MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2025-09-27 12:36:24+00:00
> So why should anyone except AI researchers and the big 4 AI providers care about fine-tuning?

I currently have Qwen3 Coder 30B A3B on prem for developers to use and it's pretty good for that: fits within two Nvidia L4 cards (with quantization), has about 60 tok/s performance and can even use tools with something like RooCode or OpenWebUI.

However, if anyone asks it stuff in Latvian, it does mess up more often than not, like someone who has half-learned the language: more or less uses the words that represent the correct concepts, but not always the best pick and really often missing or wrongly used diacritics (ā, č, ē, ģ, ī, ķ, ļ, ņ, š, ū, ž). In a word, some basis of the language is there, but sadly in practice it's still unusable.

So far working with Latvian text I need to maintain EuroLLM running in parallel, which has great Latvian knowledge, but at the same time just knows less (not a model that's good for programming) and doesn't know how to call tools as well and isn't really meant for long contexts: https://huggingface.co/collections/utter-project/eurollm-66b...

So my ideal model (for this use case) would be something along the lines of: around 30B since can't fit anything much bigger into the VRAM for now, MoE, supports tool calling, okay programming knowledge, has a long enough context support, can converse in Latvian so I don't need to run 2 models (which means that the context sizes that can fit within VRAM are way too small for either of the models).

Without finetuning, I just have to sit and wait for someone to release that and it feels unlikely that it'll just pop into existence (even the bigger EuroLLM model is nowhere to be seen, TildeOpen works bad). With finetuning, maybe I have a chance to take the Latvian Wikipedia or whatever other samples of the language being used I can get, filter down to topics I care about, maybe use EuroLLM to generate question/answer pairs for training from that input data and then just run Unsloth over a weekend or something (who knows, maybe that'd be enough to bring Qwen3 up to speed).

Do most people care about that stuff? Probably not, but when you have to deal with a language that's less represented in the training data but will never have the budget to train something from scratch, finetuning is nice to have. RAG can't fix it not knowing how to use language.
by shaftoe | 2025-09-27 12:38:35+00:00
While bots are possible, another confounding factor is that the most prolific social media posters are strongly correlated with psychiatric disorders.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/

Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
by utopiah | 2025-09-27 12:38:41+00:00
Thanks. Well that's a good question, namely what do I actually expect out of federation.

In my case it's to remix pedagogical exercises. So I need :

- actual content (e.g. exercise and assets) to remix (imagine changing the language)

but also optionally

- author ID for attribution - a stable URL for provenance, again from attribution but possibly metadata (e.g. how many times played on origin server, language, etc)
by pkal | 2025-09-27 12:39:42+00:00
This is probably not useful for most people, but I wrote a little script for Emacs that lets me write TeX-style math in a comment and then render/update it below in MathML: http://sdf.org/~pkal/src+etc/mathml-from-tex.el. The translation itself is done by LaTeXML, which one must install on your system separately.
by Thorrez | 2025-09-27 12:39:51+00:00
>Of course, that means 75% of those posts were from people. PeakMetrics notes that the earliest posts expressing dismay and frustration at Cracker Barrel’s decision to update its logo came from human-run accounts. Once the bot networks started to pick up on the trend, though, they blew the whole thing up. “Authentic voices articulated cultural dissatisfaction, which bots then amplified,” the report said.

>PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.”
by crazygringo | 2025-09-27 12:41:01+00:00
But it's all part of the same thing. And it wasn't just the logo -- they redid the entire restaurant design. And they've rolled it all back now, the old restaurant design stays.

And the logo is more recognizable than you seem to think -- you see signs for it on the highway, it's part of building anticipation for the visit. It's part of childhood memories.
by danabramov | 2025-09-27 12:41:12+00:00
Ideally, a client app would make these backups for you automatically. I hope Bluesky official client will add automatic backups (in addition to the existing manual export flow that already exists). It's not hard to set it up as a GitHub action today if you're technical but making it accessible to non-technical users seems important.

>Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?

Not really since there has to be a source of truth where the writes happen. I guess you could manually replicate changes between multiple servers but there still has to be one that applications know to talk to. I'm not sure what problem it would solve. This seems similar to "can I have multiple deployments of my site" — you sure can, but you might as well deploy it elsewhere when you actually plan to point to it.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-27 12:41:25+00:00
There is no way people are that passionate about graphic design. All the debate about the logo has to do with conservatives declaring Cracker Barrel was going woke and getting angry about it and turning it into yet another front for their culture war.

