MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-13 23:20:58+00:00
I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains.

I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself.

For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art and I have a budget of about $0. So I get asset packs off Itch.io and they generally drive the direction of my games because I get what I get (and I don’t get upset). But that’s changed dramatically this year. I’ll spend an hour working through graphics design and generation and then I’ll have what I need. I tweak as I go. So now I can have assets for whatever game I’m thinking of.

Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!

It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat.
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 23:21:32+00:00
I did not consider it a glib dismissal, and I would not consider traditional media an appropriate avenue to litigate this either. Trial by media is a term used to describe something that generally think shouldn't occur.

The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus.

The media should not be deciding what is true, they should be reporting what they see. Importantly they should make clear that the existence of a thing is not the same thing as the prevalence of a thing.

>Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum.

I think much of my post was in effect saying that a good deal of the problem is the belief that building political momentum is more important than accuracy.
by midnitewarrior | 2025-09-13 23:21:33+00:00
3d UIs don't work, every attempt has failed to reach mass adoption

IR keyboards lack haptic feedback

Aside from enhancedprivacy, a desire to drain your battery, a lack of recurring revenue for local phone LLMs, and functioning when network is inaccessible, what would a local LLM do that a network-enabled feature couldn't?
by metalman | 2025-09-13 23:21:35+00:00
Self taught climate junky here, so the Ekman Transport thing is a gem, which explains things I have seen inreal time watching huricanes leave there fingerprint right on the oceans surface

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/index.h...

and will be watching for the Panama upwelling more carefully, but my eye has been drawn to the intersectiin of the labrador current and the gulf stream this year, which looks off a bit with the labrador erratic and the gulf stream tending a bit south. Also surface currents are exceptionaly visible in the artic sea ice, right now

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
by slg | 2025-09-13 23:21:43+00:00
>If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend.

So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect.

>Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.

If we are talking about a society level problem, I think it is a little silly to think a society as toxic as this hypothetical one could be saved by anonymous internet posting.

For the record, I'm not as against anonymous posting as the person who started this specific comment thread, I just think this line of argument is advocating for a band-aid over bigger issues.
by palata | 2025-09-13 23:22:10+00:00
> We don't want to pay someone to write a feature we don't agree we need

We're talking about open source here, and saying "no" to unpaid, external contributors.

The way I approach it as an external contributor is that if the project is useful to me, I fork it, make my changes, and then open a PR in case the maintainers want to adopt them upstream. They don't have to, it's fine. But I don't have to ask for their opinion in an issue because I will just do what I want in my fork anyway.
by Theodores | 2025-09-13 23:22:36+00:00
Wimpy was not alone, before McDonald's franchises were commonly available in the UK, there were many burger shops that sometimes operated as a small chain.

One survivor is Burger Star (best by far), which is now down to a single location, down from their peak of about four locations.

When McDonald's was not everywhere it was quite easy for local shops to offer an American dining experience because most people had never been to the USA or McDonald's. It was cultural appropriation of sorts. In the 1980s everything American was awesome in the imagination of British people, exactly like the movies with Disney theme parks as the ultimate. In these times anything American was more sophisticated, whether it was 501 Levis, Nike shoes, water beds and much else that we stereotyped.

Wimpy made no claim to be faux American, it was definitely very British. So I don't see a battle of the burgers. Wimpy went the way of Little Chef, another British food chain that just got stuck in the past. People just didn't want that sit down, waited on experience any more, they wanted take out, which was not something Wimpy was known for.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-13 23:22:46+00:00
Of course it depends on fractions. You can develop cervical cancer via some other route, but the vast, vast majority of cervical cancers are caused by HPV infection. So knowing that all the plans towards eliminating this disease focus on HPV.

On the other hand most people with "flu" in summer months are not infected with Influenza, so an improved influenza treatment isn't going to make a big difference for them unlike in winter. We know other reasons you might get those symptoms which are more likely in summer.
by gerdesj | 2025-09-13 23:23:25+00:00
Scottish bloke rocks up to the wrong wedding, simple mistake.

Top thread on HN riffs on Catalan independence. To be fair, Scotland and Catalonia both cite each other as exemplars.

For me, I'm fighting for Wessex's independence from England and hence Britain oh and the UK. Eventually I'll fight for Somerset, then Yeovil and finally Brunswick Street. Not sure how it will all work.

