MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by musebox35 | 2025-10-18 17:01:07+00:00
waymo already has driverless taxi service in a major us city and is expanding. Tesla is in the process. again this is if they cover the last 5%. Scalability arguments wont matter when they can not launch such a service. And no, cmos cameras are close but are not better than the human eye in low light unless you have an ir camera and can flood everywhere with active ir lights. they are certainly inferior in dynamic range. I have been doing vision for more than two decades and I would not be comfortable in a camera only robotaxi at high speed. Certainly not at night or under adverse weather conditions. But this is all speculation of course. Considering fully autonomous driving at scale has been a major unrealised promise for the past 10 years, I stand by my assessment until I see a major advancement in camera technology or affordable active sensors.
by oasisbob | 2025-10-18 17:01:19+00:00
I'm not sure that either of these methods count as traditional.

Air spades in particular are primarily used for rootwork, not transplanting. Bareroot methods are used for smaller trees. Bare rooting leaves roots in a very vulnerable state, so doing it on larger trees you intend to move and keep alive is a serious logistical challenge.

The most traditional method I can think of is "ball and burlap" where root balls are cut free in the field, and retrieved later in the season for final packaging.
by saxenaabhi | 2025-10-18 17:01:32+00:00
Not speaking about their case, but I think some cases a "versioned mutable data store" with a event log that lists updates/inserts makes more sense than an "immutable event log" one like kafka.

Consider the update_order_item_quantity event in a classic event sourced systems. It's not possible to guarantee that two waiters dispatching two such events at same time when current quantity is 1 would not cause the quantity to become negative/invalid.

If the data store allowed for mutability and produced an event log it's easy:

Instead of dispatching the update_order_item_quantity you would update the order document specifying the current version. In the previous example second request would fail since it specified a stale version_id. And you can get the auditability benefits of classic event sourcing system as well because you have versions and an event log.

This kind of architecture is trivial to implement with CouchDB and easier to maintain than kafka. Pity it's impossible to find managed hosting for CouchDB outside of IBM.
by manmal | 2025-10-18 17:02:07+00:00
Unfortunately we can’t know at this point whether transformers really understand chess, or just go on a textual representation of good moves in their training data. They are pretty good players, but far from the quality of specialized chess bots. Can you please explain how we can discern that GPT-2 in this instance really built a model of the board?

Regarding qualia, that’s ok on HN.

Regarding humans - yes, humans also hallucinate. Sounds a bit like whataboutism in this context though.
by aerzen | 2025-10-18 17:02:18+00:00
These "anti-patterns" are just workarounds for bad language design of SQL (or lack of design actually). I'm working on a language that can run on SQL databases, so I hope it will do better with every one of these points.

If anyone wants to check out a half-done lang with lacking documentation, I'd be happy to read your feedback: https://lutra-lang.org
by FpUser | 2025-10-18 17:03:36+00:00
Because I tell AI exactly what and very often how to write the code to avoid sub-optimal solutions AI so keen to propose if not properly directed.

As for autocompletion, not sure about every tool but CLion and other IDEs I have from JetBrains are genius. Yes they can autocomplete multiple lines of code with a single keystrokes and no I do not really want to write it myself as it mostly boilerplate code I've written many times and autocompletion just predicts it.
Show HN: I replaced paid WhatsApp platform With a self-hosted Free stack (n8n) [video]
by ahmedelhadidi | 2025-10-18 17:04:17+00:00
Demo video (8–10 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J08qIsBXs9k

Quick start macOS/Linux: cd ./Mac docker compose up -d

Windows (PowerShell/CMD): cd .\Windows docker compose up -d

How it connects 1.Start containers, open http://localhost:3000, Link Device (scan QR) 2.In n8n, create a POST webhook and copy the Production URL 3.In the WA dashboard, set event=messages → paste the n8n URL • If both run in Docker: use http://n8n/… (service name), not localhost 4.Add AI Agent node + memory (window=10) 5. Add HTTP Request node to send the AI reply back to WhatsApp

Gotchas • The WhatsApp session must be named “default” • Bind volumes for persistence so you don’t re-link after restarts • You can raise the memory window above 10 if your use-case needs it

Roadmap (feedback welcome) • Attachments/media • Multi-number routing • Retries/monitoring/healthchecks • FAQ/Docs ingestion for the agent

Not affiliated with WhatsApp or Meta. Please use on accounts you control and follow local laws. Happy to answer technical questions and share snippets.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-18 17:04:29+00:00
> Can you please explain how we can discern that GPT-2 in this instance really built a model of the board?

