MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pas | 2025-10-27 11:26:58+00:00
ah, thanks!

yes, to me this is not about the Sokal affair, it's absolutely only about Gaza/Palestine, and how even Sokal itself is a hero of the cause, and how he used a way to advocate for higher standards in social science even if some thinks of this way as not ethically spotless, but everything is all right after all because they were doing politics back then (and the whole construct conundrum was already put to rest by Professor Fuss decades ago, basically right after the affair, he-he), and so on and so on, politics on the occasion of the anniversary of the affair.

that said now I'm trying to get a copy (or at least some response to) Fuss' 19 page book (!) about essentialism/anti-essentialism. sounds interesting. (really shows how academia needs to shut up when they cannot even their their own theory promulgated in their own circles, and come to some working conclusion, instead of just playing the forever armchair quarterback and vanguard at the same time.)
by twostraws | 2025-10-27 11:27:31+00:00
If you try the game and like it – if you've run through the 10 tutorial challenges and thought, "I like this and want more" – there's a separate version of the app that is an up-front, one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all. You pay once and get everything. Get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754342195
by aa-jv | 2025-10-27 11:28:36+00:00
I think the more important maxim to follow is this: if you didn't manufacture your own sillicon, you are infinitely more hackable than if you did.

Alas, no matter how hard we try to trust our compilers, we must also adopt methods to trust our foundries.

Oh, we don't have our own foundries?

Yeah, thats the real problem. Who owns the foundries?
by CZEC | 2025-10-27 11:28:41+00:00
The linguistic situation in coastal Karnataka is a complex and highly interesting one. Many, if not most people in that region are not Kannada mother-tongue speakers but have a different home language (Tulu, Malayalam, Konkani); furthermore, the dialects of spoken Kannada in that region (Havyaka, Kundapura Kannada, etc.) deviate considerably from the modern literary norm. In this complex linguistic environment, Kannada is the language in common (esp. written) use. Tulu is used colloquially in southwestern Karnataka, but is not standardized and is hardly used for written purposes. To some extent, Kannada in coastal Karnataka can be compared to standard German in Switzerland. Kannada is consciously learnt in school rather than at home, and this explains why the written Kannada from that region is very precise and cultivated; for that same reason, it is sometimes unfairly considered ‘stiff’ and ‘lifeless’ by Kannada speakers from other parts of the speech area.
by benabbott | 2025-10-27 11:29:09+00:00
Climate change seems to be a topic that's "OK" to be skeptical about because you can't see it right now, today, with your own eyes.

I wonder if folks who aren't so keen on the idea of climate change would be more open to the idea of population-level poisoning?

These two issues seem to get lumped in the same bucket but it does seem that population-level poisoning seems to be more of an acute threat. Lead, asbestos, microplastics, PFAs, pesticides... Who knows what these will do over generations, and there is certainly more chemical poisons we've introduced into our environment that we haven't even discovered.
Built a tool to switch Claude models mid-conversation
by sahli | 2025-10-27 11:29:38+00:00
I aimed to optimize the usage limit by using Haiku for simple questions and Sonnet for complex analysis—while maintaining the conversation context. I created a simple tool that lets me switch models within the same chat. The screenshot shows it in action: Claude correctly identifies itself as Haiku after switching from Sonnet mid-conversation.

https://imgur.com/a/sYRHjHC

Use cases:

- Drop to Haiku for quick clarifications and edits - Use Sonnet for in-depth analysis and complex code - Stay within rate limits by selecting the appropriate model per turn

