MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by margalabargala | 2025-10-19 17:31:52+00:00
It's not "sacrificing" square footage for height, it's just encountering diminishing returns. To say it's sacrificing for height, means square footage decreases with increased height.

What actually happens is square footage per floor decreases with increased height. But a 20 or 80 story building still has strictly much more square footage than a 15 story one, perhaps excepting the absolute narrowest buildings.
by criemen | 2025-10-19 17:31:53+00:00
> They will hire anyone who can produce a model better than GPT5, which is the bar for fine tuning

Depends on what you want to achieve, of course, but I see fine-tuning at the current point in time primarily as a cost-saving measure: Transfer GPT5-levels of skill onto a smaller model, where inference is then faster/cheaper to run. This of course slows down your innovation cycle, which is why generally this is imo not advisable.
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 17:32:23+00:00
Sure, that’s why I said the process is an approximation of truth and only then in the limit.

This is known in the scientific, philosophical, and research communities. It is a reality that is only solved by the slow inexorable application of the scientific process and exchange of ideas, not by outside political influence.

We should never put researchers on pedestals, but the process of science is the most prized accomplishment of humanity. It is a farcical weaponization of the slow and often backtracking nature of science by the anti-intellectuals of the world which we are witnessing now. Not a real crisis
by jagged-chisel | 2025-10-19 17:32:25+00:00
It's a theoretician's trope. "Identical and spherical" is the baseline state of the objects in a system one wishes to model. There's are several jokes with this as the punchline.

An executive is retiring. He's been very fond of horse races, but has been very responsible throughout the years. Now with some free time on his hands, he spends more time than ever at the tracks and collects large amounts of data. He takes his data, along with his conviction that he's certainly onto something, to a friend in research at a nearby university. He convinces his friend to take a look at his data and find a model they can use to win at betting. After many delays, and the researcher becoming more disheveled over months of work, he returns to the retired executive to explain his model. He begins "if we assume all the horses are identical and spherical..."
by jsnell | 2025-10-19 17:32:37+00:00
That doesn't match my recollection of the AlphaEvolve release.

Some people just read the "48 multiplications for a 4x4 matrix multiplications" part, and thought they found prior art at that performance or better. But they missed that the supposed prior art had tighter requirements on the contents of the matrix, which meant those algorithms were not usable for implementing a recursive divide and conquer algorithm for much larger matrix multiplications.

Here is a HN poster claiming to be one of the authors rebutting the claim of prior art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43997136
by luxuryballs | 2025-10-19 17:33:00+00:00
“This is what government is for” was the most terrifying thing I’ve read all month. The only thing more starkly dystopian than relying on robots and AI for survival would be adding “the government” to the list.

The government should keep its charge as the protector and upholder of justice, I don’t want it to be those things and then also become a fiat source for economic survival, that’s a terribly destructive combination because the government doesn’t care for competition or viability, and survival is the last place you want to have all your eggs in one basket, especially when the eggs are guaranteed by force of law and the basket becomes a magnet for corruption.
by skydhash | 2025-10-19 17:33:15+00:00
I get you. Emacs is one software that you must invest some time to get the famous ROI. The promise is one unified interface for all the tools you may need (editor, tasks runner, shell, spellchecking, file manager,...). But the learning curve is there, although not as steep as some would make it appear.

One of my major motivation for putting in the time is that Emacs is very stable. You can coast for decades on a configuration. I don't mind learning new stuff, but it's grating to for it to be taken away, especially if there's no recourse (proprietary software).
by ch4s3 | 2025-10-19 17:33:34+00:00
This is demonstrably false. Large supermarkets in the US have far more SKUs in produce, dairy, and meat than they did 30 years ago. I can still remember the first time I encountered a number of vegetables in the early 2000s which suddenly appeared in large chain grocery stores. Who knew what a sunchoke was in 1992?
by pessimizer | 2025-10-19 17:33:57+00:00
> Why shouldn't we use

So weird that you immediately move the goalposts after accusing somebody of moving the goalposts. Nobody on the planet told you not to use "LLMs + tools if they work." You've moved onto an entirely different discussion with a made-up person.

> All of this just works, today.

