MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brabel | 2025-09-26 10:59:03+00:00
Well the real open source project is llama.cpp which Ollama basically wrapped and made a nice interface on top of. Now they do more things as they want to be a real business, but llama.cpp is now doing most things people wanted from something like ollama, like serving a REST API compatible with OpenAPI, downloading and managing local LLMs… while remaining an actual open source project without VC money as far as I know.
by al_borland | 2025-09-26 10:59:20+00:00
Amazon’s insistence on the prices being the same, even though they take a large cut of fulfilled by Amazon, on top of their devil-may-care practices around returns, while at the same time being so big that companies feel they have to be there for the eyeballs, have put many companies in a really bad and vulnerable position.

This is why Amazon will often tell you to just keep the item you want to return. The companies lose money on returns and need to sell 2-3 more to make it up. It’s not worth it for them to even take it back. In other cases, Amazon will blindly resell the returned product and damage a company’s reputation. I saw an instance where someone returned a children’s swim suit with poop in it, then Amazon went and re-sold it to someone, poop and all. That review tanked the whole company.
by solarkraft | 2025-09-26 10:59:30+00:00
The companies affected whining about is a sign that it may actually have some effect.

Remember: New laws are made because someone has been acting in ways society agrees they shouldn’t have been and this DEFINITELY applies to big tech companies. It’s a testament to how bad your behavior must have been if we go through all the trouble to come up with a law to forbid it.
by m000 | 2025-09-26 10:59:58+00:00
When you run a relational database, you typically do it for the joins, aggregations, subqueries, etc. So a real-life scenario would include some application actually putting some stress on postgres.

If your don't mind overprovisioning your postgres, yes I guess the presented benchmarks are kind of representative. But they also don't add anything that you didn't know without reading the article.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-26 11:00:17+00:00
When I was growing up computers were getting faster by leaps and bounds, and I remember a video game that was so 'sophisticated' that it needed a math (FP) co-processor (80387) to play some parts of it:

> The program requires a minimum of a 12MHz 80286, 1MB RAM, DOS 5.0 or DR DOS, one 1.2MB 5 1⁄4" or 1.44MB 3 1⁄2" disk drive, hard drive with 11MB of free disk space, and VGA graphics. In addition, Falcon3.O supports a joystick, a joystick with a throttle, dual joysticks, rudder pedals or the ThrustMaster controls. The game also supports a mouse and various sound cards, including the Ad Lib, Sound Blaster and Roland. The 80x87 math coprocessor is supported for the HighFidelity flight model.

> Optimal system requirements are a 20MHz 80386 system or faster, 80x87 math coprocessor, 4MB RAM with EMS (expanded memory), DOS 5.0 or DR DOS, one 1.2MB 51⁄411 or 1.44MB 31⁄2" disk drive, hard drive with 11MB of free space, a 16-bit VGA card, a mouse and a joystick.

* https://vtda.org/docs/computing/SpectrumHolobyte/Falcon_3.0_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0

"Wow!" we thought at the time.
by bariumbitmap | 2025-09-26 11:00:51+00:00
Relevant link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-023-00459-6

Currently most quibits require cryogenic cooling so without a breakthrough in room temperature superconductors etc. we could easily end up in a situation where quantum computing is used for specialized tasks where it is faster than conventional computing but the end result is more energy expenditure overall.

Edit: clarified the wording
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-09-26 11:00:51+00:00
To be fair most people don’t have as complicated a life that they really need a personal assistant. How much would it really save you per day? 30 min? I mean that’s not nothing but it’s not revolutionary either. And of course there is the principal-agent problem so it’s not always a strict upgrade.

For example, at my work people managers get admin assistants but most ICs do not, even at the same level. I think it’s fine, the value for me would be very low and I doubt it’s a good use of company resources.
by pqb | 2025-09-26 11:01:03+00:00
I have been using Pop!_OS on my old Intel-based Dell laptop for over 5 years. Now, I'm alternating between my M1-powered Mac and Pop!_OS as my daily driver. Before, I used Ubuntu for over 10 years and tested various distributions.

