MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-24 18:54:49+00:00
What would the "screw" push off of? That rotational force would need to go somewhere or be corrected, else the probes would just rotate. I guess a gyroscope could do that, but what you're describing just sounds... very roundabout, and in terms of force, a few kilos of propellant would have the same effect.
by scottlamb | 2025-10-24 18:55:19+00:00
> Is anyone surprised that the systemd folks basically said "fuck you, we'll do what we want to" to everyone else?

I don't think that's an accurate paraphrase of "Consider this more a passing of the baton from upstream systemd to downstreams: if your distro wants this kind of legacy interface, then just add this via a distro-specific tmpfiles drop-in. But there's no point really in forcing anyone who has a more forward-looking view of the world to still carry that dir."

That kind of drop-in is pretty routine, so I don't know why this became a big thing we're all discussing now.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-24 18:55:19+00:00
>I'm not really sure what to do.

Get any of the modern laptops with good battery life, install linux + Elementary OS without any hacks or workarounds (or better yet, i3wm which is the best window manager for laptops), and never look back.

Or do what I do, which is buy $200 dells/thinkpads of ebay, and for anything requiring CPU, just ssh into your home server.

Personally I went a step further and use a lapdock with a samsung phone - acts like a laptop with Termux, and I can do pretty much everything with good battery life, because lapdock battery also charges the phone.
by yorwba | 2025-10-24 18:55:44+00:00
The paper uses a number representation that is designed to make attention easy to learn: each digit is a separate token and the least significant digit is put first, so that the first digit of the output is simply the sum of the first digits of the inputs and the second digit is the sum of the second digits plus an optional carry from the first digits and so on.

If the numbers are represented with the most significant digit first as usual, you need a bunch of intermediate steps before outputting even the first digit just to determine whether it is affected by a carry or not.

The paper looks at multiplication of numbers represented with the least significant digit first as a toy task requiring several additions as intermediate steps to study why a model large enough to perform those additions in principle fails to learn to do so in practice.

They compare with a model that is first trained to produce the intermediate additions explicitly (as a "chain of thought" with a specific format) and then has this CoT progressively shortened during training until there's nothing left of it. But that second model successfully multiplies.

The difference appears to be that the presence of the intermediate results induces a better number representation in latent space, whereas the model without CoT gets stuck in a less efficient local minimum.

So the answer to the question "Why can't transformers learn multiplication?" is that the training process is insufficient for the model to discover the best intermediate steps on its own.

You could do a similar experiment where the CoT involves first taking the logarithm, adding, and then exponentiating to get the final result, but I think logarithms are probably another computation that's too difficult to learn without additional hints for intermediate steps.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-24 18:56:15+00:00
For my case, and probably the case of many such people, that's closer to 90%. The 10%, however, is a big deal. When you need to take it somewhere, you need to take it somewhere, and a device you can use in that 10% of the time is better than a device you can't use in that 10% of the time, regardless of how superior the latter is in the happy path cases.
by uecker | 2025-10-24 18:56:25+00:00
It is certainly a lot more complex than C. Whether it codified the things one needs to know is a different question. I would even agree that partially it does and there are aspects I really like about Rust, but I do not believe it matters as nearly as much as some people might think. For example, no complicated super-smart type system will prevent you from adding a CLI option and then not implementing it, breaking automatic updates and backup scripts. But nerds like to believe that this super-smart type system is the solution for out security problems. I can understand this. This is also what I believed 20 years ago.
by anonnon | 2025-10-24 18:57:00+00:00
After 2000, the practice of calling states (even noncompetitive ones) before polls closed was abandoned, and the Voter News Service (VNS) consortium (who provided the flawed exit polling data that informed the erroneous, premature call) was disbanded three years later. This practice of calling states early, either in the sense of calling eastern states before western states' polls closed, or calling any state before its own polls closed, had been heavily criticized by congress since the 80s based on studies showing it adversely affected voter turnout.

Oddly, the media's gun-jumping call of Florida and its likely adverse effect on Bush's performance in the heavily red panhandle gets scant mention today when the election is discussed (compared to the infamous "butterfly ballot"), despite it being a major point of controversy in 2000 and forever altering the way the media reports election returns.
by visarga | 2025-10-24 18:57:15+00:00
It seems unfair to call out LLMs for "spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing." These problems are largely the result of platform optimization for engagement and SEO competition for attention. This isn't unique to models; even we, humans, when operating without feedback, generate mostly slop. Curation is performed by the environment and the passage of time, which reveals consequences. LLMs taken in isolation from their environment are just as sloppy as brains in a similar situation.