Cracker Barrel is a mediocre chain people associate with the term “American.” That being said, this isn’t changing the Statue of Liberty. It’s a corporate logo change. People took this personally because virtually everything is part of the culture war now.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-27 12:41:26+00:00
That's the mirage of value. It's a mirage 'cause:

a) it isn't creating that value but taking it from somewhere else (past IME contestants and test preparers, StackOverflow, the job market, etc)

b) users fight to bid up the value of a single set of fixed capabilities, like rats fighting over the same scrap of leftovers. The market floods with generic copies of whatever stuff it can do.

That is to say it's utterly, humorlessly laughable to think that we're trending towards these things doing a whole economy worth of work.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-27 12:41:54+00:00
It's especially hilarious because ime, when it's drifting into this mode of constantly saying "production ready, ready to merge, ready to ship", the code it's producing is usually in a complete downward spiral - likely because it's no longer able to reason about the effect the "one little change" will have on the rest of the application.

Ive come to just terminate the session if a phrase like that turns up

Tbf to Nadia however, her comment supposedly came from the "code reviewer" agent? So the prompt might've explicitly asked it to make this statement and would (hopefully) not be reusing the context of the development (and neither the other way)
by sigmoid10 | 2025-09-27 12:42:21+00:00
IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.
by Applejinx | 2025-09-27 12:42:21+00:00
I have claves, which are literally two sticks. I've also got a couple egg shakers, a couple tambourines.

Do you have ANY IDEA how hard these things are to play well.

I don't care if haphazard bashing of sticks with intent to make noise counts as 'music'. I do care if this whole line of discussion fundamentally equates any such bashing with, say, Jack Ashford.

I would be surprised if the name meant anything to you, as he's more obscure than he should be: the percussionist and tambourine player for the great days of Motown. Some of you folks don't know why that is special.
by pmk1c | 2025-09-27 12:42:45+00:00
This I a valid point. But what‘s promising is: If this should happen, someone could easily decide to start Bluesky2 (maybe find a better name) and start at exactly the same point where rogue Bluesky left off ATProto.

Think about the Twitter exodus to Mastodon and Bluesky. Now imagine the same thing happening, but with one player saying: Come here, we have all the profiles, posts, feeds and likes and can promise, your data is still yours, when we decide to go rogue (maybe think about this marketing message again).
by rrjjww | 2025-09-27 12:43:13+00:00
While Covid 19 was certainly a "Catastrophe", the market for pandemic insurance in 2020 was minuscule and to my knowledge did not cause any insurer solvency issues. There were a few cases of insurers being instructed to pay out significant claims by the courts on Business Interruption losses which the insurers argued were not covered due to existing policy exclusion.

Product development is usually highly specialized as there are a lot of nuances and frictions within the insurance industry that outsiders may not fully understand. It helps also to be in the industry and have the network with insurers, reinsurers, brokers, etc. This is not at all to suggest there isn't room for clever people to bring innovation to the market though!

Book recs are hard to specify for CAT bonds but for insurance in general:

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On the Brink: How a Crisis Transformed Lloyd's of London - Andrew Duguid

The last one is a personal favourite of mine
by saalweachter | 2025-09-27 12:45:02+00:00
> It could be cheaper in the long run to have more tax collection and expenditure at the local level, and not rely as much on federal grants.

There's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma here in that even if a city decides to go this route, their citizens are still paying Federal taxes and contributing to the programs used to buy busses.

So you're not going to save your citizens any money unless everyone stops using the programs. From an incremental standpoint, where everyone has already defected, you want your local governments to be grabbing every grant they can.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-27 12:45:16+00:00
Sadly I actually stopped playing guitar because of my issues after having played for almost 20 years.

I'd played guitar since I was 12 years old and probably averaged at least an hour a day basically the entire time even into adulthood. Played obviously a hell of a lot more when I was a teenager though.i also was competing in powerlifting and used my grip and fingers for all sorts of stuff.

I had surgery on both elbows and am told I may need to on my hands/wrists since the issue is a combination of nerve issues and wrist issues.
by ZeroCool2u | 2025-09-27 12:45:36+00:00
Really impressive performance from the Moondream model, but looking at the results from the big 3 labs, it's absolutely wild how poorly Claude and OpenAI perform. Gemini isn't as good as Moondream, but it's clearly the only one that's even half way decent at these vision tasks. I didn't realize how big a performance gap there was.
by riordan | 2025-09-27 12:46:31+00:00
11 years ago, NY Magazine published my favorite startup zeitgeist article of the Uber-For-X era: “Let’s, like, demolish Laundry”. This feels like a perfect revisit of that for our darker and more cynical era.

https://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/
by reactordev | 2025-09-27 12:46:52+00:00
This is exactly what unit tests are for. You did the first (hard part), dissecting the Fortran ark for goodies. You built a Unity equivalent (slightly less hard than deciphering ancient text but still high on difficulty). Now, write tests that test those inputs and outputs (translation calls included). Great, now that all the tests pass, change to metric until the tests pass again.

