MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2025-11-03 22:11:44+00:00
I got my taste of "full" folders with NT during the early days of DVD programming. The software would write everything into a single directory where it would create at least 3 files per source asset. We were working a specialty DVD that had 100k assets. The software+NT would crash crash crash. The next year the project came through, we were on a newer version of the software running Win2k and performance was much improved using same hardware. I haven't had to do anything with a folder that full in years, but I'd assume it is less of a chore than the days of NT. Then again, it could have gotten better, but then regressed as well. Really, I'm just happy I don't get any where close to that to find out.
by officeplant | 2025-11-03 22:11:55+00:00
>It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts

It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.

> Every DAW will bake them in

And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.

But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.

May the AI enjoy the rot in their soulless world.
by page_index | 2025-11-03 22:12:26+00:00
In modern document question answering (QA) systems, OCR serves an important role by converting PDF pages into text that can be processed by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting text can provide contextual input that enables LLMs to perform question answering over document content.

Traditional OCR systems typically use a two-stage process that first detects the layout of a PDF — dividing it into text, tables, and images — and then recognizes and converts these elements into plain text. With the rise of vision-language models (VLMs) (such as Qwen-VL and GPT-4.1), new end-to-end OCR models like DeepSeek-OCR have emerged. These models jointly understand visual and textual information, enabling direct interpretation of PDFs without an explicit layout detection step.

However, this paradigm shift raises an important question:

> If a VLM can already process both the document images and the query to produce an answer directly, do we still need the intermediate OCR step?

We build a practical vectorless, vision-based question-answering implementation for long documents, without relying on OCR. Specifically, we adopt a vectlorless, reasoning-based retrieval layer and the multimodal GPT-4.1 as the VLM for visual reasoning and answer generation.
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-03 22:12:52+00:00
Well, "the same consciousness" it's not, as for example it occupies a different position in spacetime. It's an identical copy for a split second, and then they start diverging. Nothing so deep about any of this. When I copy a file from one disk to another, it's not the same file, they're identical copies for some time (usually, assuming no defects in the copying process), and will likely start diverging afterwards.
by squidsoup | 2025-11-03 22:12:57+00:00
There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:

> In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).

> The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088236/

Presumably only 20% of the rats were religious.
by robinhoode | 2025-11-03 22:13:29+00:00
Railroads need repair too? Not sure if it's every 4 years. Also, the trains I take to/from work are super slow because there is no money to upgrade.

I think we may not upgrade every 4 years, but instead upgrade when the AI models are not meeting our needs AND we have the funding & political will to do the upgrade.

Perhaps the singularity is just a sigmoid with the top of the curve being the level of capex the economy can withstand.
by mcg_ab_sec | 2025-11-03 22:13:36+00:00
Abnormal.AI (Series D, $5.1 Billion valuation Unicorn) | REMOTE in US, Canada and Singapore) with optional offices in SF & NYC. HYBRID in Bangalore, India | Full-time |

https://careers.abnormal.ai

I'm looking for exceptional engineering managers, full-stack, backend and ML engineers to join my teams at Abnormal AI to fight cybercrime. We have multiple open positions for each of these roles, working in Python, Golang, Typescript and React among other leading edge technologies. If you're looking for personal as well as company growth, you won't find a better company than Abnormal AI.

I'm the Director of Engineering for the Messaging Security Products Division. We build the user-facing products for inbound email security and have many interesting challenges working at massive scale. Please see the following links for more details on the open positions and our general careers page link for all open positions across the company. We are hiring for engineering in other divisions as well!

Engineering Manager Remote - Singapore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/7497288003?gh_jid=749728800...

Engineering Manager Hybrid - Bangalore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/7496072003?gh_jid=749607200...

Software Engineer II - Fullstack (4 open positions) Remote - USA/Canada: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/6671235003?gh_jid=667123500...

Software Engineer II - Fullstack Hybrid - Bangalore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/6577843003?gh_jid=657784300...

Software Engineer II - Backend Hybrid - Bangalore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/6592675003?gh_jid=659267500...

Software Engineer 1 - Fullstack Remote Singapore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/7500482003?gh_jid=750048200...

Machine Learning Engineer II Remote - Singapore: https://abnormal.ai/careers/jobs/7509271003?gh_jid=750927100...
by joouha | 2025-11-03 22:13:43+00:00
I'd find it very useful to be able to query a terminal to see if it has font support for a given list of characters.

