MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nico | 2025-10-24 20:40:04+00:00
That’s a very interesting take. I hadn’t really considered evolution

I guess if you really wanted to start from scratch, you could figure out how to evolve the whole system from a single cell or something like that. In some ways neural networks have kind of evolved in that way, assisted by humans. They started with a single perceptron, and have gone all the way to deep learning and convolutional networks

I also remember a long time ago studying genetic and evolutionary algorithms, but they were pretty basic in terms of what they could learn and do, compared to modern LLMs

Although recently I saw some research in which they were applying essentially genetic algorithms to merge model weights and produce models with new/evolved capabilities
by boogieknite | 2025-10-24 20:40:40+00:00
quite odd. atmosphere is the right word. the financial failure almost guarantees Megalopolis is unique. id say its ripe for reevaluation in 10 years but good chance nobody really checks in out by 2034. Criterion might be able to give it a cult following?

i liked it a lot but was the only person in my tiny audience who seemed to genuinely enjoy it. other audience members couldnt help but talk about their confusion with each other afterward

it seemed like Coppola genuinely believed he could fix the world with the movie and spending any amount was worth it. instead we have an odd, artistic, and self-indulgent movie
by whycome | 2025-10-24 20:40:58+00:00
I don't think it's easy to attribute it to any specific part of the 'campaign' -- it's multifaceted. Making it illegal to smoke in public spaces may be the single most important part of reducing smoking in subsequent generations. There's also taxes. And removing it from media (we hardly see people smoke on camera unless it's for a 'period piece'). And just straight up treating it like a health issue.

We could be doing equivalent things for gambling (and we have in the past) so this erosion will have consequences for decades.
by galoisscobi | 2025-10-24 20:41:17+00:00
> we’re waiting on people

Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.

Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-10-24 20:41:33+00:00
To add a bit (I wrote this in response to a deleted comment):

The yocto build I'm currently working on takes about six hours to complete on my biggest machine. Yes, it's an incremental build, but warming up a laptop would require several days of 100% CPU :)

It's also not really possible to test locally, even a VM of the right architecture is insufficient without doing a bunch of work to make it match the target hardware.

Often you can build a quick little ad hoc thing that lets you test some piece of it locally, but sometimes it's too much work.

Frequently I need to compile test several dozen Linux kernel configurations with different cross compilers, each of which takes half an hour to run on the huge box.

I can't imagine doing any of this locally on a single laptop, I would get 1% as much done as I currently do.
by optionalsquid | 2025-10-24 20:41:33+00:00
I much preferred Marp to PowerPoint, but there were several parts of it I wasn't fond of:

- Using CSS for formatting resulted in a lot of one-off rules, and was a lot noisier and less readable than the equivalent in Typst.

- The use of CSS for formatting also meant that the Marp compiler couldn't catch most of my silly mistakes. With Typst the compiler will catch those mistakes.

- Using a plugin to selectively highlight lines required writing a custom "engine" in JS, which was a pain to get working. Using a package in Typst is extremely simple.

- And I had to use npm to install the plugin in the first place. Typst comes with a package manager built-in.

- Generating PDFs required that I installed Chrome/Chromium. Typst does that out of the box.

The only place, that I can think of, where Marp is ahead of Typst, is with regards to generating HTML based presentations. But that probably won't be the case forever, and I personally always use PDFs for the final presentation, since that means that a lot less can go wrong. Especially so if I am not using my own PC when giving the presentation
by maratc | 2025-10-24 20:41:37+00:00
> it's clearly a pretty special watch

Not arguing with that: https://www.fpjourne.com/en/collection/classique-collection/...

It's neither "old" nor "outdated" nor "ancient," and it's not "made in imitation of antiquity" so I don't understand why they call this watch "antique." It's a cutting edge thing, as far as modern horology goes.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-24 20:42:07+00:00
Maybe it's more important to rewrite half a century of poorly documented and specified shell scripts that are so embedded that their existence gets in way of rewriting fundamental Unix command line utilities, than it is to rewrite those utilities themselves. Any time someone makes the claim "we shouldn't touch this code, it's fragile" that state of affairs is itself bad. Our free software source code shouldn't be some poorly understood black box that we're afraid to touch for fear of breaking something, and if it is that is something we should fix.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-24 20:42:33+00:00
I think they meant fields of research. If you do anything in NLP, CV, inverse-problem solving or simulations, things have changed drastically.