Read the article. It's very clear. To quote it:

"Next, I wanted to see if my model could accurately track the state of the board. A quick overview of linear probes: We can take the internal activations of a model as it’s predicting the next token, and train a linear model to take the model’s activations as inputs and predict board state as output. Because a linear probe is very simple, we can have confidence that it reflects the model’s internal knowledge rather than the capacity of the probe itself."

If the article doesn't satisfy your curiosity, you can continue with the academic paper it links to: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15498v2

See also Anthropic's research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-mod...

If that's not enough, you might explore https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Language-Lev-S-Vygotsky/dp/02...

or https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156482401 to better connect language and world models in your understanding.
by trashface | 2025-10-18 17:04:32+00:00
By this point in college 30 years ago I had switched to mostly emacs, and was struggling with it - our program was unix based (solaris) with gcc. But a few years before that I was using turbo pascal, which was indeed a very fast ide, partially by virtue of how low latency hardware was back then.

I like these programs, mostly for that sweet low latency which is just gone today, but I wouldn't romanticize them as dev experiences. To experience it you can download free pascal today and use theirs which is just like turbo pascal (may even based on turbo pascal?). Its pretty clunky compared to what you get today, although, the debugger works which is more than what you can say for the majority of languages today.
by submeta | 2025-10-18 17:05:02+00:00
Ahh, memories. I started hacking in Emacs on my Amiga 2000 in 1988. And later in Turbo Pascal in 1991ish.

When I saw Visual Studio years later, or Visual Basic, these IDEs were doing so much more, but I‘d lose the ability to fully control the bare text. These MS tools wouldn’t allow me to write my code in my favourite text editor and version it. So they were nice and a curse at the same time.
by torgoguys | 2025-10-18 17:05:54+00:00
You called an "interrupt," which was basically a system call. That changed a bunch of timing registers within the video hardware. For a long time you basically could only do 40, 80 columns of text and 25, 43, or 50 lines. With some trickery you could get the video hardware to output 90 columns and with even more trickery you could get 60 rows.

If you made a custom font you could also have more diversity in the number of rows too but this was rarely done.

Eventually different text modes became available with higher resolution video cards and monitors. 132 columns of text were common but there were others.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-18 17:05:54+00:00
That is not the case. The government was elected with 33.7% of the vote.

You were trying to make a distinction between "government" and "executive" -- that's not how it works here, matey. His Majesty's Government is the party in power (or whichever grouping of MPs can hold the confidence of parliament), it is not all the other MPs - they are the opposition.

We don't have an "Executive". We have His Majesty's Government, they head all the departments, they command the civil service, they control the legislative timetable. The rest of the MPs and Lords are just plebs who get to vote on things. The opposition don't get to propose legislation, except when the Government feels generous and lets them (opposition days).

FPTP creates individual constituencies of roughly 70,000 voters, and the candidate who gets the most votes in one constituency wins a seat. The other candidates in that constituency get nothing, and all votes for them are completely wasted (unlike in other voting schemes). Candidates are usually a member of a political party. The party with the most seats gets first opportunity to form a government.

The 2024 general election was won by Labour with 9,708,716 votes (33.70%) out of 28,924,725 cast. Turnout was 60%, there could've been 48,208,507 possible votes.

The 2019 general election was won by the Conservatives with 13,966,454 votes (43.63%). 2017 was 42.3%. 2015 was 36.8%. 2010 was 59.1%. 2005 was 35.2%. 2001 was 40.7%. You can see the last result was the lowest vote share in decades.

And yet, 33.7% of the vote nets you 100% of the power. Thanks, FPTP!
by whaleofatw2022 | 2025-10-18 17:06:15+00:00
We had a whiplash effect in the US.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Used car prices plummeted due to so many people trading in 2nd vehicles. I remember tire kicking a 2008 vehicle that was 2000$ then...