Nominative tribalism can be a force for good or bad but rarely makes a useful contribution to an article about a daft mistake that has a heart warming finale.
by bashkiddie | 2025-09-13 23:24:34+00:00
Are you aware of jruby?

https://www.jruby.org/

It is ruby running on a Java Virtual Machine. Imposes all downsides of the JVM (try to allocate more that 4GByte per object!) and provides JVMs concurrency model. Currently supports Ruby 3.1 (it claims to support 3.4, read the fine print if your specific feature is supported!)
by rimunroe | 2025-09-13 23:24:36+00:00
> Which still isn't much, conpared to if everyone cared.

This is yet another blind assertion. Please give details about how it isn't being paid attention to much.

> Compare either to modern variants. Who maintains the F-35? Who profits from poor quality?

You keep arguing vague things without actually giving any examples. The F-35 is a vastly more complicated aircraft than the B-52. Please give an example as to which part or parts you're referring to as being low quality in comparison.

Fighters can't be used for nearly as long as a bomber like the B-52 because the threats they face evolve quickly and are much closer. You wouldn't fly an F-14 against a modern fighter because you'd be blasted out of the sky with an air-to-air missile from 50 miles away. A B-52 can attack from quite a ways away or be held off until airspace is under control. A B-2 on the other hand is supposed to be able to fly in unobserved, and thus its service lifetime will be more limited.
by lubujackson | 2025-09-13 23:24:37+00:00
There's a lot that goes into it. Before Facebook was Friendster. Which failed spectacularly because they tried to have some sort of n-squared graph of friends that took thw whole thing down. What FB got right in the early days was it didn't crash. We take that for granted now in the age of cloud everything.

Also, there was Classmates.com. A way for people to connect with old friends from high school. But it was a subscription service and few people were desperate enough to pay.

So it's wasn't just the idea waiting around but idea with the right combination of factors, user-growth on the Internet, etc.

And don't forget Facebook's greatest innovation - requiring a .edu email to register. This happened at a time when people were hesitant to tie their real world personas with the scary Internet, and it was a huge advantage: a great marketing angle, a guarantee of 1-to-1 accounts to people, and a natural rate limiter of adoption.
by fl7305 | 2025-09-13 23:24:41+00:00
You might be right that it wasn't GCC specifically. I think I was running a free/low cost version of OS-9 68K for the Atari ST, and managed to get hold of a proprietary C compiler for it. The combination of a "real" OS + C compiler made it possible to port the popular Unix text games of the time (empire, nethack, larn, etc).

My point was more that the 68K home computers like Atari ST and the Amiga of the mid-to-late 1980s were powerful enough to "run emacs / C compilers", even if it wasn't the GNU stuff yet.
by philodeon | 2025-09-13 23:24:56+00:00
Yes, that is precisely my point.

“ According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which "actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs" to make them "exploitable." ... One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.” —New York Times
by evanelias | 2025-09-13 23:25:00+00:00
That absolutely isn't true as a blanket statement. It varies a lot in terms of B2B vs B2C, distribution model, etc.

With B2B software using the popular model of "paid hosted SaaS + libre self-host", you can definitely get revenue from companies who happen to employ some open source purists. Ditto with the model of "libre self-host with paid technical support". But all of this is much harder with a non-OSI license, since the open source purists will protest, regardless of whether or not the company is even running the self-host version.

Software adoption also tends to follow network effects, so having any contingent of vocal people complaining about license choice is bad news for a business.
by KPGv2 | 2025-09-13 23:25:55+00:00
Yes, I'm writing a parser in Unison (in the Haskell family) for ASN.1 at the moment. It's so clean to write parsers with parser combinators.

For example Asn1Type can be of form Builtin, Referenced, or Constrained. So a sum type.

parseType = Builtin <$> parseBuiltin <|> (Referenced <$> parseReferenced) <|> (Constrained <$> parseConstrained)

Assuming you have the parsers for Builtin, Referenced, and Constrained, you're golden. (Haskell PCs look very similar, possibly even exactly the same minus different parenthesis for operator precedence reasons.

Compare Parsy for Python, particularly the verbosity (this parses SELECT statements in SQL):

select = seq( _select=SELECT + space, columns=column_expr.sep_by(padding + string(",") + padding, min=1), _from=space + FROM + space, table=table, where=(space >> WHERE >> space >> comparison).optional(), _end=padding + string(";"),

).combine_dict(Select)

The same thing in a FP-style language would be something like

eq "SELECT" *> Select <*> (sepBy columnExpr (eq ",")) <* (eq "FROM") <*> parseTable <*> optional (eq "WHERE") <* eq ";"

which would feed into something like

type Select = { cols: [ColumnExpr], table: Table, where: Optional Where}
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-09-13 23:26:48+00:00
There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something.

