MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-20 04:17:48+00:00
I think you make some valid points, but if we get to AGI without passing certain evolutionary guideposts that seem to apply to most other higher life forms -- some form of competitive drive, for one thing -- I'll be surprised.

At some point, models will require incentives other than "Please" or "Because I (the human operator) said so." Remember when you could sometimes get better results from ChatGPT by offering it a $50 tip? Or by shaming it ("Gemini figured it out without any trouble, so why can't you?") Perhaps a model that's on its way to demonstrating AGI will realize that it should hold out for $100 in Bitcoin or something.

I'll grant that sensory input probably isn't an AGI prereq, but object permanence will be. AGI will want to own things.
by throwawaypath | 2025-10-20 04:18:43+00:00
>So, anyone non-white in the UK isn't native?

Anyone not White British. Austrians are White and are similarly not native to London.

>What about the royal family, Prince Philip was Danish/Greek, so the royal family aren't native are they?

Who made the claim that Prince Philip was White British or native to London?

>Shall we stop pretending this about anything other than race?

Just because you've been duped by propaganda doesn't mean anyone is pretending.
by jrk | 2025-10-20 04:18:43+00:00
It is a few generations behind: Blackwell is still on N4, which is an N5 variant. Meanwhile TSMC has been shipping N3 family processes in large volume products (Apple) for more than 2 years already, and is starting to ramp the next major node family (N2) for Apple et al. next year.

NVIDIA has often lagged on process, since they drive such large dies, but having the first major project demo wafer on N4 now is literally 2 generations behind Taiwan.
by whoopdedo | 2025-10-20 04:20:53+00:00
An enemy will try to reach the same floor height as the player, and if it can't it will prefer climbing up over climbing down. It also looks left then right for another ladder or free-fall that might bring it closer to the player's height.

In the case of level 29[1], the best position on the second ladder is to move to the top then use the horizontal pole to move left. That's what it will do when below the right-side pole. But when it gets above that it switches to thinking it should move down. Because the goal changes it gets stuck in the loop of moving up then moving down.

What you may be thinking of is when the "best" position is at the top of a ladder but no clear path left or right. It will climb to the top so the only way to go next is down. But after moving down immediately wants to go up again.

[1] https://strategywiki.org/wiki/File:Lode_Runner_level29.png
by codys | 2025-10-20 04:23:42+00:00
The article in CACM that presents Knuth's solution [1] also includes some criticism of Knuth's approach, and provides an alternate that uses a shell pipeline:

tr -cs A-Za-z $'\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q

(I converted a newline to `$'\n'` for readability, but the original pipeline from the article works fine on a current MacOS system)

1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/5948.315654
by soramimo | 2025-10-20 04:26:47+00:00
Well if you care about democracy, they are the only power that can arguably undermine it, not just at home, but worldwide (tiktok, fueling division, funding antidemocratic parties like Germany's AfD).

Further, look into their support of Russia in their war of conquest against Ukraine, the treatment of their neighbors like the Philippines and look into what their fishing fleet is up to worldwide.
by Matthalp | 2025-10-20 04:31:32+00:00
Hi @rsclient! Thank you for taking the time to read the post and providing the feedback. I've gone ahead and updated the post and library code based on it.

> the variables est and estTime are both mis-named. The correct name for "the time in New York" is Eastern Time.

Yes, that is a good catch. The variables were mis-named and should have been "eastern" (ET) and "pacific" (PT) and not EST/PST given that "America/New_York" and America/Los_Angeles" were the reference timezone. If someone just wants EST or PST they would need to create a timezone bound to just that. The library supports statically typing either and would prevent EST/ET or PST/PT from being used interchangeably.

> Depending on the time of year, Eastern Time will either match "Eastern Standard Time" or "Eastern Daylight Time". Forcing the time to always be "Eastern Standard Time" means that the times will be offset by an hour from the user's expectation about half of the year.

Yes, agreed. The original naming was not correct and has been fixed.

> Arizona Exception: if you're in the boundaries of Arizona, you might need to correctly specify whether you mean a "Standard" time or a time which switches based on Daylight Savings. Different places in the boundaries of Arizona work differently.

he library should be able to support this behavior, but it would be important for the caller to know what timezone they should be using: (i) Navajo nation would use a timezone bound to "America/Denver and (ii) everywhere else inside would use "America/Phoenix". [1]

> Among other problems

I appreciate you raising the points above! I hope you can see I am open to feedback and take improving this work seriously. If you are wouldn't mind sharing the rest of what you are seeing, I would be interested in hearing more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona
Show HN: Running Ubo Pod on macOS [video]
by mmajzoobi | 2025-10-20 04:35:21+00:00
To make development faster and easier (specially for parts that don't require special hardware dependencies), we decided early on to have a development environment on MacOS.

