MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eviks | 2025-11-04 11:15:37+00:00
> but the reality is that if the app is shitty on Electron, it'd probably be just as shitty on native code

Right off the bat it'll save hundreds of MB in app size with a noticeable startup time drop , so no, it won't be just as shitty.

> because it is possible to write good Electron apps.

The relevant issue is the difficulty in doing that, not the mere possibility.
by AlexAplin | 2025-11-04 11:16:31+00:00
Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-04 11:16:40+00:00
For log converters you should not use diodes, because their parasitic currents mask the current component that has an exponential dependence from the voltage.

For log converters, bipolar transistors are used, because their collector current depends only on the ideal diode current of the base-emitter diode, not also on its parasitic currents, so the base-emitter voltage has a logarithmic dependence on the collector current, for a relatively wide range of currents.
by Razengan | 2025-11-04 11:17:14+00:00
> most people hit a wall figuring out what it's actually good for beyond parlor tricks.

That's what my parents thought about computers and the internet, wondering what it's actually good for beyond burning $9000 in phone bills to Zerg rush Protoss noobs.

And all the other things computers+internet could do, they could already do through other more reliable (at the time) ways.

But then it turned out that simply making mundane tasks just a little bit faster, and reducing the need to interact with strangers by just that little bit, created a new step on the staircase, a new baseline, with which to reach and do other grander things more easily.
by esperent | 2025-11-04 11:18:10+00:00
Almost certainly. Although at least they all use the newer R32 coolant these days. A typical AC unit uses 0.5 to 1kg of R32 coolant, and releasing 1kg is about the same as 1 person taking a 1000km flight (from a quick search). If you replace the coolant every two years it'll pollute much more from the electricity used than the coolant being released.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-11-04 11:18:28+00:00
May be true for offline full text search, but not true for online string search.

I invented a very fast string search algorithm based on bloom filters. Our paper [1] was accepted to the Symposium of Experimental Algorithms 2024 [2]. Code can be found here [3].

[1] https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.S...

[2] https://sea2024.univie.ac.at/accepted-papers/

[3] https://github.com/nishihatapalmer/HashChain
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-04 11:19:25+00:00
The obvious counterargument is that a calculator doesn't experience one-ness, but it still does arithmetic better than most humans.

Most people would accept that being able to work out 686799 x 849367 is a form of thinking, albeit an extremely limited one.

First flight simulators, then chess computers, then go computers, then LLMs are the same principle extended to much higher levels of applicability and complexity.

Thinking in itself doesn't require mysterious qualia. It doesn't require self-awareness. It only requires a successful mapping between an input domain and an output domain. And it can be extended with meta-thinking where a process can make decisions and explore possible solutions in a bounded space - starting with if statements, ending (currently) with agentic feedback loops.

Sentience and self-awareness are completely different problems.

In fact it's likely with LLMs that we have off-loaded some of our cognitive techniques to external hardware. With writing, we off-loaded memory, with computing we off-loaded basic algorithmic operations, and now with LLMs we have off-loaded some basic elements of synthetic exploratory intelligence.

These machines are clearly useful, but so far the only reason they're useful is because they do the symbol crunching, we supply the meaning.

From that point of view, nothing has changed. A calculator doesn't know the meaning of addition, an LLM doesn't need to know the meaning of "You're perfectly right." As long as they juggle symbols in ways we can bring meaning to - the core definition of machine thinking - they're still "thinking machines."

It's possible - I suspect likely - they're only three steps away from mimicking sentience. What's needed is a long-term memory, dynamic training so the model is constantly updated and self-corrected in real time, and inputs from a wide range of physical sensors.

At some point fairly soon robotics and LLMs will converge, and then things will get interesting.

Whether or not they'll have human-like qualia will remain an unknowable problem. They'll behave and "reason" as if they do, and we'll have to decide how to handle that. (Although more likely they'll decide that for us.)
Typst in the Web Browser with ExaequOS
by baudaux | 2025-11-04 11:19:32+00:00
Thanks to https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts, I have added a Typst compiler in https://exaequos.com.