Whiplash on used cars started later in 2021, as people were starting to go back out more and in some cases beginning to RTO.

The combination of rising new car prices and rising interest rates in 2022 only further hurt the market. On top of that the newer cars are in many cases less reliable so people are holding on longer.

Fwiw I just double checked and For reference that same 2008/make/mileage is now more like 5000$...
by robotresearcher | 2025-10-18 17:06:53+00:00
A toaster has feedback control over its temperature, time control over its cooking duration, and start/stop control by attending to its start/cancel buttons. It makes decisions constantly.

I simply can't make toast without a toaster, however psychologically primary you want me to be. Without either of us, there's no new toast. Team effort every time.

And to make it even more interesting, the same is true for my mum and her toaster. She does not understand how her toaster works. And yet: toast reliably appears! Where is the essential toast understanding in that system? Nowhere and everywhere! It simply isn't relevant.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-18 17:08:39+00:00
This comment is hallucinatory in nature as it is in direct conflict with the in the ground reality of LLMs.

The LLM has both light (aka photons) and language encoded into its very core. It is not just language. You seemed to have missed the boat with all the ai generated visuals and videos that are now inundating the internet.

Your flawed logic is essentially that LLMs are unable to model the real world because they don’t encode photonic data into the model. Instead you think they only encode language data which is an incredibly lossy description of reality. And this line of logic flies against the ground truth reality of the fact that LLMs ARE trained with video and pictures which are essentially photons encoded into data.

So what should be the proper conclusion? Well look at the generated visual output of LLMs. These models can generate video that is highly convincing and often with flaws as well but often these videos are indistinguishable from reality. That means the models have very well done but flawed simulations of reality.

In fact those videos demonstrate that LLMs have extremely high causal understanding of reality. They know cause and effect it’s just the understanding is imperfect. They understand like 85 percent of it. Just look at those videos of penguins on trampolines. The LLM understands what happens as an effect after a penguin jumps on a trampoline but sometimes an extra penguin teleports in which shows that the understanding is high but not fully accurate or complete.
by javcasas | 2025-10-18 17:08:44+00:00
Any modern DB with a WAL (write ahead log) is an immutable event system, where the events are the DB primitives (insert, update, delete...).

When you construct your own event system you are constructing a DB with your own primitives (deposit, withdraw, transfer, apply monthly interest...).

You have to figure out your transaction semantics. For example, how to reject invalid events.
by motbus3 | 2025-10-18 17:08:57+00:00
This is all theatrical. They already know that what they want is a section on what can be see or not within its borders. After this case has been processed and maybe some others some genius will say that internet should be a subset of the whole internet. That's nothing new. For years during war times the post office had followed letters from and to specific destinations/people for conference.
by LexGray | 2025-10-18 17:09:54+00:00
It is a strange definition of relatively trivial to ask each and every person on the planet who has served content to be aware of all constantly changing local judicial content restrictions, to identify the location of their users, and to identify which specific bits of the content they are serving is problematic.

It is a massive global undertaking involving untold collective man hours developing, implementing, and updating. They may as well be adding an invisible 1/2 pent tax on every man woman and child like some sort of hidden global sovereign.

This is a war they lost long ago and they keep trying to take power to which they are not entitled. The correct answer is like the Boston tea party dumping their imperial assumptions into the ocean.

If they want to block content they should take the responsibility to do so themselves. Even just blocking advertisers who fund problem sites would probably take care of whatever problem they are trying to solve.
by Twirrim | 2025-10-18 17:10:29+00:00
In the late 90s I was required to slowly replace dumb terminals with PCs. One of the older ladies taking phone orders was most put out by this, understandably. She was lightning fast on that terminal. She'd never used a PC (I hit on the idea of using solitaire to learn to use a mouse, which worked amazingly well), and was never able to get to the same speed with one as she'd done on her dumb terminal. It's hard to beat the performance of dedicated devices.
by m-hodges | 2025-10-18 17:10:33+00:00
> especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content

It’s wild how often a Google summary asserts something, I click through to the cited Wikipedia link, and the article says the exact opposite.