Keeping it private for now to gauge interest. Would this be useful to others?
by CZEC | 2025-10-27 11:30:44+00:00
ನನ ೆ Ěೕರು ™ೇಕು nanage nīru bēku can have any meaning ranging from ‘I need water’ (because otherwise my health will fail me due to dehydration) to ‘I would like some water’ (because my mouth is dry and I will able to speak more easily if I have had a sip of water, or because I wish to wash away a bad taste from my mouth). Usually the context will make it clear to the listener or reader what is meant. Kannada has words that are more precise (such as ಬಯಸು bayasu ‘to desire’, ಇċªಸು icchisu ‘to wish’, ಅವಶ½
by eska | 2025-10-27 11:31:05+00:00
The original repo is about using a subset of a language to compare language implementations. I can see the point in that. But language benchmarks like this are incredibly useless and very easy to get wrong anyway. For example it you actually cared about performance for the bounce example you would never write it like this in C. Bouncing 100 balls in a loop 50 times with 4 ifs just tests the branch predictor. There is nothing to learn from this in practice.
by api | 2025-10-27 11:31:30+00:00
The better answer is to build better OSes with better security models.

I should be able to run a crypto wallet I downloaded from a Kim Jong Un fan site while high and it shouldn’t be able to do anything I don’t give it permission to do.

It’s totally possible. Tabs in a web browser are basically this.

I can do it with VMs but that’s lots of extra steps.
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-27 11:32:04+00:00
Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).
by IshKebab | 2025-10-27 11:32:31+00:00
> Even apps that could easily be built into a single binary use these odd installation methods.

Yeah because the curl bash script can deal with automatically selecting the right binary (even on Mac) and adding it to your PATH.

> And while Flatpak gets a lot of criticism, I honestly think it's far better than these `script| bash` methods.

I agree but does Flatpak actually work for CLI tools (which is where I see most use of curl-bash). E.g. could I install Rust using Flatpak? My understanding was it's more suited for sandboxed GUI apps.
by jimnotgym | 2025-10-27 11:32:54+00:00
>Such interspecies adoptions appear to have become more common in recent years

Or humans have been noticing them more. If this happened every year in a deserted area then nobody would know. Equally if some yokel saw it happening regularly in the past, they probably wouldn't have contacted anyone who would publish it to the world. They also probably were not carrying a camera in their pocket.
by nicce | 2025-10-27 11:33:55+00:00
> (disclaimer: I think bitcoin is dumb, but the market disagrees)

I believe that market is quite controversial. Most people know that bitcoin is a bit dump, but they buy it regardless because they believe they profit from it when they do that as part of larger group. A very interesting social experiment with the mix of market manipulation. It is less about stability, independence or usability of the currency, but more about the opportunity of profit.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-27 11:33:56+00:00
I don't think it's entirely illegitimate.

1- citing wikipedia (or any tertiary source) is valid, the problem is just when the source is not cited. And also it's against wikipedia policy, but you are free to cite it elsewhere.

2- citing the tertiary source and citing the secondary source are distinct and valid. There is no "rule", in wikipedia or otherwise, that says you need to cite the underlying source. In fact citation chains can become quite deep, it would be very impractical. An example would be, you could cite the gospels when jesus talks with the devil. If we had it your way then you wouldn't be able to cite an apostle, you would have to attribute the quote to jesus, and furthermore if jesus quoted the old testament you would have to cite that? If you think the bible is an exception, consider case law, if you were to cite an attorney's defense and the attorney cited some cases, would you have to cite the original cases? If so, then which? There might be multiple, it's not just a citation chain but a graph.

In this specific example your professor was not just quoting himself, but his work is now part of wikipedia and importantly was not contested or was not successfully contested. Similarly to how a trademark works, you claim you own the trademark, and if a year or so no one contends it, you have a stronger case that it's yours.
by simoncion | 2025-10-27 11:34:07+00:00
Yeah, honestly, package your thing up as either a .DEB or an .RPM. 'alien' [0] will handle converting from one to the other, and that will take care of like 90->98% of the Linux users out there.

The "OMFG there's no standard way to package things on Linux!" complaint kinda sucks.

[0] <https://wiki.debian.org/Alien>
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-27 11:34:17+00:00
I disagree, I don’t think I’m excusing it at all and your argument hinges on the restriction of software running on hardware to be evil. I wouldn’t describe it that way. I think it’s frustrating certainly but I don’t think you have an inalienable right to run code of your choice.