Therefore, the correct attitude to take regarding LLMs is to create ways for them to receive useful feedback on their outputs. When using a coding agent, have the agent work against tests. Scaffold constraints and feedback around it. AlphaZero, for example, had abundant environmental feedback and achieved amazing (superhuman) results. Other Alpha models (for math, coding, etc.) that operated within validation loops reached olympic levels in specific types of problem-solving. The limitation of LLMs is actually a limitation of their incomplete coupling with the external world.

In fact you don't even need a super intelligent agent to make progress, it is sufficient to have copying and competition, evolution shows it can create all life, including us and our culture and technology without a very smart learning algorithm. Instead what it has is plenty of feedback. Intelligence is not in the brain or the LLM, it is in the ecosystem, the society of agents, and the world. Intelligence is the result of having to pay the cost of our execution to continue to exist, a strategy to balance the cost of life.

What I mean by feedback is exploration, when you execute novel actions or actions in novel environment configurations, and observe the outcomes. And adjust, and iterate. So the feedback becomes part of the model, and the model part of the action-feedback process. They co-create each other.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-10-24 18:57:27+00:00
I've recently started to use it to help with writing tests. I'll write the code, then scaffold out the test scenarios that I want it to do, give it my code, my scaffolding, and say fill it in. It's done pretty well and saves me a ton of time doing the part of the job that I hate the most. I go through and tweak probably 10% of the generated code, and typically about 1 out of 30 tests will fail, badly, and I'll have to rewrite it from scratch.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-24 18:57:30+00:00
My children attended Montessori schools, and it really is a wonderful system.

I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.

Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.

Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
by cco | 2025-10-24 18:57:45+00:00
> The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.”

Well my point is two-fold. First, what you say here is my point, all branches need an _enforcement_ arm. Today Congress has the Sergeant at Arms and courts have bailiffs and may deputize members of the Executive Branch.

However that's clearly inadequate in the face of the Executive's current balance of power. A rebalancing is necessary imo.

Could that result in a Roman-esque problem of the three branches having "tug of wars" with each other's law enforcement arm, but I don't think so. We have this problem today with the dozens of law enforcement organizations within the Executive...which brings me to my second point!

My second point is that carrying out the law in the Executive was clearly the wrong choice. The Legislative branch should actually carry out the law, i.e. USPS should live under a committee in Congress, and mail fraud would continue to be prosecuted by the Executive.

I'll caveat that I'm had waiving a lot here, but I hope we can all agree at least on the problem statement; too much power has concentrated in the Executive and _drastic_ measures would be required to resolve that situation.
by dathinab | 2025-10-24 18:57:47+00:00
no, it is that it adds complexity which is no longer needed

especially for image based stuff it's a pain

which includes OCI images for things like docker

but also image based distros like e.g. ostree (as used through rpm-ostree by Atomic Fedora desktops like Fedora Silverblue, but also in similar but different forms something Ubuntu has been experimenting with)
by slg | 2025-10-24 18:57:57+00:00
That is highly debatable. Stories about "politics, or crime" are allowed if "they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"[1]. I'm not sure what to make of the word "interesting" there, but this is clearly a new phenomenon that is deeply concerning and worth discussing.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by einsteinx2 | 2025-10-24 18:58:15+00:00
Yeah when I got the first gen base model M1 Air, I put it to the test against my maxed out i9 MacBook Pro (basically the last Intel model they released, so it was the “best of the best” they had to offer on the Intel side).

I tried out using Handbrake to CPU encode the same video on both devices. Amazingly the M1 Air was slightly faster than the i9, while comparatively sipping power, and staying relatively cool without even having a fan. The i9 on the other hand drained its battery super fast, sounded like a jet plane taking off, and was too hot to sit on my lap.

That’s when I knew it was really a massive leap forward.
by eightysixfour | 2025-10-24 18:58:32+00:00
I think you're missing the point if you're in "whataboutism" mode. Members of the current administration have used the term "extra-constitutional" on their own, I would argue that is far more acute than the slow elitist take over from the other party.

However, this argument isn't about the "teams" it is about "the playing field." We the people need to defend the playing field, the one that makes us citizens not subjects (as the article put it), by acknowledging the game needs to be changed, so that the teams work for our benefit.

The game, of course, being defined by what the goals and metrics of the system are.
by ben_w | 2025-10-24 18:58:50+00:00
> The "whole country" is irrelevant. You can't transmit arbitrary amounts of power across the large geographic areas, most of energy has to be generated in a reasonably close proximity.