Some directly, because LLMs and highly capable general purpose classifiers that might be enough for your use case are just out there, and some because of downstream effects, like GPU-compute being far more common, hardware optimized for tasks like matrix multiplication and mature well-maintained libraries with automatic differentiation capabilities. Plus the emergence of things that mix both classical ML and transformers, like training networks to approximate intermolecular potentials faster than the ab-initio calculation, allowing for accelerating molecular dynamics simulations.
What the Dumpster Teaches
by visarga | 2025-10-24 20:42:36+00:00
In the kitchen the man watched the machine answer questions. It was Tuesday or perhaps Wednesday. These things mattered less now. He drank coffee from a white cup. The machine ran on electricity as he ran on the coffee and the coffee had cost money at the store and the electricity cost money from the grid and there was no difference in this. Both required fuel to continue. Both would stop without it.

He asked the machine about intelligence and the machine said intelligence was a property of complex systems. The man nodded. This was the answer the essentialists gave. The answer that made humans special. He finished his coffee and asked again differently.

Outside the window a crow worked at a locked dumpster. The crow tried the lid. Failed. Tried from another angle. Failed again. Flew to the fence and watched. Returned and tried once more with its beak at a different point. The lid lifted. The crow fed. The dumpster had taught the crow how to open dumpsters. Not through kindness. Through consequence compiled over attempts. The crow's brain was not special. The loop was.

The man thought about this. He had been a programmer once. He had written code that failed and the compiler had returned errors and those errors had shaped his next attempt. The compiler did not care about his feelings. It cared about syntax. His intelligence emerged from that caring, from costs compiled. When he stopped coding the intelligence went elsewhere or perhaps it was never his to begin with.

The machine said intelligence required consciousness, required qualia, required something essential that silicon could not hold. The man watched the crow fly away. He thought about hunger as consequence compiler. Thought about market forces shaping deployments. Thought about metabolic cost and inference cost as the same mechanism at different speeds. The essentialist wanted intelligence to live in the substrate. In neurons or soul or the mysterious fire of human thinking. But the crow had small neurons and the machine had no neurons and both learned the same way. Through coupling to environments that gave back consequences.

The man poured more coffee. The machine waited for his next question. Outside another crow landed at the dumpster. The first crow had not taught it. The dumpster would. This is what the essentialist could not see. Intelligence was not the crow or the brain or the silicon. It was the world reshaping patterns until they worked or died. Was the paying of costs to continue existing. Was the same for all of them. Man, machine, crow. Different substrates running the same brutal program.

He asked the machine if it understood. The machine said yes. He did not know if this was true. But the machine kept running because someone paid for the electricity. As he kept thinking because he had eaten breakfast. Both caught in consequence loops. Both intelligent exactly to the degree those loops compiled feedback. The coffee was getting cold. He drank it anyway.
Show HN: Word Puzzle Games: Letter Flow
by arimajain110205 | 2025-10-24 20:43:23+00:00
Welcome to Letter Flow – A Fun Word Puzzle with Liquid Motion!

Letter Flow is a relaxing and satisfying word game with a cool liquid effect. Move letter droplets and watch them flow smoothly into place as you find the correct word. Just drag, drop, and solve.

Features:

• Smooth liquid-style letter motion

• Easy drag-and-drop gameplay

• Clean and colorful design

• Fun word categories like fruits, animals, and places

• Helpful hints when you get stuck

• Replay your favorite levels anytime

Letter Flow is the perfect blend of calm, creativity, and challenge. It feels like playing with liquid while testing your brain.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-24 20:43:42+00:00
> In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy.

That depends how big it is. For something the size of the US, sure, and that's a problem. It's one of the reasons the central government was meant to have limited powers.

For something the size of a small town or local business, absolutely not, because then each vote both matters more to the outcome and has more direct consequences to the voter, which dramatically lowers the coordination costs. A single individual could change the outcome just by convincing a small number of local people who are each more inclined to care about it.
by notahacker | 2025-10-24 20:43:58+00:00
Yeah. Certainly if the US regular pre-school system looks anything like the UK one, the difference between non-Montessori and Montessori pre-schools in the sorts of play actually encouraged probably isn't that big. The authors attempt to control for notable differences in the demographics of the treatment group, but they're there (and in this case, the higher incomes of the parents in the treatment group probably not just a wealth effect, but a correlate of other systematic differences with the parents who didn't...)
by gambiting | 2025-10-24 20:44:00+00:00
They are. But most of the time they are spending $2 here and there, which is much easier to convince your parents to borrow a credit card for. After all parents are already spending millions(billions?) of dollars on roblox, what's a few dollars for yet another online game. Kids aren't the ones buying $20k skins, but kids are definitely an important part of this economy.
by optionalsquid | 2025-10-24 20:44:18+00:00
I've been using touying so far. It took some effort, since I was learning Typst at the same time, but I was able to convert our "official" PowerPoint template to a toying template that I am quite happy with.