I would characterize it more as Google is responding to the needs of the vast majority of its users, most of whom do not care to run unsigned software, certainly don’t write it, and have no need of escape hatches. Escape hatches are great, but each also represents a security weakness waiting to be exploited.

And not to leave it merely implied: they are also responding to large development organizations who want locked down platforms in which they can distribute, and more importantly crack down on those who would pirate their, software.
by brainless | 2025-10-27 11:35:04+00:00
This looks very good from the screenshots. I will try this as quickly as I can. I have been building with egui and have tried Iced, Slint and Makepad.

I built (agentic coded) a stocks viewer app for Indian stock market data: https://github.com/brainless/Indistocks. It was a fantastic experience as to how easily I could build a GUI app.

My main product also uses egui: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo. It used to have a web app frontend and I moved to desktop app after the experiment with Indistocks. The experience has been really good, also coded with agents.

Desktop apps are fun and even on my somewhat old and slow laptop (i5 8th gen, 16 GB RAM, 2GB nvidia dedicated graphics), they are so much faster than web apps on Chrome (on Linux). I want desktop apps to make a big comeback, we could use so many old devices.
by JackMorgan | 2025-10-27 11:35:06+00:00
Because too many bad interviews are all about ensuring that the candidate knows the exact same 1% of CS/SWE knowledge as the interviewer.

Don't worry, karma dictates when the interviewer goes looking they'll get rejected for not knowing some similarly esoteric graph theory equation or the internal workings of a NIC card.

Too much of our interviewing is reading the interviewer's mind or already knowing the answer to a trick question.

The field is way too vast for anyone to even know a majority, and realistically it's extremely difficult to assess if someone is an expert in a different 1%.

Sometimes I feel like we need a system for just paying folks to see if they can do the job. Or an actually trusted credentialing system where folks can show what they've earned with badges and such.

A better interview question about this subject doesn't assume they have it memorized, but if they can find the answer in a short time with the internet or get paralyzed and give up. It's a very important skill to be able to recognize you are missing information and researching it on the Internet.

For example, one of my most talented engineers didn't really know that much about CS/SWE. However, he had some very talented buddies on a big discord server who could help him figure out anything. I kid you not, this kid with no degree and no experience other than making a small hobby video game would regularly tackle the most challenging projects we had. He'd just ask his buddies when he got stuck and they'd point him to the right blog posts and books. It was like he had a real life TRRPG Contacts stat. He was that hungry and smart enough to listen to his buddies, and then actually clever enough to learn on the job to figure it out. He got done more in a week than the next three engineers of his cohort combined (and this was before LLMs).

So maybe what we should test isn't data stored in the brain but ability to solve a problem given internet access.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-27 11:35:13+00:00
We call an embedding-space n-dimensional, but in this context I would consider it 1-dimensional, as in it's a 1d vector of n values. The terminology just sucks. If we described images the same way we describe embeddings a 2 megapixel image would have to be called 2-million-dimensional (or 8-million-dimensional if we consider rgba to be four separate values)

I would also argue tokens are outside the embedding space, and a large part of the magic of LLMs (and many other neural network types) is the ability to map sequences of rather crude inputs (tokens) into a more meaningful embedding space, and then map from a meaningful embedding space back to tokens we humans understand
by globular-toast | 2025-10-27 11:35:17+00:00
Since when? What have they been replaced with?

I went on the train between Hamburg and Copenhagen around 2007. Crossed on a ferry between Puttgarden (Germany) and Rødby (Denmark). Looks like this was discontinued in 2019 but I'm not sure what replaces the Hamburg-Copenhagen link. I'm glad I did it, it was definitely a strange experience to disembark the train on to a ferry and go and stand on the deck as it crossed.
by NalNezumi | 2025-10-27 11:35:28+00:00
Huh interesting. I overheard a conversation in a bar around Kabukicho, Shinjuku, Tokyo a few years ago with similar story.