Pop!_OS is probably the best Ubuntu/Debian derivative I've used. It's buttery smooth for everything I need it to be. I haven’t encountered any bugs or major problems that are strictly related to Pop!_OS. It feels like Ubuntu, without slow Snaps (Pop!_OS is Flatpak-centered), Canonical ads (Ubuntu Pro, MicroK8s...), and with a slightly modified GNOME desktop environment.

If I had to find the worst thing about Pop!_OS, it's a negligible issue stemming from muscle memory after using macOS. The Super+Left/Right Arrow keys on Pop!_OS are used to switch between applications, while on macOS they are meant to move the text cursor to the start or end of a word. I haven't found the option to disable it yet.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-26 11:01:03+00:00
It's an approximator, right? I don't know about Astronomy but there are obvious use cases where an approximate result is "good enough" and even better than a precise result if it's significantly cheaper (or faster!) to get the approximation than to calculate the precise result.

In cases like this I'm always thinking of Reimann integrals and how I remember feeling my face scrunching up in distaste when they were first explained to us in class. It took a while for me to feel comfortable with the whole idea. I'm a very uh discrete kind of person.

As an aside, I consider the kind of work described in the article where a classic, symbolic system is essentially "compiled" into a neural net as one of the good forms of neuro-symbolic AI. Because it works and like I say there are important use cases where it beats just using the symbolic system.

Neuro-symbolic AI can often feel a bit like English cuisine where stuff is like bangers (i.e. sausages) and mash or a full English (breakfast), or a Sunday roast, where a bunch of disparate ingredients are prepared essentially independently and separately and then plonked on a plate all together. Most other cuisines don't work that way: you cook all the ingredients together and you get something bigger than the sum of the parts, a gestalt, if you like. Think e.g. of Greek gemista (tomatoes, bell peppers and occasionally zucchini and aubergines stuffed with rice) or French cassoulet (a bean stew with three different kinds of meat and a crusty top).

Lots of the neuro-symbolic stuff I've seen do it the English breakfast way: there's a neural net feeding its output to a symbolic system, rarely the other way around. But what the authors have done here, which others have also done, is to train a neural net on the output of a symbolic system, thereby basically "cooking" them together and getting the best of both worlds. Not yet a gestalt, as such, but close. Kind of like souvlaki with pitta (what the French call a "sandwich Grecque").
by boxed | 2025-09-26 11:01:18+00:00
> when he described ZFS as a rampant layering violation

I read some blog posts back in the day about why they did this and it sounded a lot like those layers were more historical accidents or something.

You can turn it around and say that ZFS is a full stack filesystem (or vertically integrated if you will) and it should be pretty obvious that a rethink on that level can have big advantages.
by ggm | 2025-09-26 11:04:25+00:00
The problem is the directionality. It's trivially easy to be led to usb-c TO 12v where what's needed is USB-C output (powered device not power source) and a question I couldn't get answered is: what is the specific words which specify this directionality -because "to" doesn't always do it.

Virtually all "pd trigger" matches are to take usb-c in from a power brick, and wire to a dc input. They're all the complete reverse of what I want. I begin to think the word "trigger" here means "trigger a PSU to send 12v" and I want to satisfy a client asking for 12v to be sent.
by ShadowRegent | 2025-09-26 11:04:35+00:00
When Apple says your data doesn't leave their servers, that doesn't mean those servers have to be in their own datacenters or that Apple doesn't have other vendors that help them deliver their service. It also doesn't mean those companies have access to your unencrypted data. That data also, by necessity, likely traverses other networks in encrypted form on its way between you and Apple.
by mwcz | 2025-09-26 11:05:19+00:00
The number of PRs for Cosmic you shared is very misleading. The parent repo is full of submodules, so if you want to present the number of PRs to Cosmic as a whole, you need to count the PRs for each repo. For example, the software library app alone has more than double (3/182) the number you presented (6/90).
by asmor | 2025-09-26 11:05:38+00:00
This does not seem to be a prevalent opinion on here, and I was trying to be diplomatic, but I guess it still comes out as "why is it OK to post / comment politics here if it's a less contentious topic many people on HN care about, but I regularly get downvoted for even relating information to my association with a demographic group forcefully enlisted to the front of the culture war".