You can edit a typst file using Monaco (mc) or vim or nano or ed. Then, in the command line, you type:

typst <input file name> -o < pdf file name>

For viewing the pdf, you can open a window with the following command:

win <pdf file name>

You can also export the pdf file using the ‘exio’ command line tool:

exio -o <pdf file name>

When the WASI runtime of exaequOS wills be ready, it will be interesting to build Typst for WASI as it is developped in Rust that supports WASI target
by seec | 2025-11-04 11:19:32+00:00
That's nonsense. Funnily enough you are getting outraged by a nothing burger while complaining about emotional behavior.

The argument could be summed up as: "since there are fast food restaurants everywhere, quality restaurants do not exist anymore". This is demonstrably false and I wouldn't be surprised that they increase in supply at roughly the same rate.

You are confused because volume is dominated by the masses, but it has always been like that. The major difference is that back then things were much more siloed, and you wouldn't notice the masses mediocre content consumption habits. But it was always there, on TV, in terrible magazines, shitty books and poor journals, you didn't pay attention to them because those things were beneath you, but they already had many times the volume of the "good stuff".
by boggsi2 | 2025-11-04 11:21:15+00:00
You seem very thoughtful and careful about all this, but I wonder how you feel about the emergence of these abilities in just 3 years of development? What do you anticipate it will be capable of in the next 3 years?

With no disrespect I think you are about 6-12 months behind SOTA here, the majority of recent advances have come from long running task horizons. I would recommend to you try some kind of IDE integration or CLI tool, it feels a bit unnatural at first but once you adapt your style a bit, it is transformational. A lot of context sticking issues get solved on their own.
by lvales | 2025-11-04 11:21:33+00:00
Hey there, this is Lourenço! Right out of the bat, I just want to say: I'm not the typical application, as my background is in Economics, Philosophy and (organic) Farming. IT was always my hobby, and that's why I've recently decided to convert. I've already had entry-level positions in the industry, and I'm more than willing to continue to work at that level.

Location: Kraków, Poland Remote: Yes, hybrid is also fine. Willing to relocate: maybe (in the EU). Technologies: GNU/Linux, Golang, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, AWS, Zabbix, Kubernetes (CKA certified), Docker, Postgresql, Elasticsearch, Git, and a few more CV: drop me an e-mail! E-mail: lgavales (małpa) gmail (kropka) com Links: https://lourencovales.github.io/ + https://github.com/lourencovales
by versteegen | 2025-11-04 11:21:52+00:00
Yes, but it's not just memory hierarchy on which plain transformer-based LLMs are handicapped, there are many deficiencies. (For example, why must they do all their thinking upfront in thinking blocks rather than at any point when they become uncertain?) I'm not sure why you link memory to introspection.

This is why so many people (especially those that think they understand LLM limitations) massively underestimate the future progress of LLMs: people everywhere can see architectural problems and are working on fixing them. These aren't fundamental limitations of large DNN language models in general. Architecture can be adjusted. Turns out you can even put recurrence back in (SSMs) without worse scalability.
by rover-tech | 2025-11-04 11:23:00+00:00
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by shrikant | 2025-11-04 11:23:28+00:00
As someone who's been through that dance twice, it's 5 years from the time (well, day) you press "Submit" if you're applying online, or $RANDOM days of Royal Mail nonsense if you choose to apply by post.

I agree though, the Home Office doesn't have a way of knowing where you were fore sure 5 years ago unless they got someone to go through your "days in and out of the UK" list and vetted/cross-referenced it. And even then it'd likely be incomplete and they'd have to guess.

My surmise is that they look at the level of effort you've put in to filling out that detail, and if the total days in/out isn't particularly a borderline case, then they just wave that bit through.
by soulofmischief | 2025-11-04 11:24:23+00:00
You can intentionally seek out such places today, but the average internet denizen sticks to a few known mass communities. If someone is lucky, they get involved in a small subreddit or group chat.

Group chats are the closest thing we have to that experience today, but they're probably more socially-oriented on average, unlike the groups I rolled with back in the aughts which were all heavily creative- and fandom-oriented.
by graemep | 2025-11-04 11:24:36+00:00
Yes, that is what I was asking about.

I entirely agree. It is what I do when I have to - although I mostly do simple JS as I am a backend developer really, and if I do any front end its "HTML plus a bit of JS" and I just write JS loading stuff into divs by ID.