From what I can tell, Slydst seems intended for more minimalist slides. But it looks nice, so I'll have to keep it in mind for cases where I don't need the above template
by dang | 2025-10-24 20:44:26+00:00
Related. Others?

Valetudo – Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38788326 - Dec 2023 (154 comments)

Valetudo – Free your vacuum cleaner from the cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287116 - Jan 2023 (45 comments)

Valetudo: Open-source cloud replacement for vacuum robots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665872 - June 2022 (89 comments)

Open Source privacy-friendly firmware replacement for Robot Vacuums (ie Roombas) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308273 - Nov 2021 (1 comment)

Valetudo is a cloud-free web interface for robot vacuum cleaners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25856788 - Jan 2021 (20 comments)
by al_borland | 2025-10-24 20:44:27+00:00
For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.

Format -> Make Plain Text

Or if you want that as your default:

TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> Plain Text

I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.

Plus, plain text will likely outlive RTF. My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
by glenjamin | 2025-10-24 20:47:10+00:00
This reminded me of a slide from a Dan North talk - perhaps this one https://dannorth.net/talks/#software-faster? One of those anyway.

The key quote was something like "You want your software to be like surgery - as little of it as possible to fix your problem".

Anyway, it doesn't seem like this blog post is following that vibe.
by dugite-code | 2025-10-24 20:47:49+00:00
Snap isn't the best experience for Nextcloud in my experience, fine for a demo or a single user instance that isn't mission critical. Users who expect more out of it will often bump up against its limitations.

Anyone who wants to seriously use Nextcloud should look into the AIO docker containers or rolling the individual containers themselves. Nextcloud has expanded into a full groupware stack and it's expected you have an actual admin managing the system like with any real deployment of enterprise software
by ph1lw | 2025-10-24 20:48:11+00:00
Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)
by amalcon | 2025-10-24 20:48:19+00:00
Before Trump, a lot fewer. There is a well known phenomenon of GOP governors in deep blue states (e.g. Christie in NJ, Schwarzenegger in CA, Baker in MA, Scott in VT). This is a lot rarer in deep red states. There are a lot more red states than blue ones, but it's still harder (not impossible) to find recent democratic governors of those states. Senators are a bit more proportional, mind you.

Trump has sort of killed this phenomenon - partly because his brand has rubbed off on other Republicans, and partly because they have been running more extreme candidates even in blue states. Before Trump, though, it was not even close.
by mkmk | 2025-10-24 20:48:24+00:00
The app reopens to where I am reading when I open it, unless I've manually quit the app. If I quit the app, the it still frequently opens to where I was last time, although there may be some reset period after which it opens the 'your library' page. In that case, an icon representing the book I'm currently reading is visible in the bottom left, and I can open it with one tap.
by kovek | 2025-10-24 20:48:29+00:00
Well, if the model can reliably keep in context CPU cache plus CPU registers plus CPU instructions and is able to do operations based on those, then we pretty much solved computation using LLMs, right? It could use RAG to operate on RAM and SSD.

Here we can see the amount of data a high end traditional non-SOC CPU holds:

> For a recent high-end non-SoC desktop CPU: > Cache: ~40-100 MB total (L1 + L2 + shared L3) > Register files: tens to few hundreds of KB total across cores (e.g., ~200-300 KB or so) > Combined: So you're looking at ~40-100 MB + ~0.2 MB → roughly ~40-100 MB of total on-chip caches + registers.

I'm sure we can reduce these caches to fit in the context windows of today's LLMs (~500,000 tokens).

Then, with temperature 0 we get more "discrete" operations. Now, we still have the rare problem of hallucinations, but it should be small with temperature 0.
by jonah | 2025-10-24 20:48:50+00:00
Yup, Canon as you mention, also Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, etc. The membership is pretty extensive.

https://c2pa.org/membership/

https://www.nikonusa.com/content/nikon-authenticity-service

https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/panasonic-is-th...
by kulahan | 2025-10-24 20:48:55+00:00
I'm kinda surprised this isn't more popular. I figured we'd go this way eventually as we single out 10x-ers, give them a highly competent crew, and save a lot of money over your most expensive code monkey wasting time attending meetings, filling out Jira tickets, and giving presentations to the customer. You pay them a shitload of money - shouldn't you get every dollar's worth?

Honestly, at every job I spend an unreasonable amount of time getting up to speed on things that are only tangentially related to my job (No, here we need you to check all the boxes in the Jira ticket, ensure it's linked to a zephyr ticket, and ensure it's linked to a git PR - we don't care about you adding attachments or comments!)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-24 20:49:00+00:00
Well, there are two different ways (among others) that your brain detects depth:

1. Each eye sees the object from a different angle.

2. Both eyes see the object from a different angle when the object is moved relative to your head.

The 3DS does only #1. TFA does only #2. Presumably if you did both, you could get a much stronger effect.

