MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beloch | 2025-11-26 01:47:31+00:00
1. A lot of archaeology is "rescue" archaeology. i.e. Either natural processes (e.g. rivers shifting) have threatened a site or the decision has been made to build, but there is a legal requirement to have the site surveyed and dug (if warranted). If you have an issue with this, then it must be with rivers shifting or people building. Rescue archaeology merely rescues the past from otherwise certain destruction.

2. Archaeologists are keenly aware that digging is a destructive act. There are countless examples of sites that were dug with unsophisticated techniques (e.g. bulldozers and dynamite) in the past that could have taught us far more were they dug with even slightly more modern (and careful) techniques. This is why, outside of rescue archaeology, excavations are done with careful deliberation. It's also standard practice to excavate sites only partially, leaving some of it intact for future archaeologists to dig with more advanced technology and techniques.

3. Rest assured, there yet remains vast quantities of history buried in the ground, waiting to be discovered. e.g. We have discovered cuneiform records referring to entire cities that remain buried and unknown. Other cities of the past are under modern settlements and are, at present, mostly inaccessible to archaeologists. It may seem like the world has been exhaustively explored, but there are still huge surprises waiting underground.
by plaidfuji | 2025-11-26 01:47:32+00:00
Python is a pretty bad language for tabular data analysis and plotting, which seems to be the actual topic of this post. R is certainly better, hell Tableau, Matlab, JMP, Prism and even Excel are all better in many cases. Pandas+seaborn has done a lot, but seaborn still has frustrating limits. And pandas is essentially a separate programming language.

If your data is already in a table, and you’re using Python, you’re doing it because you want to learn Python for your next job. Not because it’s the best tool for your current job. The one thing Python has on all those other options is $$$. You will be far more employable than if you stick to R.

And the reason for that is because Python is one of the best languages for data and ML engineering, which is about 80% of what a data science job actually entails.
by logicprog | 2025-11-26 01:47:45+00:00
Yeah. I definitely think LLMs are cool and are useful — they don't just appear that way because everything else happened to be enshittified when they came on the scene — but I've definitely been pondering the fact that we're likely in a part of the cycle right before enshittification sets in. Because it is very possible to monetize AI — the badness of the token economics has been greatly exaggerated, and with huge MAU numbers there's a lot of opportunity — but most of those MAUs won't pay a monthly subscription with caps and rate limits like prosumers will, so the obvious way to monetize is with ads and manipulation.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-26 01:49:16+00:00
IIUC the idea is that when the dark matter particles decay, they produce a pair of bottom and anti-bottom quarks, and when these new particles colide they produce a pair of gamma rays. (Also, there is similar processes with W- and W+.)

It's super weird that he paper has only one author. Now most papers have like 5 authors. Is he analyzing the data from another team? For an experimental paper I expect even more authors.
by Nathanba | 2025-11-26 01:49:33+00:00
This is a very obviously AI written article, I don't get why these newspapers think that this is the future. Just look at this, but this style is all over the entire article: "Graphics cards are typically the most expensive components in a computer. So, when you get your hands on one for free, it's like the universe finally throwing a bone at you, rewarding you for years of kindness and suffering. Then, if that GPU suddenly gets enveloped in a legal feud, you start to second-guess your alliances, shattering loyalties in a moment"
by venturecruelty | 2025-11-26 01:50:29+00:00
Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.
by annavitals | 2025-11-26 01:50:39+00:00
Hi HN, Co-creator here, built this after getting frustrated trying to figure out which food additives to actually worry about when my kid started kindergarten. Scraped 817K+ products to see which additives are actually common, then compared that against Google Trends and Ahrefs data. Turns out there's a massive gap - some additives banned in Europe are in tons of products here but almost nobody searches for them. Not making health claims, just showing the data. The awareness score is basically: how much people search vs how common it actually is.

Data normalization was a nightmare - manufacturers call the same thing 10 different ways (E102, Tartrazine, Yellow 5, etc). Also, MSG is not most known for being a food additive apparently, etc. Would appreciate feedback on the methodology or if you spot any issues.
by mips_avatar | 2025-11-26 01:51:02+00:00
Andrej does use biological examples, but he's a lot more cautious about biomimicry, and often uses biological examples to show why AI and bio are different. Like he doesn't believe that animals use classical RL because a baby horse can walk after 5 minutes which definitely wasn't achieved through classical RL. He doesn't pretend to know how a horse developed that ability, just that it's not classical RL.