I know it sounds daunting. Making a painting does too to someone who doesn’t paint. However, there are steps you can follow that make it super easy to create masterpieces and all the greats follow the same process.

So where you translate ft to m or slug/ft to slug/m or however - the surrounding math is perfect for a unit test. Keeping you from having to build another flight model and do analog mark-2 eyeball testing.

You could just leave it - someone will pick it up and do the work.

*EDIT* I ran some of it through my models and converted AirDataComputer to Kelvin, kg/m, m/s:

public class AirDataComputer { /// <summary> /// Density at sea level in kg/m³ (standard atmosphere) /// </summary> public const float SeaLevelDensity = 1.225f; /// <summary> /// Max altitude in meters /// </summary> public const float MaxAltitude = 10668.0f; // ~35,000 ft in meters /// <summary> /// Calculates air data based on velocity and altitude using SI units /// </summary> /// <param name="velocity">Velocity in m/s</param> /// <param name="altitude">Altitude in meters</param> /// <returns>Air data</returns> public AirData CalculateAirData(float velocity, float altitude) { const float baseTemperature = 288.15f; // Sea level temp in K (~15°C) const float minTemperature = 216.65f; // Tropopause temp in K (~ -56.5°C) const float temperatureGradient = 0.0065f; // Lapse rate in K/m const float gamma = 1.4f; // Ratio of specific heats const float gasConstant = 287.05f; // J/(kg·K), specific gas constant for air const float densityPower = 4.14f; altitude = Mathf.Clamp(altitude, 0, MaxAltitude); // Calculate temperature in Kelvin using linear lapse rate model float temperatureFactor = 1.0f - (temperatureGradient * altitude / baseTemperature); float T = Mathf.Max(minTemperature, baseTemperature * temperatureFactor); // Speed of sound in m/s float speedOfSound = Mathf.Sqrt(gamma * gasConstant * T); float altitudeMach = velocity / speedOfSound; // Air density using barometric approximation float rho = SeaLevelDensity * Mathf.Pow(temperatureFactor, densityPower); // Dynamic pressure in Pascals (N/m²) float qBar = 0.5f * rho * velocity * velocity; return new AirData() { altitudeMach = altitudeMach, qBar = qBar }; }
by litexlang | 2025-09-27 12:47:01+00:00
know @self_defined_axiom_larger_equal_is_transitive(x, y, z R): x >= y y >= z =>: x >= z