Orange site bad.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-26 11:05:43+00:00
> The nautical mile is not an SI unit, so it is not defined by a single organization

"In 1929 the International Hydrographic Bureau obtained an agreement from a large number of countries to adopt a value of 1852 metres for the nautical mile, the unit thus defined to be called the International Nautical Mile."

* https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/adoption-of-international-na...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hydrographic_Org...

But there was no treaty or anything with a fancy ceremony, just a 'handshake', and so it was up to each country to adopt it with a domestic law or regulation, which (e.g.) the US did in 1954:

* https://usma.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Nautical-Mile.pd...

Previously in the US it was 1853.25 m (because the US is actually metric "officially": all of its customary units (ft, oz) are defined in terms of metric equivalents):

* https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/mendenhall-order
by indolering | 2025-09-26 11:06:11+00:00
We've actually chatted before . I was also asking dumb questions that you were polite enough to suffer through .

I really do wish Haxe would get the attention of library developers like yourself. It's more like a framework for polyglot development. It can auto generate non-ergonomic libraries that feel like FFS automatically but you can also gradually fine tune it to match the target language over time. It really helps to centralize development effort and share burden.

So sure, maybe not Rust. But Haxe's distributable size would be comparable.

Maybe I'll try a Dafny implementation to see how that project is coming along!
by dotancohen | 2025-09-26 11:06:41+00:00
> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it.

Internet had problems before Cloudflare, but for the most part it was useable. Now, suddenly I've been getting IP blocked by Cloudflare on large swaths of websites. Cloudflare is a monopoly when you're a user trying to get to a website.
by chilmers | 2025-09-26 11:07:54+00:00
Yes, modern screenwriting classes hammer home some variation of the five-act structure and, the particular beats to hit at each point. It's rare for any narrative film, even indies, to deviate from it much, and you are absolutely told to map out your whole narrative and know where it's going before you begin.

I'm sure there are some screenwriters who ignore all that and just start writing. Particularly if they're experienced enough to have an intuitive grasp of structure. But if you're a first time writer and reach the night before a submission deadline and you haven't even finished the first draft, then you've got serious problems. Leaving aside the ending, any script needs multiple revisions with time in between so that you come back it with clear sight.
by IanCal | 2025-09-26 11:09:02+00:00
I really disagree on the autonomy side. In fact the Wikipedia page explicitly says that’s not required so whether you agree with that concept or not it’s not a universal point.

> The concept does not, in principle, require the system to be an autonomous agent; a static model—such as a highly capable large language model—or an embodied robot could both satisfy the definition so long as human‑level breadth and proficiency are achieved

Edit -

> That is ultimately what sets AGI apart from AI.

No! The key thing was that it was general intelligence rather than things like “bird classifier” or “chess bot”.
by tecleandor | 2025-09-26 11:09:03+00:00
I went the extra step to clear those terms for anybody that could read it, just in case anybody is interested.

You said:

- A rangefinder is a higher quality camera than an SLR ever was - a full frame mirrorless probably has better quality than a DSLR - A medium format camera can be better than all of those

I say you're mixing stuff because:

- rangefinder only means it has a rangefinder. There are Yashica Electro, Argus C3, and there are Leicas. Most rangefinders are medium/low quality - well nowadays, maybe, but not necessarily. But we can generalize a bit in that case - A medium format camera can be mirrorless, DSLR, rangefinder... so it can be in any of those groups, so we cannot compare it just like that
by jorams | 2025-09-26 11:09:12+00:00
> Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2]

You're linking to the PRs on one of many Cosmic repositories, the top-level wrapper repository. The total number of PRs on all Cosmic repositories it includes is far larger than Omarchy.
by markild | 2025-09-26 11:09:31+00:00
While I do think that's true, I'd say a more apt analogy is that for humans each model will produce fairly similar results on each prompt, but it helps having 8 billion different models running.

I'd also argue that we tend to have a larger context. What did you have for dinner? Did you see anything new yesterday? Are you tired of getting asked the same question over and over again?
by vidarh | 2025-09-26 11:09:39+00:00
Yes, all of this is fine but none of it address my point:

Enough people use the default settings that benchmarking the default settings is very relevant.