Also, it definitely doesn't "just work." It slops around, screws up, reinserts bugs, randomly removes features, ignores instructions, lies, and sometimes you get a lucky result or something close enough that you can fix up. Nothing that should be in production.

Not that they're not very cool and very helpful in a lot of ways. But I've found them more helpful in showing me how they would do something, and getting me so angry that they nerd-snipe me into doing it correctly. I have to admit, 1) however, that sometimes I'm not sure that I'd have gotten there if I hadn't seen it not getting there, and 2) sometimes "doing it correctly" involves dumping the context and telling it almost exactly how I want something implemented.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-19 17:34:06+00:00
It's the immigrants' fault.

No wait, it's because of the queers.

Surely it's because of women.

Would you believe it's the socialists fault? Gangs? Non-Christians? Welfare Queens? China? The American People as a whole?

It's everybody else's fault except ours, the people who actually and demonstratively have power.

Please believe us.
by ternus | 2025-10-19 17:34:14+00:00
Totally fine to choose as the author did, but for others who might face a similar choice: repairing a thermostat in a fridge is dramatically easier than fixing almost anything in a dishwasher. I did that with my fridge - cost <$20 for the part and maybe 30 minutes of work. Your (EU) kilometrage may vary.

I suspect the power savings would be much less dramatic with a fixed thermostat.
by JaumeGreen | 2025-10-19 17:34:31+00:00
What I dislike of RFCs is that some are accepted, but still referred as RFC, for no apparent reason.

I specially dislike when some people try to do the same with internal documentation and still call "RFC 2029 Project Lifecycle" when it has been accepted by all the appropriate parties. It makes it harder to look for than needed, and it's not clear, by the name, if it has been passed or not.
by dehugger | 2025-10-19 17:35:02+00:00
I dunno, I think many dev are aware of the existence of RFCs, but if your work occurs at higher levels of the stack there is frequently not a pressing need to read them.

For example, you don't have to read the specific RFC to know the difference between 200, 400, and 500 status codes. Any layman's blog post (or literally just reading the response messages accompanying those codes in actual use) is enough knowledge to get you real far.

That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.
by Cyph0n | 2025-10-19 17:35:13+00:00
This is excellent advice.

I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them.

To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points.

Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
by constantcrying | 2025-10-19 17:35:32+00:00
Some more advice:

Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.

If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.

Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
by brainwad | 2025-10-19 17:35:38+00:00
Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution, so in the long run we are slowly freeing ourselves. But in the short run, people keep working because a) machines usually are complementary to labour (there are still coal miners today, they are just way more productive) and b) even if some jobs are completely eliminated by machines (ice making, for example), that only "solves" that narrow field. The ice farmers can (and did) reenter the labour market and find something else to do.
by creer | 2025-10-19 17:35:55+00:00
> What will happen to democracy in a world where 100% of the population are 27/7 consumers?

What does the one have to do with the other?

But even then, currently plenty of people find their fun in creating - when it's not their job. And they struggle with finding the time for that. Sometimes the materials and training and machines for that also. Meanwhile a majority of current jobs involve zero personal creativity or making or creating. Driving or staffing a retail outlet or even most cooking jobs can't really be what you are looking for on your argument?

Is the road to post-scarcity more likely with or without robots?
by margalabargala | 2025-10-19 17:36:18+00:00
A different country with 3.5x the population building a majority of skyscrapers, doesn't mean that the US doesn't build skyscrapers.

The three countries you mention build skyscrapers in far more densely populated areas. Canada and Australia may be huge, but they are mostly empty and all the population congregates in a tiny fraction of the land area. The US is more more evenly populated by comparison.

The thing to compare here, which might be tricky to get numbers on, is skyscrapers per local population density.
by eesmith | 2025-10-19 17:37:31+00:00
Sure, but there are all sorts of known legal risks to title. That's why title insurance exists.

Do Canadian title insurance regulations really allow the insurance companies to not provide coverage for indigenous land claims? That seems completely irresponsible.

And "due diligence" doesn't mean a homeowner must sift through two centuries of title history and determine the validity of the title themselves. Otherwise that would be a requirement (or to pay someone to do so), just like title insurance, except a lot more expensive.