Since transitivity of >= is not implemented, one has to call this self_defined_axiom_larger_equal_is_transitive to make x >= 17 here, so

``` know forall x N: x >= 47 => x >= 17 ```

is essential
by tdeck | 2025-09-27 12:47:11+00:00
To OP: The term for these is "screen readers". NVDA seems pretty popular these days, and some people find it easier to learn. However if you need expensive software like JAWS and live in the US, your employer is probably required to buy it. That's why it costs as much as it does.

On Android you can use TalkBadk which works pretty well. You can set up a shortcut to enable it quickly by pressing both volume buttons at the same time. TalkBack allows even fully blind people to use a normal smartphone.
by danabramov | 2025-09-27 12:47:31+00:00
If the user chooses to delete their account, it is a separate event on the network, which well-behaved apps should respect (and update their caches accordingly). So an app like Bluesky would display this as a reply to a deleted post.

If the user's repo just goes down (e.g. the host is down), then indeed it won't be available upstream and only cached versions will remain. It might be that the user is having problems, and the repository will be up on a different host later. It's up to each application how to handle this, but it seems reasonable to keep serving cached content since there was no explicit deletion instruction. E.g. I presume Bluesky would keep showing both replies in the conversation.

>I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?

Yeah this is a tricky thing. The general guideline is that the user expresses intent (e.g. can delete post or entire repo) and well-behaved apps respect that intent. But of course there can be non-well-behaved apps that don't, or that permanently archive everything ever emitted.
by zbentley | 2025-09-27 12:48:36+00:00
Yes, and?

The outcome of that approach is that an important service has uniform low costs to direct consumers, many of whom rely on the service for their quality of life, and many of whom would be unable to afford the service if its costs were passed along to them instead of subsidized via government debt and taxes.

In other words, a public service. That’s a good thing.
by TrackerFF | 2025-09-27 12:48:45+00:00
I'm a musician, and have been for 25+ years. In fact, I made a living of music before eventually getting my education and working in tech.

I've played around with Suno for a couple of months. It works for some things, but to me - it just doesn't give any sense of...accomplishment? I'd much rather sit down with my instruments, and come up with the stuff myself.

What is more, I get no feel of ownership. It is not me that's making music, I'm just feeding it prompts. That's it.

It's like paying some painter 5 bucks, and telling them what to paint. In the end, you'll have your painting, but you didn't paint it.

With that said, these tools have their uses. Generating jingles and muzak is easier than ever.
by JetSetIlly | 2025-09-27 12:48:54+00:00
Maybe it doesn't make it any easier but your question does remind us that cataloguing and categorising people can be dangerous. I accept that there are good reasons that the state could use this information, but we should also be alert to possible abuses.

Without looking, I honestly don't know if the passport and driving licence lists this information. But the census certainly does.
by spookie | 2025-09-27 12:49:28+00:00
This is what happens in the EU, even more noticeable since 2021. Hell, it's basically the horseshoe theory put into practice. In some subjects similar ideas are supported by both extremes, mostly just for political gain in the moment. You know, populists are like that.

Take a look at France. That's what has been happening since political interests took over the gilets jaunes protest (which didn't really end in 2020, mind you), and continues to this day in one way or another.

(Edit: clarify, and add context)
by lyu07282 | 2025-09-27 12:50:16+00:00
Has anyone dived more deeper into this, how do they determine if it is a bot or not? It seems like a non-trivial problem to me, on Reddit there is the BotBouncer [1] but that's all seemingly based on user-flagging.

I couldn't find any real sources for it besides [2] but its not even mentioning bots, did Gizmodo make it up? Why don't they link their sources ffs!

Like people constantly allege botting or brigarding for things they don't like, and even if it wasn't a machine it can still be inauthentic. The methodology seems really important to explain in detail otherwise this is all just vibes and junk science.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BotBouncer/ Github: https://github.com/fsvreddit/bot-bouncer

[2] https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...
by infinitezest | 2025-09-27 12:50:23+00:00
The issue is one of power imbalance. It's not a new observation to say that money basically equates to power. The more money you have, the more influence you have, the more you get your way. And the more you don't have to care about what anyone else thinks. You become completely detached from the needs and wants of the majority around you because as long as your needs and wants are being met you have no reason to work with anyone else. They need you more than you need them OR you have so much more money/power that you don't really need to account for their well-being at all. There is no material difference to you at a certain point. And the gap between who Has and who Has Not is getting larger. By a lot.

How can the world continue to function this way if fewer of us have so much wealth that the rest of us effectively have no say in how the world works?
by i_c_b | 2025-09-27 12:51:41+00:00
I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.

I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...

So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.
by throwaway_7274 | 2025-09-27 12:52:32+00:00
Actually, you can’t specify macros anywhere. Unlike TeX, it’s a real honest-to-goodness programming language with functions and types and modules (yes! It has namespaces!) instead of just macros on macros on macros.

It’s not perfect, they definitely made some interesting choices here and there, but this makes it ~80% less painful than TeX when you’re doing anything other than happy-path undergrad-lab-report writing.

(To be clear, I know you know this! I’m writing this for the benefit of all sentient beings :))
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-27 12:53:51+00:00
I was not taught to formally type and learned pretty much exclusively from playing PC games. Primarily wold of Warcraft.

I did not "touch type" in the traditional sense of correct form and using the home row, but I didn't need to look at the keyboard. I typed around 120wpm like this though at the time. I have not and probably never will get back to this speed typing on the Kinesis. I'm closer to just 90-100wpm with stricter typing technique. But usually try not to type as fast as I can anymore anyway. I still to this day type faster with my crap form on a laptop keyboard if I swap to it for a bit even though I rarely do anymore.

My typing form was honestly atrocious. If I were to describe it I covered over wasd with my left hand as if I was gaming, and pinky was only ever really used for modifier keys and shifting. I only used left shift, never right. My right hand I used index finger for spacebar and moved my entire hand to the spacebar between every word. I didn't even realize I did this until I sat and analyzed my typing form maybe a year ago to compare to correct touch typing.

It actually took me quite a while to learn to type on a split keyboard since I basically had to learn to type correctly from scratch.