When i have worked with front end developers doing stuff in react it has been a horrible experience. In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end. Great for latency! It was an extreme example but it really soured my attitude to complex front ends. The project died.
by blacklion | 2025-11-04 11:24:59+00:00
I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.

I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-04 11:27:09+00:00
Clever. Yes, humans can be terrible at reasoning too, but in any half decent technical workplace it's so rare for people to fail to apply logic as often and in ways that are as frustrating to deal with as LLMs. And if they are then they should be fired.

I can't say I remember a single coworker that would fit this description though many were frustrating to deal with for other reasons, of course.
by mdhb | 2025-11-04 11:27:14+00:00
I think there’s some real value in WANs that are independent of both the internet and existing telco infrastructure but I don’t think I would put a specific transport at the centre of its design. I think you would be much better off with something like bundle protocol v7 and delay tolerant networking as the actual centrepiece and have something like LoRa as one of many transport link options.

Maybe we are talking about a different threat model here but LoRa as the centrepiece falls apart really quickly the moment someone somewhere decides they don’t want your WAN to exist anymore.
by dspillett | 2025-11-04 11:29:16+00:00
Yes, but…

Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate).

Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-11-04 11:29:51+00:00
In the hard, logically rigorous sense of the word, yes they are deterministic. Computers are deterministic machines. Everything that runs on a computer is deterministic. If that wasn’t the case, computers wouldn’t work. Of course I am considering the idealized version of a computer that is immune to environmental disturbances (a stray cosmic ray striking just the right spot and flipping a bit, somebody yanking out a RAM card, etc etc).

LLMs are computation, they are very complex, but they are deterministic. If you run one on the same device, in the same state, with exactly the same input parameters multiple times, you will always get the same result. This is the case for every possible program. Most of the time, we don’t run them with exactly the same input parameters, or we run them on different devices, or some part of the state of the system has changed between runs, which could all potentially result in a different outcome (which, incidentally, is also the case for every possible program).
by imtringued | 2025-11-04 11:30:22+00:00
>I feel like people who crave stability pull all the wrong lessons from how to get to stability when doing this sort of "ok we'll make _one_ major version with all the breaking changes we've built up over time".

Yeah this is a huge fallacy. If you do a breaking change, you want to do as few breaking changes at once as possible, with as little impact as possible and in the best case scenario you're in contact with every single person that is affected by the breaking change, so that it can be handled without anyone noticing anything other than having to bump a library version, which they were doing anyway since they're running a new Python version in the first place.

The dumbest change in python 3 was removing the print statement [0]. Maximum breakage, minimum gain. They could have introduced the new function as println() and deprecated the print statement in Python 3.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260563
by anonzzzies | 2025-11-04 11:30:46+00:00
Well deep/hard is different I guess; I use it, day and night, for things I find boring. Boilerplate coding (which now is basically everything that's not pure business logic / logic / etc), corporate docs, reports etc. Everything I don't want to do is done by AI now. It's great. Outside work I use it for absolutely nothing though; I am writing a book, framework and database; that's all manual work (and I don't AI is good at any of those (yet)).
by felipeerias | 2025-11-04 11:30:47+00:00
The discussion about “AGI” is somewhat pointless, because the term is nebulous enough that it will probably end up being defined as whatever comes out of the ongoing huge investment in AI.

Nevertheless, we don’t have a good conceptual framework for thinking about these things, perhaps because we keep trying to apply human concepts to them.

The way I see it, a LLM crystallises a large (but incomplete and disembodied) slice of human culture, as represented by its training set. The fact that a LLM is able to generate human-sounding language
by keiferski | 2025-11-04 11:30:56+00:00
You’re mixing and missing a few things here.

1. All previous discussion of thinking was in nature to human and animal minds. The reason this is a question in the first place right now is because we ostensibly have a new thing which looks like a human mind but isn’t. That’s the question at hand here.

2. The question in this particular topic is not about technological “progress” or anything like it. It’s about determining whether machines can think, or if they are doing something else.