Only technically correct because you said "arbitrary": it's well within China's manufacturing capabilities to make a grid that can transmit 3 TW over 40,000 km, with a conductor cross section so thick it only has 1 Ω resistance.

As in: all the world's current electricity demand, the long way around the planet.

I have, in fact, done the maths on this.

> Transmission lines are expensive, regardless of your ideology.

"Expensive" but not "prohibitively expensive".

All infra is "expensive". Nations have a lot of money.
by culi | 2025-10-24 18:59:00+00:00
It's entirely possible that I'm being unnecessarily pedantic, but this doesn't feel like a post about "capabilities" so much as "hacky workarounds".

Maybe my years of contributing to undisciplined codebases has made me bitter but TypeScript has ways to solve these problems and it hurts to see more attention brought to hacks than the interesting (and underdocumented) solutions TypeScript already has. Given that roughly half of the documentation is in the damn changelog, TypeScript is especially in need of independent content that highlight features (not hacks) of the language
by tasuki | 2025-10-24 18:59:02+00:00
I don't know! They said "collaborative" and they provided a link. I tried making some changes to test the collaboration and clicked the "save" button. It changed the "last changed" to "now" and upon reload my changes were gone.

It lied to me: my changes weren't saved! If I can't save a thing, I want to be explicitly told so!
by foobarian | 2025-10-24 18:59:04+00:00
The problem is not the customer safety, it's the worker's. Look into how things used to be done in the "good old days" and see if you'd be ok going to that kind of job. [1]

[1] https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CRN1913010...
by sdairs | 2025-10-24 18:59:07+00:00
Chrome does suck ass, hence why I use Firefox and said I don't want to use Chrome, lol. But I want Firefox to be a good browser in its own right, not just "not Chrome". Firefox is just about over the "acceptable" line for me, as a power user for 15+ years (and under that line for most normal users) so I continue to use it, but they're neglecting it in favor of these useless AI features.
by fluoridation | 2025-10-24 18:59:08+00:00
Huh... considering such annihilations should have left nothing but energy behind, from our standpoint, how could we distinguish which of these sequences of events actually happened?

* The early universe produced slightly more matter than antimatter, and they annihilated until matter and energy remained.

* The early universe produced overwhelmingly normal matter and energy, and almost no antimatter.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-24 18:59:12+00:00
> Right but he is the President.

Yeah, and that he specifically is President should tell you something -- maybe the fight isn't at the pardon power.

> So what are we getting by making 1000 internet comments of which 800 are about how bad Trump is?

We might come to understand the root of the problem is the psychology of a specific individual and the cult that surrounds him, rather than what Obama did a decade ago. It's not that Obama's use of the pardon power caused a slippery slope of executive overreach that has resulted in today's corrupt pardons. We are not dealing with "overreach" here, what's happening today is categorically different.

> This whole exchange reminded me why I don't participate in politics on HN. It's all just venting.

I dunno, hopefully in this exchange you've learned that the pardon power is not supposed to be limited under the Constitution and why, so now you can stop making arguments that we should limit the pardon power. When you take that off the table, viable solutions become easier to spot. Limiting the pardon power is not viable because there is no Constitutional mechanism to do so. Under the Constitution, any limits put in place can just be ignored by the next POTUS who decides he wants to ignore them.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-10-24 18:59:30+00:00
A surgeon has 4 years of undergraduate education, 4 years of medical school, and a 5 year residency, learning to operate (pun intended) with other equally highly trained specialists, many of whom are peers, like anesthesiologists, not merely support. The comparison was already dubious when Brooks made it for operating systems programming. Setting up a comparison with the average "I don't use anything I learned in my CS degree, lol" coder wrangling a chorus of hallucinating stochastic parrots is a bonkers level of hubris from techbros.
by snug | 2025-10-24 18:59:51+00:00
The way the plugin works (in my simplified understanding) is that it guesses how many dislikes there are based on the like/dislike ratio of the people that have the plugin installed. So if 100 people that have the plugin installed and there is a 90/10 like/dislike ratio, and the actual video has 1000 likes, it will say that there are 100 dislikes. Youtube not only took away the dislike UI, but stopped publicly giving the number of dislikes even behind the API.

But even then, the database could not get that big, you'd only need a few simple tables, one that tracks every plugin users like/dislike on the video they stored it on, and then a table that does the aggregations. 15TB sounds crazy.