This would allow TUIs to use recent unicode characters which may not be supported (e.g. Symbols for Legacy Computing), or private use characters (e.g. powerline symbols & font-awesome icons), while falling back to a more universally supported character in terminals that do not support them.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-11-03 22:13:55+00:00
That's probably not that big a deal. I can count the number of times I've used a public slow charger in my last 4 years of EV ownership on one hand. Slow charging basically only makes sense at home, where you're leaving your car charging overnight (where you'll obviously have your own car's charging cable).

Out and about, it makes a lot more sense to use a DC fast charger, where having a port that will fit the charging stations matters a lot more.
by tkz1312 | 2025-11-03 22:13:58+00:00
Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now.

Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we can achieve true reasoning via scaled matrix multiplication is understandable, but also betrays a lack of imagination and flexibility of thought. The world is full of bizarre wonders and this is just one more to add to the list.
by interroboink | 2025-11-03 22:14:10+00:00
To say nothing of the launchpad sound suppression water system[1] that dumps 7,300 gal/sec (about 2–3 seconds for one swimming pool)!

Though that's just gravity-fed, of course. Still pretty cool though, I think (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_suppression_system
by Muromec | 2025-11-03 22:14:16+00:00
Location: EU (the Netherlands)

Remote: Yes, unless you have an office in Amstersam and going there is needs-based, not time-based.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Node.js, Vue.js, React, Wasm, Docker, Erlang, Linux, ESP32, MQTT, SDR

Résumé/CV: mail me

Email: il.pv@protonmai.ch

GitHub: https://github.com/muromec, https://github.com/dstucrypt/, https://github.com/erwasm/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/muromec/

---

Give me some more python, with django or without, or even better erlang/elixir. I mostly did react and vue for the last 10 years, but want to get back on the backend/fullstack train.
by topaz0 | 2025-11-03 22:14:18+00:00
It would be different if I worked in chinese or hindi or something, or worked with other people who do. Also worth noting that even terminals that score badly on this benchmark handle most of the things you mention just fine (e.g. accented characters or check marks -- unicode that is well-behaved in terms of mapping a single code point to a single fixed width character). The places where the poorly ranked terminals lose points is mostly in pretty complicated cases that are far from what terminals were originally designed for. Also I have never encountered a command line tool that prints emoji -- and if I did, I would be annoyed.
by ericd | 2025-11-03 22:14:25+00:00
>They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.

As a former rider, why? Cars were the most dangerous part, in my experience.

Something that stuck with me from my motorcycle safety course, the speed at which hitting a wall is 50% fatal is 30 mph. Doesn't take highway speeds.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-03 22:14:29+00:00
Somehow others experience shit situations without needing to self-sooth by inflicting similar pain on others.

Bullying is not a form of innocently misguided, or sympathy deserving, coping.

I think that view is best interpreted as an inaccurate but well meaning rationalization offered to bullied people, to suggest more passive karma is present than there is. Often by those uncomfortable with the pervasive element of real-politik physical negotiation throughout nature.

Bullies are cruel because they are getting something psychological and practical from the practice. Usually both. Violence exists because it is a very effective tool.

And just as easily a tool for good. Bullies’ behavior is famously responsive to people who vigorously retaliate or are strongly defended. Even to the point of genuinely respecting those strong enough to give back punishment, as well as they can take.

Bullies are also famously quick to offer their subservience to bigger bullies. Suddenly pliable “lambs” in that context, offering up their own power. These are rational choices for those that operate in the violence economy, not the flailings of broken souls.

Which makes standing up to all bullies in the world dramatically more important, than the calculus of any individual situation might seem to suggest.

Like all economic realms, norms that bend to lower the costs of applying bullying, violence, threat and fear power, only incentivize further expansion, investment and innovation.
by Animats | 2025-11-03 22:14:33+00:00
> the example I really wanted to use was people picking Go for their top-end, competitive-with-anything-in-the-market database.

You mean they're writing their own database? Why? That's a huge job and available databases are pretty good. There are multiple open-source choices, all of which work.

If they think they're going to compete with Oracle, they need to read the history of Oracle.
by treetalker | 2025-11-03 22:14:52+00:00
Related rules of thumb, from the conclusion of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (pages 344–45 in my version):

- Plan on surprises.