It often isn't a good thing to rely on the defaults, but it's nevertheless the case that many do.

(Yes, it is also relevant to benchmark tuned versions, as I also pointed out, my argument was against the claim that it is somehow unfair not to tune)
by sroerick | 2025-09-26 11:10:59+00:00
I agree with this.

However, I have a Starlabs convertible tablet, which I have just not gotten comfortable with on Arch.

I've considered going the sxmo route, but the volume buttons aren't that good. So I'm thinking maybe KDE plasma? Maybe the hardware is just not good enough for me to be happy.

There really isn't a solid arch config, to my knowledge, on tablets. I'd love to have the scriptability of Omarchy on something that worked well with an OSK and touchscreen. It may be hard to do this, however, as elements like "Activate OSK when text box selected" might be reliant on DE properties. Im not sure
by Antibabelic | 2025-09-26 11:11:06+00:00
> The framework aligns the construction principles of L4 with Unix philosophy. In line with Unix philosophy, Genode is a collection of small building blocks, out of which sophisticated systems can be composed. But unlike Unix, those building blocks include not only applications but also all classical OS functionalities including kernels, device drivers, file systems, and protocol stacks.

That's very interesting, but does it actually work in practice?
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-26 11:11:07+00:00
> "Essential Search, a smart search function that helps users find information across their device."

By now I'm wondering whether this feature constantly keeps getting developed by multiple companies because of a user-first motivation (an actual NEED by the user), or an engineering-first motivation ("we build a big index, apply some model on top, add a search-bar, BAM! AI!")

I've never had a need for a context-less search where I type "Netflix" and it shows me the App on my phone, all Emails from Netflix, all chats where I mentioned it, all bookmarks of it, just for me to work through all that noise manually again...
by dangus | 2025-09-26 11:11:11+00:00
This product is accidentally demonstrating why today’s mediocre AI products like Apple Intelligence will be the eventual winners in the market.

ChatGPT can’t become more useful until it’s integrated into your OS. The OS is what has the potential to provide a safe framework (APIs) to share data with an AI system.

Being able to hook up Gmail and Google Calendar is nice but kinda useless if you have any of the other thousands of providers for email and calendar.
by Zak | 2025-09-26 11:11:20+00:00
There's only a risk of fines if Apple doesn't comply with the regulation, or tries to appear compliant while sabotaging the intended goals of the regulation.

Apple is, of course prone to doing exactly that, but it doesn't have to be. The EU recently fined Apple, and a US judge sanctioned them for violating a previous ruling, both with regard to developers offering subscription payment methods other than Apple's.

It's not hard to let developers put whatever they want for subscription payments in their apps, which would fully comply and eliminate the risk. Apple just doesn't want to because it feels entitled to a cut of that revenue.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-26 11:11:27+00:00
So is Nazism, that doesn't mean all moral frameworks are created equal. Also, tit for tat is a type of cynical pragmatism, not a thing based on some principle (misguided or not) which is a basic requirement of a moral framework; the notion of doing something or not doing it because you feel it to be right, regardless of benefit.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-09-26 11:11:28+00:00
The title and the article are both independently true, just not together :) As in, there are certainly cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers which now run on a laptop, that's just the story of computational progress.

More seriously though, https://www.404media.co/a-vast-cosmic-web-connects-the-unive... is another nice article about this work. It has a bit less detail (i.e. less proper nouns in it), but is more readable for it IMO.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-26 11:11:31+00:00
> Doesn't have to be "perfect accuracy". It just has to beat the accuracy of the doctor you would have gone to otherwise.

They made an absolute statement claiming that AI will "at least" let them dodge false diagnosis, that implies a diagnostic false positive rate of ~0%. Otherwise how can you possibly be so confident that you "dodged" anything? You still need a second opinion (or third).

If a doctor diagnosed you with cancer and AI said that you're healthy, would you conclude that the diagnosis was false and skip treatment? It's easy to make frivolous statements like these when your life isn't on the line.

> What do you call a doctor who was last in his class in medical school? A doctor.

How original, they must've passed medical school, certification, and years of specialization by pure luck.