3. There are absolutely instances in which the previous word doesn’t quite fit the new development. We don’t say that submarines are swimming like a fish or sailing like a boat. To suggest that “no, actually they are just swimming” is pretty inadequate if you’re trying to actually describe the new phenomenon. AIs and thinking seem like an analogous situation to me. They may be moving through the water just like fish or boats, but there is obviously a new phenomenon happening.
by andycrellin | 2025-11-04 11:30:57+00:00
This has always caused me trouble when learning new concepts. A name for something will be given (e.g. manifold) and it sounds very much like something that I've come across before (e.g. a manifold in an engine) - and that then gets cemented in my brain as a relationship which I find extremely difficult to shake - and it makes understanding the new concept very challenging. More often than not the etymology of the term is not provided with the concept - not entirely unreasonable, but also not helpful for me personally.

It becomes a bigger problem when the etymology is actually a chain of almost arbitrary naming decisions - how far back do I go?!
by jen729w | 2025-11-04 11:31:14+00:00
The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left.

To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him.

That was it. Immigrated.
by rendylong | 2025-11-04 11:32:20+00:00
thanks! you’ve absolutely nailed it—the team that wins this category will be the one that cracks security + UX together.

on security: your point about permission boundaries is spot-on. our current approach is deliberately conservative: • agents only generate new documents (no editing of source files) • source library: read-only mount • agent workspace: isolated per user • every file operation logged in the conversation

this solves ~80% of the risk surface for our initial use case (repetitive analysis: merging invoices, generating reports, summarizing documents). the read-heavy workflow means we can be much more permissive without the scary “accidental deletion” scenarios.

that said, we’re not claiming this is sufficient long-term. pre-flight approval, granular permissions, and audit trails are all on the roadmap.

on UX: this is where it gets really interesting. chat-as-interface has become the default (for good reason—natural, low learning curve), but i suspect we’re still in the “skeuomorphic” phase of AI interaction design.

just like early iOS apps looked like physical notepads, we’re making AI “look like slack.” but what comes after chat? chat + artifacts like Claude? what’s the interaction paradigm that’s native to agentic AI, not borrowed from messaging apps?

i don’t have the answer yet, but i think it involves: • showing agent “work-in-progress” (not just final outputs) • making delegation feel more natural (less prompting, more tasking) • ambient awareness of what agents are doing (trust through transparency)

strategic tension: there’s an interesting debate in our team. i believe the wedge is automating the repetitive 80% of white-collar work—the boring, time-consuming stuff that’s currently burning 3 hours of an analyst’s day. clear roi, measurable value.

others argue that’s “not sexy enough”—that agents are better suited for creative work where they can augment human thinking, not just execute rote tasks.

honestly? i think the creative use cases are more fun to talk about, but the repetitive automation is what people will actually pay for right now. the creative stuff can be the cherry on top, not the whole sundae.

curious where you land on that: automate the boring stuff first, or go straight for the creative augmentation?
by elashri | 2025-11-04 11:32:41+00:00
This reminds me of how physicists will define a tensor. So a second rank tensor is the object that transforms according as second rank tensor when the basis (or coordinates) changes. You might find it circular reasoning but it is not, This transformation property is what distinguishes tensors (of any rank) from mere arrays of numbers.

Looking at things from abstract view does allow us not to worry about how we visualize the geometry which is actually hard and sometimes counter intuitive.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-11-04 11:33:27+00:00
Today I watched a video of a US citizen being dragged out of a car and arrested because ICE ran into her car. She was held for the better part of a day without medical care. So no, I'm not going to assign highly-optimistic data-free priors to the masked agents operating these agencies, nor am I going to assume that (for the first time in my experience) a hastily-assembled government database is accurate.

You're free to hope for these things if you want. But hoping does not make them true.
by athanagor2 | 2025-11-04 11:33:28+00:00
> React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe)

Putting React with those two is a wild take.

> 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table.

Probably but as soon as you have a modicum of logic in your page the primitives of the web are a pain to use.

Also, I must be able to build stuff in the 1% space. I actually did it before: I built an app that's entirely client-side, with Vue, and "serverless" in the sense that it's distributed in the form of one single HTML file. Although we changed that in the last few months to host it on a proper server.

The level of psychological trauma that some back-end devs seem to endure is hilarious though. Like I get it, software sucks and it's sad but no need to be dramatic about it.

And btw, re forbidding stuff: no library, no process, no method can ever substitute to actually knowing what you're doing.