And due diligence may be wrong, or right but still contested, so it goes to court. Title insurance helps pay for that title defense.

So yes, when I bought my house in the US on what was once indigenous land, I was quite aware of the possibility of title claims, but indigenous treaty law for that land goes back to Imperial Spain, incorporated into US treaty law, and researching that is far beyond due diligence.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-19 17:37:43+00:00
> Yes, using older distro is the de facto method of resolving this problem.

What i describe is different from what you wrote, which is that Linux is not binary compatible between distros. This is wrong because Linux is binary compatible with other Linux distributions just fine. What is not compatible is using a binary compiled using a newer version of some shared libraries (glibc included but not the only one) on a system that has older versions - but it is fine to use a binary compiled with an older version on a system with newer versions, at least as long as the library developers have not broken their ABI (this is a different topic altogether).

The compatibility is not between different distros but between different versions of the same library and what is imposed by the system (assuming the developers keep their ABIs compatible) is that a binary can use shared libraries of the same or older version as the one it was linked at - or more precisely, it can use shared libraries that expose the same or older versions of the symbols that the binary uses.

Framing this as software not being binary portable between different distros is wildly mischaracterizing the situation. I have compiled a binary that links against X11 and OpenGL on a Slackware VM that works on both my openSUSE Tumbleweed and my friend's Debian system without issues - that is a binary that is binary portable against different distros just fine.

Also if you want to use a compiler more recent than the one available in the distro you'll need to install it yourself, just like under Windows - it is not like Windows comes with a compiler out of the box.
by Maxatar | 2025-10-19 17:37:45+00:00
OpenAI has published a great deal of information about hallucination rates, as have the other major LLM providers.

You can't just give one single global hallucination rate since the rates depend on the different use cases and despite the abundant amount of information available to people on how to pick the appropriate tool for a given task, it seems very few people care to take the time to actually first recognize that these LLMs are tools, and that you do need to learn how to use these tools in order to be productive with them.
Show HN: MarkdownConverters – Convert any file format to clean Markdown
by Dkaur | 2025-10-19 17:38:58+00:00
Hey HN

I built MarkdownConverters.com — a tool that converts any file format (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, HTML, or URL) into clean, structured Markdown.

I often needed to prep documents, reports, or scraped pages for AI pipelines, documentation, or version control, but existing tools either broke formatting, lost code blocks, or produced unreadable Markdown.

So I built something that focuses on: • Accurate structure (headings, lists, tables, code, links) • Consistent Markdown output ready for LLMs or docs • Fast, browser-based conversion with privacy-friendly processing • Support for multi-format and URL inputs

It’s especially useful if you work with RAG, embeddings, or text preprocessing — Markdown becomes a universal “clean” format for structured content.

Would love feedback on: • Conversion quality — what edge cases break for you? • Formats you’d like supported next (CSV, EPUB, JSON, etc.) • API workflows — would you use it for automation?

Try it here: https://markdownconverters.com

Happy to answer any technical questions about the conversion pipeline or file parsing methods.
by cj | 2025-10-19 17:39:07+00:00
I was reminded how terribly ChatGPT hallucinates this morning when I used it to look up the 7 point measurement locations for skin fold calipers to estimate body fat.

It correctly described the locations in text, then it offered to provide a diagram.

I said “sure”, and it generated an image saying the chest location is on the neck, and a bunch of other clearly incorrect locations for the other measurement sites.

It’s gotten better. But it’s still bad.
by grafmax | 2025-10-19 17:39:33+00:00
Problem is billionaires have co-opted our government. Their interest is in channeling money from the working class into their hands through rentier capitalism. That is contrary to widely structuring income.

Rent extraction hurts them in the long run. Because working class income gets absorbed by various forms of rent, they are more expensive to employ. Thus we fail to compete with, say, China, which socializes many costs and invests in productive industry. We are left with a top heavy society that as we can see is already starting to crumble.
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 17:40:14+00:00
> whatever the mechanism

Is straining to carry the rest of this sentence. I responded to an assertion that a policy by certain limited universities was attempted and deemed unfit by the natural process was still active. This is how institutions grow and evolve.

> echo chambers

Publish your papers, rebut the research. This is actively happening every day in every field of science. It is happening in everything from gender studies to particle physics.