I’m very much an AI optimist these days, but product decisions (like elevating weaker models to the top of search results) are making the world epistemically worse right now.
by vacuity | 2025-10-18 17:10:51+00:00
I think most people would claim that they support the truth. Even a troll might publicly claim to speak the truth, let alone someone who has an ideological motivation to believe likely falsehoods. Flat Earthers don't typically say "I know the Earth isn't flat". The best lies come with a grain of truth. And all appealing claims build on the listener's beliefs of how the world truly is. The truth is a great hook.
by pkal | 2025-10-18 17:10:56+00:00
And if you don't have anything configured, graphical Emacs will have a tool bar with a button to save and a menu bar that also gives the binding for the command.

GUI is different because there is no tool bar, but in Emacs 31 `xterm-mouse-mode' will be enabled by default so you can use the menu bar like a TUI.
by burntsushi | 2025-10-18 17:11:01+00:00
To back up what I said earlier, a common case for ripgrep is to search a code repository while respecting gitignore, ignoring hidden files and ignoring binary files. Indeed, this is ripgrep's default mode.

For example, in my checkout of the Chromium repository, notice how much faster ripgrep is at this specific use case (with the right flags given to `ugrep` to make it ignore the same files):

$ hyperfine --output pipe 'rg Openbox' 'ugrep-7.5.0 -rI --ignore-files Openbox ./' Benchmark 1: rg Openbox Time (mean ± σ): 281.0 ms ± 3.6 ms [User: 1294.8 ms, System: 1977.6 ms] Range (min … max): 275.9 ms … 286.8 ms 10 runs Benchmark 2: ugrep-7.5.0 -rI --ignore-files Openbox ./ Time (mean ± σ): 4.250 s ± 0.008 s [User: 4.683 s, System: 2.154 s] Range (min … max): 4.242 s … 4.267 s 10 runs Summary rg Openbox ran 15.12 ± 0.19 times faster than ugrep-7.5.0 -rI --ignore-files Openbox ./

`ugrep` actually does a lot better if you don't ask it to respect gitignore files:

$ hyperfine --output pipe 'rg -u Openbox' 'ugrep-7.5.0 -rI Openbox ./' Benchmark 1: rg -u Openbox Time (mean ± σ): 233.9 ms ± 3.3 ms [User: 650.4 ms, System: 2081.6 ms] Range (min … max): 228.8 ms … 239.8 ms 12 runs Benchmark 2: ugrep-7.5.0 -rI Openbox ./ Time (mean ± σ): 605.4 ms ± 6.4 ms [User: 1104.1 ms, System: 2710.8 ms] Range (min … max): 596.1 ms … 613.9 ms 10 runs Summary rg -u Openbox ran 2.59 ± 0.05 times faster than ugrep-7.5.0 -rI Openbox ./

Even ripgrep runs a little faster. Because sometimes matching gitignores takes extra time. More so, it seems, in ugrep's case.

Now ugrep is perhaps intended to be more like a POSIX grep than ripgrep is. So you could question whether this is a fair comparison. But if you're going to bring up "ripgrep catching up to ugrep," then it's fair game, IMO, to compare ripgrep's default mode of operation with ugrep using the necessary flags to match that mode.

Repository info:

$ git remote -v origin git@github.com:nwjs/chromium.src (fetch) origin git@github.com:nwjs/chromium.src (push) $ git rev-parse HEAD 1e57811fe4583ac92d2f277837718486fbb98252
by analog31 | 2025-10-18 17:11:34+00:00
I make a device akin to a guitar pedal. If you want to use a plastic case, it has to be designed for mechanical ruggedness and protection of the innards. For small time pedal makers, the cost of design and mold tooling rules this out, though I wouldn't try to predict the future of technologies such as 3d printing.

But if you're limited to drilling some holes in an off-the-shelf enclosure, it had better be metallic. I learned that lesson the hard way, and I now use metal boxes exclusively. Luckily for me, my product somehow hasn't attracted the interest of Behringer or other low-cost makers -- yet.

Also, judging from some returns I've gotten, gadgets can be subjected to a lot of abuse. A musician can control this, but a gear maker can't.

I've seen the insides of some early Behringer gear. A lot of their early stuff was mechanically delicate, and showed signs of extensive "re-work" in production.
by brailsafe | 2025-10-18 17:12:12+00:00
> You don't become addicted because of luxury. Attention is not a luxury.