Do you ask to see every doctor's report card before deciding to go with the AI or do you just assume they're all idiots?
by gempir | 2025-09-26 11:11:53+00:00
I've been using the cosmic-de on arch for a few months now. Started with the alpha and then switched to their git main branch.

I absolutely loved it. It is such a breath of fresh air. I previously used to run i3 and a bunch of other tooling around it I can't even remember. Setup always had some weird edge case or was weird to use. Gnome always felt very bloated and laggy.

I then tried sway because I wanted to see if Wayland was any better performance and was not very impressed, although it just might be a configuration issue, the out of the box experience was just not good. And I wasn't in the tinkering mood anymore.

I installed cosmic and everything just worked. It felt snappy, no weird lags, nice but not too slow animations, even a build in window manager that was close enough to i3 that I no longer need sway or i3.

Notification, Display Management, Login, Autolaunching apps, Window Management etc. everything finally feels like a full operating system the way I have never experienced linux before. Maybe Ubuntu or Mint came close, but those came with their own troubles.
by seesthruya | 2025-09-26 11:11:57+00:00
I'm a diagnostic radiologist with 20 years clinical experience, and I have been programming computers since 1979. I need to challenge one of your core assumptions.

> Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes.

I'm sorry, but I disagree, and I think you are making a wild assumption here. I am up to date on the latest AI products in radiology, use several of the, and none of them are even in the ballpark on this. That vast majority are non-contributory.

It is my strong belief that there is an almost infinite variation in both human anatomy and pathology. Given this variation, I believe that in order for your above assumption to be correct, the development of "AGI" will need to happen.

When I interpret a study I am not just matching patterns of pixels on the screen with my memory. I am thinking, puzzling, gathering and synthesizing new information. Every day I see something I have never seen before, and maybe no one has ever seen before. Things that can't and don't exist in a training data set.

I'm on the back end of my career now and I am financially secure. I mention that because people will assume I'm a greedy and ignorant Luddite doctor trying to protect my way of life. On the contrary, if someone developed a good replacement for what I don, I would gladly lay down my microphone and move on.

But I don't think we are there yet, in fact I don't think we're even close.
by Bender | 2025-09-26 11:12:46+00:00
This is some kind of poor encryption.

In fact it is exactly zero encryption both technically and legally. By using encoding I would not be breaking the law at all assuming encryption itself is actually outlawed. Encryption is mathematical obfuscation. This is only useful for text to/from the server of course. Local storage is still being scanned which means one still have to use a device that does not have local scanning if the files are sensitive such as financial documents or those files would also have to be encoded. Encoding may not have value to some people but it has value to me. Obviously if I am trying to hide something that is highly sensitive like a master password database then I would probably do something a tad bit stronger, maybe 64 to 256 chains of encoding. This is still sufficient to break fuzzy scanning.

Here's an easy one:

MDExMTAxMTEwMDExMDAwMDAwMT EwMDAwMDExMTAxMDAwMTExMDEx MTAwMTEwMDAwMDAxMTAwMDAw MTExMDEwMDAwMTAwMDAwMDEwMA oxMDAxMDAxMDAwMDAwMTEwMDAw MTAxMTAxMTAxMDAxMDAwMDAw MTEwMDAwMTAwMTAwMDAwMDExMT AwMTEwMTEwMTAwMTAxMTAxMTAw CjAxMTAxMTAwMDExMTEwMDEw MDEwMDAwMDAxMTEwMTExMDExMD ExMTEwMTEwMTEwMTAxMTAwMDEw MDExMDAwMDEwMTExMDEwMAo=

Zero encryption but it might take people a while to figure this out. The commands I used are installed by default to most Linux distributions. If I wanted to get really crazy I would add different levels and types of compression in the middle of the chain.
by al_borland | 2025-09-26 11:13:03+00:00
> This appears inconsistent with Apple’s privacy statement that such system data “never leaves Apple servers or goes to third parties.”

As I recall, this statement was specifically about Apple Intelligence. It was for their AI that couldn’t be done on-device, and wasn’t going to ChatGPT after user authorization.

It was not a general statement that all Apple endpoints are in-house.