The bartender was talkingto a local bar owner, and he was explaining how he was trying to find another contractor for garbage disposal because he found the current rate ridiculous. Every contractor hung up on him after hearing his address, and he found out that yakuza had territories around Kabukicho and you'd get in trouble if you took a contract there.

Interesting to hear garbage disposal being a common business organized crime go for. I guess there's many utilities too to have garbage disposal infrastructure for other illegal activities
Ask HN: Career in science when you're old?
by jitbit | 2025-10-27 11:35:32+00:00
I'm financially secure and would love to volunteer in science (physics). How would you even approach that?

Some background: I have a master’s in math and 30 years of full-stack software engineering. I have a (very) basic understanding of relativity, quantum field theory, gravity, electricity etc.

I’ve also founded a moderately successful software company, so I can basically work for free. Intern, lab assistant, unpaid engineer - anything! I'm good at explaining complex things in simple ways to students, but I'm also fine just making coffee for some professor for the rest of my life if it means being around scientific research.

So... Do universities have volunteer positions like that? Do I just send CVs to local universities? Or is there a better way to get involved? (I’m in Europe, if that matters)

The problem is that I'm actually 48 which is super old by today's standards.

Thanks.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-27 11:35:39+00:00
My issue with that is that I don't really have any Python tooling installed globally (old trauma with overlapping package versions), each project is in an uv venv.

So every time an LLM starts firing blind they'll go python -> python3 -> damnit -> uv run python, wasting precious tokens.

That's why I have explicit instructions on how to use uv to manage things in AGENTS.md
by Amezarak | 2025-10-27 11:35:51+00:00
Right, and I agree and I don’t. I’d o my best to explain to my kids they should never put anything in their mouth that isn’t made to be eaten.

But this should be considered when we make blanket claims about it’s okay because we’re just touching them, not eating them. We have to think about how people actually behave, not ideal usage.

By the way, headphones are required in elementary school here and are used at least an hour a day.
by nu11ptr | 2025-10-27 11:36:28+00:00
Even though most UI libraries now draw their own widgets some native integration is almost always used/desired. Those integrations are typically: keyboard short cuts, native system menu (macOS), native file dialogs, and (sometimes) native context menus. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but these minimal integrations are a good thing as they give the user some sense of familiarity.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-27 11:36:33+00:00
I think if we had a perfect tool where you can get MRI (and CT) data in the time it takes to get a blood pressure reading, it would only be used to detect slam-dunk diagnoses for further screening which is how we use blood pressure.

You’re assuming that we would skip this step, implicitly.

Now when would we do further screening? In a Bayesian framework, when we have a certain pre-test probability that we think we can improve to our desired level of post-test probability in order to take an action.

The fact that this is all automated doesn’t change our uncertainty about whether borderline calls should be targeted. Indeed, we’ll likely have more stringent criteria about things to ignore than are used today, and that may be worse for the small number of times we currently catch an actionable incidental finding.

And we’re not even beginning to consider cost, resource misuse, and the risks we’re incurring (an MRI machine isn’t safe to be around and costs a lot to maintain)

Edit: the things that kill people are smoking, heart disease, lack of exercise and poor diet. Targeting these is so much more useful than detecting a larger number of incidental findings
by vindex10 | 2025-10-27 11:36:42+00:00
reminds me of the difference between fasttext and word2vec.

fasttext can learn words it haven't seen before by combining words from ngrams, word2vec can learn better meaning of the whole words, but then missing out on the "unknown words".

image tokens are "text2vec" here, while text tokens are a proxy towards building a text embedding of even unseen before texts.
by mlrtime | 2025-10-27 11:37:10+00:00
I never thought about this.. I've had the following problem in the past.