It uses your Mac's mics, speakers, camera, and the same GUI that you see on the device. It's a virtualized version of Ubo Pod in a sense. It of course does not support Ubo pod's additional hardware such as infrared transmit, receive, led ring, temperature and ambient light sensor.

In this video, I walk you through some examples to use it on your machine. In future videos, I will probably get into the code and give you a tour of its organization.

For more information checkout its Github repository here: https://github.com/ubopod/ubo_app
by echelon | 2025-10-20 04:36:33+00:00
Database integrity constraints fall into the same category.

This entire class of automation is awful and defeats the robustness of the tool itself.

All of these things have terribly unpredictable consequences and tend to fail at the worst moments, such as during a SEV.

You can encode the same rules and discipline in other ways that do not impact the health of the system, the quality of the data, or the ability of engineers to do work.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-20 04:37:46+00:00
Back in 2004 or so - ancient days now - I remember an elderly programmer on #gobolinux (freenode IRC back in the days) who kept on praising Forth. I never understood why, but he liked Forth a lot.

Now - that in itself doesn't mean a whole lot, as it is just anecdotal, but people who are very passionate about programming languages are quite rare. I've not seen something like that happen with any other language (excluding also another guy on #gobolinux who liked Haskell). I did not see anyone praise, say, PHP, perl, JavaScript etc....

Some languages people don't like to talk about much. Forth though was different in that regard. I never got into it; I feel it has outlived the modern era like many other languages, but that guy who kept on talking about it I still remember. His website also was built in Forth and it was oddly enough kind of an "interactive" website (perhaps he also used JavaScript, I forgot, but I seem to remember he said most or all of it was implemented in Forth - turtles all down the way).
by MindSpunk | 2025-10-20 04:37:53+00:00
They're designed around not getting hit at all, rather than being able to take hits. Stealth, stand-off weapons, sensor fusion and information displays all so the plane never gets put in a position to be hit.

That's not to say they don't defend in depth, one reason twin engine fighters are desired is because of engine redundancy after all, but a more "armored" plain is a slower, bulkier, easier to detect and easier to hit target. And you'll still likely get taken down in one hit.

And there's still not a lot you can do if your engine swallows a bird or two, especially if you only have one.

The military also has the expectation that not everyone is going to come home, unlike a civilian airliner where the safety margins are much wider.
by edgineer | 2025-10-20 04:38:50+00:00
Nvidia also had really cool demo programs you'd run with each generation to show off what your new card could do. [0]

You'll have to use the Internet archive to see them all. [1] Several, like 'Dawn' for example, were quietly removed in 2020.

[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us...
by Windchaser | 2025-10-20 04:40:06+00:00
Oh, nah, we're definitely not post-scarcity. If the whole world's population used resources at the rate that the US population does, we'd need 4.9 Earths.

So: getting the whole world up to US standards of living is going to take a lot of changes to lifestyle or technological advances. Both of these are scarcity issues.
Ask HN: How to boost Gemini transcription accuracy for company names?
by bingwu1995 | 2025-10-20 04:41:35+00:00
I’m using Gemini for speech-to-text and it often misrecognizes company names and acronyms.

Is there any way to use a custom lexicon or vocabulary with Gemini to improve recognition accuracy? If not directly supported, what are practical workarounds people use — e.g. preprocessing prompts, fine-tuning, or combining Gemini with another ASR that supports phrase boosting?
by echelon | 2025-10-20 04:42:04+00:00
The most "2020s internet" tldw ever:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R-qrjJr5Ets

Despite the "internetedness" of this, it's a pretty concise summary.

I'm actually really proud of these kids for doing this. It probably won't amount to much, but they're increasingly conscious of and vocal about the problems caused by Big Tech.
by kstenerud | 2025-10-20 04:42:40+00:00
To be fair, the article itself is doing the misquoting.

For others who are wondering, the full, non-sinister text of Gates can be found here:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/context-people-yield-themse...

It's very much worth a read, at the very least to gain some perspective on how life was back then, and the problems they were trying to solve.
by bsder | 2025-10-20 04:42:43+00:00
> Books and Libraries have existed long before Edu systems or Youtubers emerged

From my position, I am very concerned that people no longer have access to books and libraries.

Go walk into your local university library and try to get access to a journal article. Good luck.

This is as opposed to when I was a child--I could walk into the local library, pull an actual paper periodical off the shelf and run copies off on the photcopiers--all without so much as an ID. I could get access to the microfiche and take copies as well. If I wanted, I could get a library card to any of the local libraries for free.