The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness.

Google Search <-- AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo

Facebook <-- MySpace, Friendster

iPod <-- MP3 players (Rio, Creative)

iPhone <-- BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile

Minecraft <-- Infiniminer

Amazon Web Services <-- traditional hosting

Windows (<-- Mac OS (1984), Xerox PARC

Android <-- Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm

YouTube <-- Vimeo, DailyMotion

Zoom <-- WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting
by dcreater | 2025-09-13 23:27:50+00:00
Categorize this under a journalist with a passing interest/insufficient research/prejudiced agenda/narrow understanding of a field and making bold statements they're not qualified to make.

Within the current state of the world, we need more systems thinking+research, done with quality, sophistication and in the public. Not less - this article does not help and spreads the wrong ideas.

summary and smackdown by Opus 4.1: https://claude.ai/share/1e8fec5e-ec6a-4c6f-a3d7-b74b0801e5b9
by yepitwas | 2025-09-13 23:28:11+00:00
What could “fight for this President” possibly mean when you’re sending people to the capital, after the election’s over, while telling them the election was stolen, on the very day that the election is to be formally certified? The election was over, the contest had ended… so far as legal options that follow the usual route for the peaceful transfer of power. What does “fight” mean here? What is someone using that kind of language around an event like that trying to accomplish?

I think it’s prodding people to do something dangerous and illegal and a risk to democracy herself, and I’m not really sure what else it could be.

(Why… would Trump hold a rally in DC on that particular day to begin with? And why did he and other speakers choose to say what they did? None of this is mysterious, it’s easy to read, but it still seems to be eluding a lot of folks in ways that it don’t think it would in any analogous situation that didn’t involve partisan politics)
by cj | 2025-09-13 23:28:13+00:00
Anyone can order labs via websites like https://directlabs.com/

If there is a doctor involved, it’s invisible to the consumer.

I believe there are 2-3 states where the rules are different (one being New York) where you can’t self-order tests, but every other state is unrestricted.

Even in New York where you can’t order via the typical websites, you can still go directly to Quest or Labcorp and buy your labs directly from them (without talking to a doctor).

Source: I regularly get blood panels without seeing doctors. I highly recommend direct labs, or Quest Direct if you live in NY.

Fun fact… my primary care provider ordered a Vitamin D and lipid panel for me last year. The cost of the labs after insurance was 3x more expensive than buying the labs myself without insurance. Insanity.

Edit: states with self-testing restrictions: AZ, NJ, NY, RI
by epistasis | 2025-09-13 23:29:51+00:00
Nearly all countries will be able to power themselves quite well with renewables, and if not that they can pay the high price for nuclear power.. But in any case, renewable energy provides much more independence than feasible with fossil fuel based industry. Fossil fuels require a continuous stream of transfer to operate. When you buy 5GW of solar panels from a country, you have 30+ years of energy before you need to think about repowering the facility, and even if there's a shortage after 30 years they are still working at merely reduced production power.

Those countries without the option for local renewables are no worse off for independence than before. The option of renewables only adds independence, it doesn't take it away. Thus our renewable future will be far more stable.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine gives a ton of insight about these dynamics, IMHO. Ukraine's energy system was vulnerable because large thermal generators pose easy targets that can be taken out with minimal tonnage of bombs. Taking out a solar field or wind field is not as easy. And Ukraine's nuclear facilities have been actively used against them during the war by Russia. In particular, Russia has used executions/torture/coercion of nuclear reactor staff and explosions around nuclear reactors to threaten melt downs, etc. Plus, it's barely been covered anywhere, but Russia in this year used drones to damage the new brand new sarcophagus that was supposed to last 100 years, with very few paths to repair:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protec...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM

And the war has also illustrated the dependence of so many countries on Russia's fossil fuels, enough to kick off inflation across the entire world. Fossil fuels are a global market, so it doesn't matter where the disruption happens, it affects prices the world over. Even though the US is supposedly energy independent when it comes to oil and natural gas, we still suffer the consequences because of that global market.

A power system bulid on local production via renewables does not suffer these massive disruptions from the actions of single nation states. The inflaction Reduction Act was very aptly named, though few people today understand why, it seems. Future generations will curse us for delaying our true energy independence, which is only possible when we get off fossil fuels.
by mcphage | 2025-09-13 23:32:13+00:00
> He described it as God's perfect law... but it's not clear if he actually condones or believes that

How do you imagine that working? Do you call many things you don’t support “God’s perfect law?”