> poison the public discourse

What on Earth are you talking about. What public discourse are you frequenting which is driven primarily by this boogeyman of the university system rather than the attention driven rat race of national fear politics.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-19 17:40:29+00:00
> Trinary didn’t make any headway in the 20th century; binary’s direct mapping to the “on”/”off” states of electric current was just too effective, or seductive; but remember that electric current isn’t actually “on” or “off”. It has taken a ton of engineering to “simulate” those abstract states in real, physical circuits, especially as they have gotten smaller and smaller.

But, I think things are actually trending the other way, right? You just slam the voltage to “on” or “off” nowadays—as things get smaller, voltages get lower, and clock times get faster, it gets harder to resolve the tiny voltage differences.

Maybe you can slam to -1. OTOH, just using 2 bits instead of one... trit(?) seems easier.

Same reason the “close window” button is in the corner. Hitting a particular spot requires precision in 1 or 2 dimensions. Smacking into the boundary is easy.
by behnamoh | 2025-10-19 17:40:33+00:00
> That incremental progress mirrors YKK’s founding philosophy, the “Cycle of Goodness.” The principle—that no one prospers without benefiting others—has supposedly guided the company for decades. It’s visible in its other micro-improvements: corrosion-resistant alloys, sound-dampened sliders, recyclable polyester tapes. AiryString continues that tradition, shrinking the zipper’s physical and environmental footprint at once.

This is alien to SF AI startups and patent trolls.
by analog31 | 2025-10-19 17:40:45+00:00
Indeed, been there. Just getting the dishwasher out of its cubby hole is a major effort, and involves dealing with not just the wiring but the hoses too. And if it's an older house, chances are good that the dishwasher had to be crammed in with a certain amount of hacking, cussing, and persuasion.

The fridge rolls out into the room on its own wheels.
by mantas | 2025-10-19 17:40:49+00:00
I’m yet to see someone who switched camps because of pro life or undocumented wording. On the other hand, all sides seem to make lots of fun of the other side wording and make jokes out of that. Or use exact wording as pejorative.

Wording may make difference in marketing for on-the-spot decisions. But in the long run, when people take a deeper look, wording seems to not make a difference.
by dboreham | 2025-10-19 17:40:56+00:00
There's probably some piece on Fox News, or a blog post from some influencer that cites these institutions. Most regime policy begins with some media outrage like this. You and I aren't exposed to that content so it seems arbitrary.

I first realized this decades ago when I ran into someone socially who started on about how evil the red cross was. I'm like wtf? Then did some research and discovered some fringe belief originating in the Vietnam war. There are thousands of oddball grievances like this.
by brosco | 2025-10-19 17:41:32+00:00
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.

As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?

When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.

If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.

People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-19 17:41:51+00:00
>Maybe on paper. But the snappy low-latency feel of TUI apps in the terminal is a joy, and unequaled in GUIs.

This is not true at all. Terminal emulators are GUIs, the TUI is just another layer on top of that GUI. Using a TUI will always introduces additional latency, depending on the quality of the terminal emulator.

I do not know what GUIs or TUIs you are using, but my KDE Apps are all extremely snappy.
by levocardia | 2025-10-19 17:41:56+00:00
I love the final point:

>Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.

While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
by hinkley | 2025-10-19 17:42:34+00:00
Salesmanship has long been associated with convincing people they have a problem and then offering a solution.

And an evergreen one is the single differentiating feature. Like color. How many kitchenaid appliances have been sold in a faddish color only to be replaced by white or black or red a handful of years later? Those things were tanks. Still are to an extent.
by Almondsetat | 2025-10-19 17:42:38+00:00
The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen.

1. Follow actively the lessons.

2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons

Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-19 17:42:44+00:00
One of the big innovations of NVMe over SATA was giving us a bunch of separate command queues. It'd be lovely to get some per queue information.

I feel like maybe some of this info is already available we just don't commonly look at it: knowing how deep the queue is, how many commands are outstanding at any given moment is probably a decent start. I haven't spent time digging into blk-mq to see what's available, to understand the hardware dispatch queue (how the kernel represents the many hardware queues available) info. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/block/blk-mq.html