Host A, cannot reach official github.com. But Host B can and has a local copy of a repo cloned. So Host B can 'git clone ssh://' from Host A which is essentially equivalent, but just setting origin to Host B instead of github.com, sort of acting as a manual proxy?

What if Host A is natted, so Host B can ssh to Host A but not the reverse, can Host G ssh clone to Host A to push changes?

In the rare times I've needed this, I just 'rsync -av --delete' a repo from B->A.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-27 11:37:21+00:00
I don't even bother pasting issues.

I just have a /fix-github-issue command that tells Claude to fix issue #xx with some extra definition of done stuff (test + build + update docs before finishing).

I also have a few other /commands for preparing and labeling issues.

Documentation by itself isn't useful (the human-readable kind), but for larger projects it's really useful to have a tree-style description on what is in each directory and a short description on where everything is in general. And this file is specifically LLM-optimised without any extra prose or formatting.

For larger projects you're wasting context if the LLM has to poke around in the dark and guess based on file/class names where everything is.
by jwr | 2025-10-27 11:37:29+00:00
> Is it possible to hot-reload a stateless function in Clojure without restarting the system?

Sure. But over the years I learned that I don't want to do that unless I'm debugging something, and I'd never do that in a production system anymore.

Like many other things in CL, they seem nice and shiny, and are sometimes beautifully designed (meta-object protocol!), but in practical day to day usage, especially with production systems, it's better to stick to simpler and more understandable tools, and predictable and repeatable deployments. Even if it's "your own thing" (I've been running my own SaaS for >10 years now). That's why I rarely use multimethods, I try not to be too smart and fancy with my code, I comment and document a lot, use ansible for deployments, and never patch production systems (e.g. every update goes through an ansible deployment).
by mohsen1 | 2025-10-27 11:38:15+00:00
My understanding is that text tokens are too rigid. The way we read is not to process each character (tokens for LLMs) precociously but to see a word or sometimes a collection of familiar words and make sense of writing. That concept that we understand from written text is really what we read and not letter or words exactly. This is why we can easily read written text with typos. They are just similar enough. By letting LLMs not to be too hung up on exact tokens and "skim" through text we can make them more efficient just like how humans efficiently read.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-10-27 11:39:57+00:00
A couple books I'd put in this category:

1. Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, loose basis of Tarkovsky's Stalker movie.

2. XX by Rian Hughes -- hugely under-rated book. Starts with a signal from outer space and goes quite far, and also has a book-within-a-book. Nearly 1000 pages but found it very engaging.

Currently trying to read Stanlislaw Lem's His Master's Voice which has a similar theme of a possible signal from an alien intelligence.
Show HN: HanView -Effortless Learning Chinese on Wallpapers
by mapedia | 2025-10-27 11:39:57+00:00
HanView fetches the stunning daily Bing wallpaper (every 3 hours), uses AI to seamlessly overlay a random frequently used Chinese word, and sets the enriched image as your Windows wallpaper. It’s a perfect way to "encounter" a Chinese word, effortlessly—blending the beauty of the world with the richness of language, right on your desktop.
by Mumps | 2025-10-27 11:40:00+00:00
Do you mean the [0] Token Benchmarks section? I only see token count numbers.

Which doesn't address the question: do LLMs understand TOON the same as they would JSON? It's quite likely that this notation is not interpreted the same by most LLM, as they would JSON. So benchmarks on, say, data processing tasks, would be warranted.

[0] https://github.com/johannschopplich/toon?tab=readme-ov-file#...
by galangalalgol | 2025-10-27 11:40:38+00:00
I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.
by ghoul2 | 2025-10-27 11:40:43+00:00
But does this not miss the "context" that the embeddings of the text tokens carry? An LLM embedding of a text token has a compressed version of the entire preceding set of tokens that came before it in the context. While the image embeddings are just representations of pixel values.

Sort of at the level of word2vec, where the representation of "flies" in "fruit flies like a banana" vs "time flies like an arrow" would be the same.