- Plan on human inventiveness.

- Favor reversibility.

- Take small steps; stand back; and observe before doing more.

Buffer, optionality, advantageous smallness, and bricolage are our watchwords.

"It is impossible to legislate for the future." —Prince Peter Kropotkin

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts." —Aldo Leopold

---

See also Gall's Law.
by whakim | 2025-11-03 22:14:52+00:00
Interested to hear more about your experience here. At Halcyon, we have trillions of embeddings and found Postgres to be unsuitable at several orders of magnitude less than we currently have.

On the iterative scan side, how do you prevent this from becoming too computationally intensive with a restrictive pre-filter, or simply not working at all? We use Vespa, which means effectively doing a map-reduce across all of our nodes; the effective number of graph traversals to do is smaller, and the computational burden mostly involves scanning posting lists on a per-node basis. I imagine to do something similar in postgres, you'd need sharded tables, and complicated application logic to control what you're actually searching.

How do you deal with re-indexing and/or denormalizing metadata for filtering? Do you simply accept that it'll take hours or days?

I agree with you, however, that vector databases are not a panacea (although they do remove a huge amount of devops work, which is worth a lot!). Vespa supports filtering across parent-child relationships (like a relational database) which means we don't have to reindex a trillion things every time we want to add a new type of filter, which with a previous vector database vendor we used took us almost a week.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-11-03 22:14:54+00:00
Piston engines got pretty wild before turbines eventually took over the world. The most efficient ones were more efficient than today's turbines in terms of BSFC[0]. One of the most interesting to me was the Napier Nomad[1], which used turbo- and super-charging. However, the turbo had secondary fuel injection and effectively ran as a turbine to drive the compressor.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Nomad
by derHackerman | 2025-11-03 22:15:07+00:00
Location: Portland, Oregon

Willing to relocate: Yes

Remote: Yes

Technologies: Go, Lua, Docker, Web, SQLite etc.

CV: https://pdx.land/resume

Email: wernerlu@oregonstate.edu

Hi I'm Lukas and I like to build re-build software to learn how it works and why it was made that way. I write a lot of go and recently lua as well. I'm currently studying Computer Science at Oregon State University and am also currently the president of ACM@OSU.Looking for internships and full time positions.
by mjr00 | 2025-11-03 22:15:12+00:00
While I mostly agree with the article's premise (that AI will cause more software development to happen, not less) I disagree with two parts:

1. the opening premise comparing AI to dial-up internet; basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative. The Krugman quote is an extreme, notable outlier, and it gets thrown out around literally every new technology, from blockchain to VR headsets to 3DTVs, so just like, don't use it please.

2. the closing thesis of

> Consider the restaurant owner from earlier who uses AI to create custom inventory software that is useful only for them. They won’t call themselves a software engineer.

The idea that restaurant owners will be writing inventory software might make sense if the only challenge of creating custom inventory software, or any custom software, was writing the code... but it isn't. Software projects don't fail because people didn't write enough code.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-03 22:15:29+00:00
This is such a brilliant thing.

I am not a person involved in building anything like this but I am a person who frequently used copy.sh/v86 and was actually building a tinycore fork which added jujutsu so that people can run jujutsu to try it out in their browser. It was a project which made me understand so much more about building linux from scratch, what isos are, and everything.

One surprising thing was that I was able to make the iso actually have jujutsu and it could run on something like qemu but not on tinycore due to some minor issue

Basically I believe that some really interesting quick-tries of some software can happen if we can have customized linux with our apps directly in the browser

This is such an interesting project really and it feels very snappy to me.

I have a quick suggestion as someone trying to make a custom iso linux / binary apps just work on linux in browser: Can you please, please, create a docker image where you can give static applications as an input in the docker and it would automatically generate the html page with wasm or the wasm output containing that static application in the /usr/bin

You mention something like this this

docker run -it -name full-linux-wasm linux-wasm-contained:dev /linux-wasm/linux-wasm.sh all

I haven't read the project more but I do find it incredibly minimalist and I genuinely hope you can add the ability to add static/hopefully some day glibc as well but I am mentioning it because there are a lot of golang tools which are statically linked and it would be so interesting to running them in browser if possible via their binaries

Yes I know that they could probably run via compiling into wasm itself but that just felt so much messy to me on how I could provide other tools like busybox with it or how it would actually feel like a linux environment to test it out as an example

I have to admit, your project is really really cool. Good luck on this project! Starred, and have a nice day.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-03 22:15:33+00:00
This thing feels like a mortal danger to the (up to 8x!) iron pipes / hydrants it's pulling from, that it'd want to just chew up the very pipes themselves! Or to the building it's hurling 37 tons of water a minute at! I don't understand how a connector hose wouldn't collapse, how it maintains any cross-section rather than being sucked into collapse.