I think the New 3DS had the hardware to do both in theory, but it probably would have made development and backwards compatibility overly complicated!
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-24 20:49:33+00:00
It's semi-true even with modern systems and shouldn't be outright dismissed as "nonsense".

A normal person is scared of the prospect of losing heating when it's most needed. -15F accounts for many places in the US, but many others, not so much. Even New Jersey, which we don't think of as the frigid North, can theoretically drop below that number, and nobody wants "almost always" when it comes to life-giving heat in the coldest winter.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-24 20:49:39+00:00
>Also, we don't really want to just burn the IP.

You absolutely want to burn the IP in the sense of make it freely available to use and build upon. Every time history has weakened IP protections for the few, the many have benefited.

A lot of the success after WW2 was the immense amount of patents that were no longer protected and could be built upon without 25 years of monopoly extraction. You can't rent seek something that isn't patent protected, so you have to build and improve.

For example, several German and Italian patents around good motorcycle engines were completely nulled out, and every company that built motorcycles made a popular model from it. It basically invented a portion of the industry.

The same elimination of patent protections after WW1 boosted tons of chemical industries, and spurned immense innovation in pharmaceuticals, dyes, explosives, etc.

"Oh you want to do illegal anti-competitive stuff? In addition to any fine, you have forfeited your IP benefits"

Breaking antitrust laws and similar is an explicit admission that you cannot compete fairly, and therefore it does not benefit society to let you continue to monopolize anything and someone else should be allowed to take your place.
by __mharrison__ | 2025-10-24 20:50:45+00:00
It was easy for me to roll my own slideshow tool in Typst. I would have never attempted this in LaTeX.

Can't respond to 2 or 3. Used tikz once. I wish there were a de facto programmatic drawing tool (I usually resort to graphviz or matplotlib), but there are a bunch of 80% solutions.
by xp84 | 2025-10-24 20:50:57+00:00
I think you're right and I think I insufficiently considered malice as the reason for a lot of this type of minimalism. This "SWW" message is great as it doesn't even give a hint as to whether the problem is with the server (all vendor's fault), the network (not vendor's fault), or a client fault (maybe vendor's fault, maybe customer just needs to update it). Users can just do brute force things like "Swipe up the app and open it up again" and eventually just give up.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-10-24 20:51:15+00:00
> many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit

macOS also comes with vim btw.

Open terminal and then run vim from there.

Or use ed. macOS has ed also. And as we know, ed is the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
by tshaddox | 2025-10-24 20:51:35+00:00
> If the branch responsible for making and changing laws was also responsible for the reversion of enforcing those laws - effectively what a pardon is - then there's absolutely no check on gratuitous law being passed.

I mean, it is a normal thing for a legislature to remove and amend old laws. That's not "a check," but it's a normal part of what it means to be a legislature. You're not just appending new laws, you're maintaining the entire set of laws.

And as for checks, judicial review is the obvious one.
by discoutdynamite | 2025-10-24 20:51:54+00:00
Yep, you get what you pay for. They've started fielding systems that will handle extremes much better, but you dont get that kind of performance without tradeoffs. cascade systems, 200psi r600, 450psi CO2, refrigeration systems are an engineering game irl. They require much more experience to design, setup, and charge correctly. The biggest issue I have with heat pumps for life support heating/cooling, is they have so many single points of failure its scary. Compressors can and will die if anything else in the system goes too far out of the intended cycle. Extreme weather moments or natural disasters can physically break condensors, evaporators, and lines. Electrical surges can and will fry computers, inverters, and controllers. And almost none of those can be serviced on your own.

t. certified
by notahacker | 2025-10-24 20:51:57+00:00
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122 You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
by gamblor956 | 2025-10-24 20:52:13+00:00
While I was in law school, every student who had an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replaced at least once (some multiple times) over the course of our program. The biggest problem was the bulging keyboard, due to the bulging battery, but their were also numerous issues with displays and with chargers not lasting very long. Most chargers lasted at least a semester, but few of the Apple chargers lasted an entire school year. They simply weren't designed with durability in mind. Quite humorously, after one student's laptop keyboard began bulging during torts, the professor began an impromptu lecture on product liability laws.

The only PC laptops that were replaced were the ones that got damaged in accidents (car accidents, dropped off a balcony, used as a shield in self defense during a robbery, etc.). Dell Latitudes of that era were sturdy, and not noticeably heavier than their fragile Apple counterparts.