I'm not a youtuber so idk what content creators could see, but it would have been smarter for them to go after the content creators that have the plugin installed instead of youtube users, not sure why we would care about those kinds of analytics
by pacmansyyu | 2025-10-24 19:00:12+00:00
Congratulations on building this! I certainly do agree with the fact that there are a lot of sites that force you to upload, ask for your email, and sometimes even add a watermark to the image; amongst other unknown things.

Although from first look, I can tell you that there's a lot of text on the site and it's a bit too cramped. From my perspective, tools like these should get out of the way and the UX should be self-explanatory for an image "conversion" tool. Basically, just a box to select, drag/drop images, a few user inputs such as the output quality and format. That's about it. A single line at the top explaining what the tool does (and that it is local) should be good enough.

Also, the title says "PNG to JPG converter," but the rest of the site claims it can convert to quite a lot more than just those format. You can possibly change that to, as an example, something like: "ImageConverter - Convert images between formats, locally". And you can get rid of multiple pages, turning it into a single-page with all the possible output options.

As a sidenote, I've been using Mazanoke for this: https://github.com/civilblur/mazanoke. It's not my project, just something I happened to stumble upon a while ago, but it's similar to your project and works exactly like you would want it to.

From my test, the rest of it works great. Good luck!
by bryanlarsen | 2025-10-24 19:00:19+00:00
The serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes only propose to eliminate the mosquito species that carry nasty human diseases. If those species were eliminated other mosquito species would quickly expand to replace the eliminated species.

So that's good for the birds, and bad for the humans that want to get rid of all the pesky annoying mosquitoes, not just get rid of mosquito born disease.
by 8note | 2025-10-24 19:00:28+00:00
> consider that 20% of Americans are to some measure dependent on SNAP. There's something wrong with that in my view.

but what interpretation leads to "therefore SNAP is the problem" ? compared to land management or anti-trust, etc

as a policy alternative, we could say, ban the exports of alfalfa until the SNAP usage is 5%, and split up cisco into 2000 different food distribution companies.

funding for social spending i think is a very strong chesterton's fence, in that the program was introduced to mitigate a problem. getting rid of the mitigation isnt going to get rid of the underlying problem
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-24 19:00:37+00:00
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school

This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.

It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
by wrl | 2025-10-24 19:01:08+00:00
This is really interesting – AU's notion of having separate input and output "elements" (buses, more or less) is one of the worst parts of the whole API.

I understand why historically these design decisions were made, but it's not like they really enable any functionality that the other APIs don't. It's just that since the host can call `Render` more than once per sample block (ideally the host would call it once per sample block per element, but there's nothing saying the host can't call it redundantly), there's additional bookkeeping that plugins have to do surrounding the `AudioTimeStamp`. And for what? There's nothing AU can do that the other formats can't.

If a plugin has multiple fully independent buses, the model mostly works, but if there's any interdependence then things get even more complicated. Say you have two separate stereo elements that don't have any routing between them, but there's MIDI input or sample-accurate parameter changes for the given block. Now you have to keep those events around until the host has moved on to the next block, which means the plugin has to maintain even more internal buffering. This sort of lifetime ambiguity was one of the worst parts of VST2. In VST2, how long does MIDI input last? "Until the next call to `process()`." In AUv2, how long do MIDI input data or parameter change events last? "All of the render calls of the next timestamp, but then not the timestamp after that." Great, thanks.

Modern plugins, upon receiving a `Render` for a new timestamp, will just render all of their elements at the same time, but they'll internally buffer all the outputs and then just copy the buffers out per-element-render call. So, it reduces down to the same thing that other APIs do, just with more pageantry.

And yet, plugin instances having to manage their own input connection types is somehow even worse. Again, I understand why it was done this way – allowing plugins to "pull" their own inputs lets an audio graph basically run itself with very little effort from the host – it can just call `Render` on the final node of the chain, and all of the inputs come along for free.

It's a compelling value proposition, but unfortunately it fully prevents any sort of graph-level multithreading. Modern hosts do all sorts of graph theory to determine which parts of the graph can be executed in parallel, and this means that the host has to be in charge of determining which plugins to render and when. Even Logic does this now. The "pull model" of an AU instance directly calling `Render` on its input connections is relic of the past.

Anyway. VST3, CLAP, even VST2 support multiple input and output buses (hell, one of my plugins has multiple output buses for "main out", "only transients", and "everything other than a transient") – it's just a question of host support and how they're broken out. Ironically, Logic is one of the clunkiest implementations of multi-out I've seen (Bitwig is far and away the best).