Also wondering: what replaced this!

(Ed: great reply from Mindcrime. Also, the new Ferrara Super Pumper shows a very impressive ribbed(?) 8-inch "hard suction" hose! There's a whole wikipedia section for these drafting/vacuum hoses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suction_hose)
by gruez | 2025-11-03 22:15:45+00:00
>Both major parties and their base are saying “he wasn’t one of ours.” I feel like I’m missing something here.

Because even though there's no slam dunk evidence that he's left/right wing (eg. some manifesto saying "yep, I'm left wing!", it's far more likely that he was left wing rather than right wing, and therefore the left's attempt to distance themselves from the shooter is weaker and worth calling out more. If the circumstances were reversed (eg. this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Paul_Pelosi#Social_m...), and both the left and the right tried to distance themselves from the attacker, I'd call out the right more, even if there's vague tidbits implying he was left.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-11-03 22:15:59+00:00
all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically.

To be clear, I don't believe that current AI tech is ever going to be conscious or win a nobel prize or whatever, but if we follow the logical conclusions to this fanciful rhetoric, the outlook is bleak.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-11-03 22:16:05+00:00
I live in the largest city in the US and saying that the average bread/pastry quality even comes close to Europe is insane.

Sure, you can get good bread here. However it's going to cost you 5x what it costs in Europe and it might take you up to 30 minutes to get too depending on where you live. Most bread in the US is low quality. Most bread in Europe is high quality. There is good bread to be found in the US, and there's bad bread in Europe. But the average bread just isn't even close to being equal.
by F3nd0 | 2025-11-03 22:16:06+00:00
My recent experience with social media has been very different. These days I'm mostly active on the Fediverse, and in contrast to the News, my timeline doesn’t feel like a model of the world at all. All I see are little snippets. Many individuals are sharing their feelings, creations, thoughts, or seeking advice. The posts don’t feel like a collage meant to capture the state of society as a whole, but rather as windows into different people’s lives.

I don’t think that’s how everyone feels on the Fediverse; browsing the federated timeline or viewing the public posts on some large instance doesn’t feel much different from the other big sites. But your own experience on your personal timeline is truly your own, and you decide what to make of it. I keep seeing personal snippets because I choose to follow people who post a lot of personal snippets that I’m interested in seeing. I get a relatively low amount of global politics and polarising topics because I seldom follow people who talk about those a lot. I quite literally get what I ask for—no less and no more.

At the end of the day, I think the key is understanding your network and adjusting your expectations. Following someone means you’ll be seeing their posts. So if you don’t want someone’s posts on your timeline, for whatever reason, just don’t follow them. Problem solved, easy as. (Then again, I imagine getting to see only the content you want to see might be more difficult on the more corporate networks, so if that’s the case, you might need a better social network.)

… and perhaps I should add that seeing only what you want to see won’t help you avoiding a simplified view of the world if such a view ultimately is what you want to see. Being in charge of your social experience is only useful if you're in charge of yourself. If you're not, you might need to change that before any social network, no matter how user-friendly, will be able to benefit you.
by thehoff | 2025-11-03 22:16:07+00:00
I’ve never had anything that available (outside of urgent care which imo is not very good). None of this had an immediate need.

MRI a few years ago had a month and a half wait (not urgent but recommended).

Pediatrician? At least 3 months and thats IF they take new patients.

Allergist, 6 month waiting list.

My last PCP I had to book out 2 months in advance (the practice I wanted to go to was booked 6 months out).

We are also suburbs of a big city.
by bena | 2025-11-03 22:16:23+00:00
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Because some notable people dismissed things that wound up having profound effect on the world, it does not mean that everything dismissed will have a profound effect.

We could just as easily be "peak Laserdisc" as "dial-up internet".