Hmm, I think there's more nuance here, how about cars? Many people let themselves be much more dependent on them than they need to be, and in many cases adjusting their life around the car or the assumption that you'll always have this behemoth thing with an engine parked outside at all times sucking money out of your bank account, making your muscles and maybe social skills atrophy, exposing you to the risk of death all the time. You get comfortable with the experience of not having to do anything more than press a button, much like content addiction and smartphones, vaping, etc..

Removing the car creates a sense of pain, you have to move your body, possibly interact
by webdevver | 2025-10-18 17:12:23+00:00
ive always felt that file systems are by far the weakest point in the entire computing industry as we know it.

something like zfs should have been bog standard, yet its touted as an 'enterprise-grade' filesystem. why is common sense restricted to 'elite' status?

ofcourse i want transparent compression, dedup, copy on write, free snapshots, logical partitions, dynamic resizing, per-user/partition capabilities & qos. i want it now, here, by default, on everything! (just to clarify, ive ever used zfs.)

its so strange when in the compute space you have docker & cgroups, software defined networking, and on the harddrve space i'm dragging boxes in gparted like its the victorian era.

why can't we just... have cool storage stuff? out the box?
by tombert | 2025-10-18 17:13:42+00:00
I've had tinnitus in my left ear for about six months now. I was hoping it was the result of an earwax impaction or something, but after having several specialists look at my ears, test my hearing, and getting an MRI to check for tumors, the overwhelming medical consensus of the cause appears to be "I dunno", and at this point I have given up on it being temporary.

About 95% of the time, I can fairly easily just tune it out and it's no different than any other background noise. Living in NYC helps, there's a fair amount of constant background noise even in the best of times. I've found that finding 10-hour videos on YouTube of TV static at a low volume can be helpful for the remaining 5%.

Still I would really prefer it wasn't there. The ringing in my left ear is still annoying, and I'm only in my mid 30's, so assuming an average lifespan I have anywhere from 40-60 years left to enjoy this constant ringing.

I'll play with this thing to see if it helps.
by cobzilla | 2025-10-18 17:14:38+00:00
The content seems like complete nonsense. Like a long AI hallucination.

The quality seems way too good for existing AI video generators.

Yet, if it’s real, that’s an awful lot of time and money invested to produce a fake video.

If it’s a scam, like to sell fake schematics for fake circuits for $5 a pop, it’s a really high quality scam for almost super low likelihood of a payout.

Anyone heard of this channel before? If this is AI generated, it’s exceptional.

Why do these videos exist?
by mikewarot | 2025-10-18 17:15:00+00:00
I was expecting to see the most productive IDEs of all time, Visual Basic 6 and/or Borland Delphi, but we're just ahead of those in this article.

While it was truly amazing that Borland managed to stuff a full text editor into a TSR under MS-DOS, and every new version of Turbo Pascal was faster and had more features, it all culminated somewhere around Delphi for me, and Visual Basic 6 for almost everyone else.

Then the world ended... Anders Hejlsberg was lost to Microsoft, and everyone went collectively crazy in at least two orthogonal ways.

First there was the obsession with C++ as "higher level" than Pascal and the view that it was for "adults", which was delusional. C++ generated a f*ckton more boilerplate and was brittle for the same functionality, at least when generating a GUI program.

Then there was Microsoft's obsession with .NET, which they never recovered from. They crammed all the bloat of an interpreter into everything imaginable, even the operating system. You were always having to get the latest .NET libraries to make things work. They destroyed Visual Basic over this, and it never recovered.
by whartung | 2025-10-18 17:15:24+00:00
I think these modern TUIs are a testament to the general failure of modern GUIs.

It's not like they're particularly easier to write these.

But since there's no remote GUI option, much less a portable remote GUI option, particularly one that's not just a video of an entire desktop, we're stuck with these.

WHo wants to fire up an entire desktop to get open a simple utility app?

Obviously the Web satisfies much of the demand for this, but clearly not all.

Remote X is, essentially, dead. It's obviously "really hard", since "no one does that any more". Or, folks just don't miss having rootless windows peering into their remote server enclaves.

It's just too bad, full circle, here we are again. "Progress."