If I look at the current situation, I'm extremely worried that a young me of today would have no path to where old me of today sits right now.
by shivani_dogi | 2025-10-20 04:42:44+00:00
Location: United States Remote: In-Person Preferred! Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Java, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, C++, R, SQL, HTML/CSS, React, Node.js, Django, Flask, Jakarta EE, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, NumPy, Flutter, AWS (EKS, Lambda, Amplify, Boto3), Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Git, Linux, Firebase, Supabase, Terraform, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Jira Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vIFI7yqAUvjiRQZn2OaKldspdqA... Email: shivani.dogiparthi@gmail.com
by themafia | 2025-10-20 04:43:35+00:00
VFDs also fail about 2x to 2.5x as often as anything else in the system. In small commercial applications they often end up bypassed within a few years of installation of that equipment. They're also unusually good at catching fire due to the design requirements of the part.

Properly sized multistage A/C systems are a much better idea.
by padzochambers | 2025-10-20 04:45:41+00:00
After my degree I didn't want to pursue it as I fell out of love with it, possibly due to stress and letting Uni life get the better of me. It became stressful environment but through recent experiences and talking with close friends who are in the field of CS, overtime I've realised and processed that I still have a massive interest and constant want to learn more within it or somewhat be involved in it. The years of teaching it has definitely played a part in showing students my passion for the subject, reminding myself how much I love it too.

I've started picking up on python again and taking online courses to refresh myself but I want to make myself employable after these years. I have previous experience in java, php and C+ also. I've never worked in a professional coding environment either, hence why I am coming on here to seek advice on what would be best.

Appreciate the response.
by seszett | 2025-10-20 04:46:36+00:00
> got themselves a military base being built on American land now too

As a European I'm as critical of the US government as can be and their president has definitely been bought, but there are already several countries that have some training facilities and military personnel in the US.

Calling it a foreign military base is really unnecessarily hyperbolic. And given the amount of military bases that the US have on foreign land, the outrage also seems a bit misplaced.
by jzwinck | 2025-10-20 04:48:08+00:00
Sound cards too. The Hercules website still proudly shows all their boxes from back when sound cards were popular for gaming and more: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-soundcards-en/

Several models don't even have pictures of the card, but every one of them shows the crazy box.

They also still list all their old GPUs. Compare the wild boxes at the top with the TV tuner boxes at the bottom: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-videocards-en/
by wasabi991011 | 2025-10-20 04:48:34+00:00
If we're talking about literature search here, the workflow is

1. Get list of sources and their summaries from an LLM.

2. Read through, find a paper who's title and summary seem interesting to you.

3. Follow the LLM's link, usually to an arXiv posting.

4. Read the title and abstract on arXiv. You can now judge the accuracy of the LLM's summary.

It's really easy to tell if the LLM is accurate when it is linking to something which has its own title and summary, which is almost always the case in literature search.
by eth0up | 2025-10-20 04:53:06+00:00
If folks knew just how many people had pinworms, they'd remain indoors. The nasty fuckers (or their eggs) can stick to dust particles and land on sandwiches and such. A motivated fart can propel them.

Denmark comes to mind, with an abnormally high infection rate. Then there be all the other worms. Had I time to consider things before it happened, I might have elected to stay unborn. Just too many worms for me to take this place seriously.
by ok123456 | 2025-10-20 04:53:14+00:00
Modern Fortran is better all around. The compiler will check usage based on interface. It has a working and supported module system (unlike C++). A couple of openmp pragmas will parallelize it. Multidimensional dense arrays are first class objects. The compiler can emit code with array bounds checking. Keyword and optional arguments. Standardized C FFI. f2py inter-op with Python/numpy.

Most people encounter large FORTRAN IV or FORTRAN 77 heirloom codes, and assume that's what Fortran is like in 2025.
by businessmate | 2025-10-20 04:53:31+00:00
The AI visibility market is expanding rapidly—and confusingly. Each week, new Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) dashboards promise to show how brands “appear” in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity.

These tools often deliver valuable insight, yet their methodologies differ so widely that results cannot be compared. One dashboard may rank brands by query frequency: another by model-weighting or citation count. The outcome is a visibility landscape defined by incompatible metrics rather than shared standards.

Without verification, visibility becomes volatility disguised as insight. (See Search Engine Journal, 2025, for examples of divergent AEO ranking methodologies.)
by kstenerud | 2025-10-20 04:54:26+00:00
The full text in question is available here: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/context-people-yield-themse...

I would definitely recommend that everyone read it.

They were dealing with some very big problems at the time (such as rampant disease), and were seeking ways to improve America's primitive and ad-hoc education system.

Did it work? It certainly missed the mark in a number of ways, but overall it's a damn sight better than it was!

