:23+00:00
I share the admiration for Crawl. It really was probably the first good roguelike, where you continuously have to "play your hand", make the best of what you have. It's in sharp contrast to a roguelike like ToME, where you can (and pretty much must) plan how to optimize your skill paths (the meat of the game) before you even click begin.

But there's not one Crawl, it's been worked on for so long that there's honestly little which has survived from Linley Henzell's game other than flavor (and even that is questionable). And the newer versions make you realize what the Slay the Spire devs made a fortune on: while a hard game with real decisions where you have to play the hand you're dealt can be fun... it's also fun with the occasional "exploit", lucky broken combinations of events which give you a free win (or more likely, make you go down in a blaze of hubristic glory).
by belZaah | 2025-09-04 05:22:30+00:00
I still have an unfinished NetHack 3.2.1 (yes, I’m partial to that specific version, dual wielding is a sin) game I’m reluctant to get back to. I’m so far I don’t want to make any mistakes and mess it up.

And NetHack truly is amazing in its details. How to get a pet dragon? Change your sex to female using a ring or similar, tranform into a dragon and then #sit. You’ll get an egg. Which will hatch into a (hopefully) pet dragon. Which you can accidentally kill, if you throw food at it (if you don’t feed it, it’ll stop wanting to be your pet) too hard. Lovely.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-04 05:23:07+00:00
> Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users

Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure.

It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such.

With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-04 05:23:11+00:00
I am the average consumer. I signed up for an Amex card that gave me 90K Skymiles and I had 30K skymiles already.

It’s fine if you aren’t interested in “the hobby”. But if I have a choice between spending $40k - $60K for 60,000 points and spending $5000 in 3 months to get 60K points, I’m going to choose the latter.
by eahm | 2025-09-04 05:23:51+00:00
I don't use Ubuntu particularly but I test the flavors sometimes and I keep the server ISO just in case, anyway, this code doesn't work with sudo-rs:

"

echo '# Disable ~/.sudo_as_admin_successful file

Defaults !admin_flag' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/disable_admin_file_in_home

"

so until I find a "fix" for me it's going to be: "apt install -y sudo sudo-rs-"
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 05:24:17+00:00
These kinds of "clients" have always been around. If they want to tell me how long they think it should take, my answer has always been that they should do it themselves. If they say something like, "it shouldn't take too long," I said "send me what you need it to do." Then I look at that and ask "what if A, B or C happens? What if a user does X?" Make a list about 15 bullet points long of edge cases they hadn't thought of showing, the flaws in their business logic. (This, btw, is what I'd do if I were instructing an LLM as well). Then it's, "well, how long will that take?"

And my answer - like the best of car mechanics who work on custom rides - is: I don't know how long until I actually get in there, but minimum 5x what you think, and my rate is $300/hr. Is it worth it to you to do it right?

Usually the answer is no. When it's yes, I have a free hand. And having a few clients who pay well is worth a lot more than having a few dozen who think they know everything and are too cheap to pay for it anyway.
by Sury9798 | 2025-09-04 05:24:40+00:00
This is a project I've been designing to tackle the Traveling Salesman Problem at a massive scale. The core idea is a hybrid architecture that uses a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to guide a powerful hierarchical solver.

The key results from the paper are: - It can find guaranteed exact (0% gap) solutions for up to 10 million nodes in 5-30 seconds. - Even on adversarial graphs where other heuristics fail, it remains robust and accurate. - The potential impact is massive, with projections of ₹48,000 – ₹1,30,000 crore in annual savings for the Indian logistics industry.
by markhahn | 2025-09-04 05:25:06+00:00
whenever I see the word 'reductionist', I wonder why it's being used to disparage.

a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.

why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".
by tasty_freeze | 2025-09-04 05:25:43+00:00
My wife got the RM1 then the RM2, as she is very organized and takes lots of notes. She absolutely loved it except for one thing -- the swipe motion to flip forward and backwards was terrible for her. She would try 10 times to get it to finally recognize what she was asking for. So if she wanted to flip forward a few pages to find something, it could take 30-50 swipes. It is sitting in a drawer now.

If anyone else had this experienced and figured out how to make it work, let me know.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-04 05:26:19+00:00
I'm not sure that's true. For example, Supernote have done very well with their A6X/Nomad range (confusingly about the size of an A5 sheet of paper), I think partly because they're the only company that has targeted that size. Personally, I much prefer having a smaller page to make notes on, and that's part of the reason I went for the Supernote.

If you're reading and annotating a lot of full-sized PDFs, then bigger is better. But for just taking notes, drawing diagrams, etc, I found a smaller device was a lot more portable and convenient.
by goatlover | 2025-09-04 05:26:37+00:00
Don't agree with this kind of linguistic dismissal. It doesn't change the fact that we have sensations of color, sound, etc. and there are animals that can see colors, hear sounds and detect phenomena we don't. It's also quite possible they experience the same frequencies we see or hear differently, due to their biological differences. This was noted by ancient skeptics when discussing the relativity of perception.

That is what is being discussed using the "what it's like" language.
by mkhalil | 2025-09-04 05:27:40+00:00
Good catch, you are correct. I initially was going post the actual command for checking out a branch at a time:

> git checkout $(git rev-list -1 --before="YYYY-MM-DD" master)

but thought I found a shortcut - which turns out is not really one, and like you said: confusing.

I can't edit my post, but in any case; the point being: it would be nice if import statements are closer to "github.com/google/uuid@YYYY-MM-DD" or in this case you can pass a date to version: "YYYY-MM-DD" and the library would run the uglier nested command above to import the proper version.
by hobofan | 2025-09-04 05:29:49+00:00
I don't think that makes it as special as you think it does.

> There are huge issues in the Apple ecosystem with documentation and so much tribal knowledge.

I struggle to come up with an ecosystem where that doesn't apply. React, Angular, .NET, .... Though some of them probably even suffer from overdocumentation, e.g. React with the same beginner level tutorials / open source code regurgitating bad patterns, and you then have the challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The question is really whether maintaining an ecosystem-specific model would be able outperform a better generalized coding model, and even further whether the marginal improvements would justify the additional maintenance process/cost.