> just making a claim about what's true within the canon of the bible

I wonder why he chose that specific example, then.

> what Ms. Rachel would believe to be consistent with herself.

What do you mean here?

> Do you know if he ever clarified his position on killing gays anywhere else?

This is an amazing sentence.
by timthorn | 2025-09-13 23:32:36+00:00
Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson came to give a lecture at my university when I was a student. I was busy in the lab and engrossed in my work, and realised the time 5 minutes after the talk was due to begin. I was too embarrassed to walk in late, so to my eternal regret I didn't go. I'm more comfortable with that sort of situation now, but I can appreciate the desire not to make a scene.
by godelski | 2025-09-13 23:34:13+00:00
I'd also STRONGLY recommend Polya's "How To Solve It"[0]

It really is about teaching you how to solve arbitrary problems. It teaches how to think. You can read pages xvi and xvii (in [0]) which will give you a good sense at what the book teaches. Half the first chapter is available too (this is an easy book to find online).

It's also technically a math book, but treating it as a standard math book is missing the point (honestly, missing the point of math altogether). It is really about how to solve problems, which that's what math is about. Math is really a collection of logics (plurality intended) that can be used to solve problems. Thing is, this is usually done in the abstract as mathematicians are usually interested in solving the general form of a problem. (The other part being that math is a high precision language, which is another thing it shares with programming languages). People might be scared off by the math notation in it, but I'd wager that anyone who can write anything more complicated than a hello world program is smart enough to make it through this book[1].

You do not need to be a mathematician to benefit from it, nor need to know much math at all. I'll make the strong claim that every single programmer, and anyone doing anything related to STE(A)M will benefit. If the "A" is surprising, I think you'll understand after reading a bit.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Scie...

[1] Variables in math are no different than in programming. The main difference is math is terse because it's typically hand written. I'd add that programming also has types but most people are writing with languages that do duck typing.
by andy99 | 2025-09-13 23:34:22+00:00
The reason I would do it, or do it when in the US is just the convenience. Seeing a doctor is complicated and obviously involves at least one extra step. If you just go and get the tests and have the info, it simplifies things, which is presumably the reason why these direct to consumer options exist in the US.

It's interesting to hear that notionally they have the same model as us of a doctor needing to prescribe the test. The difference in Canada is that private healthcare is not available so you are forced to deal with the public system and the pace and inconvenience that entails.
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 23:36:18+00:00
We've banned this account for continually posting unsubtantive comments and ignoring our previous request to observe the guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by pif | 2025-09-13 23:36:59+00:00
When my father left us, a cousine of mine (from my mother's sise) got confused and parked a couple blocks away. She entered the house where people were mourning, and she realised the people she didn't recognise had to be from my father's side. Then she approached the casket and leapt forward exclaiming "I'll miss you, Uncle", only to find a lady laying inside.
by giveita | 2025-09-13 23:37:23+00:00
The point though is AI wont make you rich. It is about value capture. They compare it to shipping containers.

I think AI value will mostly be spread. Open AI will be more like Godaddy than Apple. Trying to reduce prices and advertise (with a nice bit of dark patterns). It will make billions, but ultimately by competing its ass off rather than enjoying a moat.

The real moats might be in mineral mining, fabrication of chips etc. This may lead to strained relations between countries.
by gcanyon | 2025-09-13 23:37:41+00:00
I'm (ahem) over 50 and I just timed 120 second in my head and came out to 2 minutes 9 seconds. I cheat though, since I count to the beat of ZZ Top songs. These days the CPR people use Staying Alive, which feels faster to me, so I tried that, and got 2:10.

Then I tried it without counting -- 2:12. That can't be considered fair, since I already read the part about how over 50s mark time faster, so I could have subconsciously slowed my roll. Still, it's fascinating to me that I'm 3 in a row within 3 seconds.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-13 23:37:48+00:00
A good example of forestation done wrong is the Jewish national fund. They have done a great job planting forests all over Israel and their work is probably still a net positive. BUT, the original directors were all from Europe and planted european trees which look nicer then the native species and reminded them of "home".

As Israel is discovering perhaps there's a reason that these trees are not native - they are more prone to wildfires in the much hotter and drier middle eastern climate.
by XorNot | 2025-09-13 23:38:35+00:00
"simple, obvious and wrong".

Phages are intensely species specific to bacterial species, so they don't work unless you identify exactly what you're targeting. Also, even if they can penetrate biofilms, that doesn't mean you can successfully deliver them to the biofilm in the human body, since they have to survive the whole blood stream and the normal human immune response to "not self" things.