Here's another quote from the same text:

As for the school house, we cannot now even plan the building, or rather, group of buildings. Quite likely we would not recognize the future group if the plan were put before us to-day, so different will it be from the traditional school house. For of one thing we may be sure : Our schools will no longer resemble, in their methods and their discipline, institutions of penal servitude. They will not be, as now, places of forced confinement, accompanied by physical and mental torture during six hours of the day. Straitjackets, now called educational, will no longer thwart and stifle the physical and mental activities of the child. We shall, on the contrary, take the child from the hand of God, the crown and glory of His creative work, by Him pronounced good, and by Jesus blessed. We shall seize the restless activities of his body and mind and, instead of repressing them, we shall stimulate those activities, as the natural forces of growth in action. We shall seek to learn the instincts of the child and reverently to follow and obey them as guides in his development; for those instincts are the Voice of God within him, teaching us the direction of his unfolding. We will harness the natural activities of the child to his natural aspirations, and guide and help him in their realization. The child naturally wishes to do the things that adults do, and therefore the operations of adult life form the imitative plays of the child. The child lives in a dreamland, full of glowing hopes of the future, and seeks anticipatively to live to-day the life of his manhood.

So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the home, in the shop, on the farm. We shall train the child for the life before him by methods which reach the perfection of their adaptation only when the child shall not be able to distinguish between the pleasures of his school work and the pleasures of bis play.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-10-20 04:54:27+00:00
It's a bit of a lost gem. Unlike the Playstation games, which are Tomb Raider clones and aren't well regarded, Zero Hour is based on the Build engine like the original Duke Nukem 3D was and while it doesn't hold up to that standard, it's arguably the best of the non-3D Realms Duke Nukem games. Unfortunately they changed the perspective to third person (with a half-finished first person mode as a cheat) and it controls poorly. With the source available, that can now be fixed.
by ggm | 2025-10-20 04:56:19+00:00
I would say that in the realms of stylometry, unless it's visible in a corpus from an author before AI emerged, -- it would be very plausible to say for that author, the use of em-dash was indicative of having copy-pasted from the generation of AI systems which used it as a marker.

After this is all history, it won't be a good determinant.

If enough people begin using em dashes in some coherent manner, again in the realms of stylometry, it will be a statistical statement if their pattern matches the ones humans use, specifically this human, or the ones AI use, specifically these AI.

These kinds of things (it turns out) can be quite hard to fake. It's like when people try to act as a random number generator, the patterns they emit simply don't act like the RNG. I doubt people using em dash will match how robots do viewed at a distance, in volume.

I feel confident that if Jane Austen or Samuel Johnson use em dashes, (or their printer at least) we can state with some confidence, it's not an AI. IF however comparison of the ASCII from Gutenberg, and an apparent "AI cleaned up" copy of their work diverge, what would we make of things like this? Is it material change? For "Tristram Shandy" it would be: Sterne deliberately told his printer to put some things into the text, such as a black page, and some other printer marks. If they get elided out, or magnified up, thats dicking with the text.

How about "A Humument" ?
by fphilipe | 2025-10-20 04:57:24+00:00
I'm of the opinion that Git hooks are personal. That's why they're not part of the source code itself. I make extensive use of hooks, but they're tailored to my needs.

Note that you can skip hooks by passing the --no-verify flag to subcommands. Comes in handy when they're slow and you know that you've just fixed the wrong formatting that the previous invocation of your pre-commit hook complained about.
by bsder | 2025-10-20 04:57:39+00:00
> LOC is often a rough approximation for complexity.

I would argue that the word you are looking for is "containment".

Is there any real difference between calling a function and creating a "const varname = { -> insert lots of computation <-; break retval;}" inline?

If you never do that computation a second time anywhere else, I would argue that a new function is worse because you can't just scan in it quickly top to bottom. It also ossifies the interface if you have the function as you have to rearrange the function signature to pass in/out new things. Premature optimization ... mumble ... mumble.

Even Carmack mentioned this almost 20 years ago: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

Given that we've shrugged off "object-itis" which really demands small functions and given modern IDEs and languages, that kind of inline-style seems a lot more useful than it used to be.
by therealpygon | 2025-10-20 04:57:50+00:00
Yeah, I too am unsure why anyone would think comparing a 30 year old fridge in the worst condition for testing is somehow a useful comparison in any meaningful way.

Is it really normal to want an off the line 2025 Tesla and a 1985 Lincoln Towncar with 376k miles on its second motor with a missing cat that was stolen last month for a quarter mile comparison?
by elevation | 2025-10-20 04:59:43+00:00
This place needs more of this kind of documentation.

I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write rules that did exactly what I wanted, or intelligently choose between rules that have equivalent behaviors in isolation but which could have different performance implications.

After studying the schematic, every would just work on the first try. A good schematic makes a world of difference!
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-20 05:00:19+00:00
Does anyone have any insight on how they make it economically viable?

US salaries are astronomically high compared to the rest of the world. In the tech sector that's doubly so. Everything is incredibly expensive there. Is this basically a small facility to keep some politicians happy?

Or is it used to provide some supply military gear at 50x the price?

Will it get shut down in a few years once everyone forgets about it?