A lot of Ilya's takes in this interview felt like more of a stretch. The emotions and LLM argument felt like of like "let's add feathers to planes because birds fly and have feathers". I bet continual learning is going to have some kind of internal goal beyond RL eval functions, but these speculations about emotions just feel like college dorm discussions.

The thing that made Ilya such an innovator (the elegant focus on next token prediction) was so simple, and I feel like his next big take is going to be something about neuron architecture (something he eluded to in the interview but flat out refused to talk about).
by chrneu | 2025-11-26 01:51:29+00:00
I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other shit that stuff like Monsters contain.

Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list sometime. There's not much to it.

Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least awful of the bunch.
by zdragnar | 2025-11-26 01:52:22+00:00
As a counter anecdote, I've yet to try a model where I break even. The output is so untrustworthy that I need to spend as much time coaching and fixing as if I'd just written it myself. When it does produce a working result faster, I still end up with less confidence in it.

What I'm working on doesn't have much boilerplate, though, and I've only been programming for 18 years. Maybe I need to work for another 7 before it starts working for me.
by an0malous | 2025-11-26 01:52:29+00:00
“Time it takes for a human to complete a task that AI can complete 50% of the time” seems like a really contrived metric. Suppose it takes 30 minutes to write code to scrape a page and also 30 minutes to identify a bug in a SQL query, an AI’s ability to solve the former has virtually no bearing on its ability to solve the latter but we’re considering them all in the same set of “30 minute problems.” Where do they get the data for task durations anyway?
by duxup | 2025-11-26 01:52:56+00:00
I've enjoyed Roblox with my kids.

Does it ask them to buy Robux? Yup, sure does, just like many apps they encounter. IMO it's a learning opportunity.

As far as safety I consider it my job to monitor them when on their devices, be present.

There's no getting around that there's no magic system that will protect kids for sure, other than parental involvement.
by mcmoor | 2025-11-26 01:53:47+00:00
Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.

I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
by Glyptodon | 2025-11-26 01:54:10+00:00
So if you think that the poverty line should be delineating that income below which a household is subject to major systemic risks and has no clear path to retirement, it does appear that the poverty line as currently defined is wildly inaccurate.

If you rule of thumb just looking at $2k/mo housing and $2k/mo for health insurance for four, it implies that a living wage for such a household is some number well above $60k, and potentially as high as $105k w/ my napkin math. This, IMO, suggests that there is a level of accuracy to the article, even if the $140k it suggests is high.
by pornel | 2025-11-26 01:54:13+00:00
The situation today is very different than what it used to be when people actually used 386 or Amigas because they had no other options (BTW, Rust supports m68k, just not AmigaOS specifically).

Today even crappiest old PCs that you can fish out of a dumpster are already new enough to have Rust/LLVM support. We have mountains of Rust-compatible e-waste that you can save from landfill. Take whatever is cheapest on eBay, or given away on your local FB marketplace, and it will run Rust, and almost certainly be orders of magnitude faster and more practical than the unsupported retro hardware.

Using actual too-niche-for-Rust hardware today is more expensive. Such machines are often collectors' items, and need components and accessories that are hard to obtain, or need replacements/adapters that can be custom low-volume products.

Even if you can put together something from old-but-not-museum-yet parts, it's not going to make more sense economically than getting an older-gen Raspberry PI kit or its Ali Express knock-offs (there are VGA dongles more expensive than some of these boards).

It's fine to appreciate SGI and DEC Alpha, have fun using BE OS, or prove that AmigaOS is still a perfectly fine daily driver, but let's not pretend it's a situation that people are in due to economic hardship.
by lmm | 2025-11-26 01:54:17+00:00
> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.

Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.
by LarryMade2 | 2025-11-26 01:54:25+00:00
Dual 24" monitors (decent quality IPS), one uses an HDMI KVM to switch between different/retro systems, Recently upgraded from VGA to HDMI switchbox, the difference was worth the cost to buy some [X] to HDMI adapters. Now there's enough inexpensive ones to cover all the bases.

The benefit for me is I use the main system to look things up and then switch to the target system and I have the main display as a reference and the other as well,

Used to have the side monitor as the KVM one, but find I work better with the switched monitor the one in the center, as a side display I would get sore/tired neck from always looking to the side. With it center I am more comfortable to concentrate on the task at hand on the other system I have up.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 01:54:49+00:00
"style" is apt for many reasons.

I've heard chairs of animation departments say they feel like this puts film departments under them as a subset rather than the other way around. It's a funny twist of fate, given that the tables turned on them ages ago.

Photorealistic models are just learning the rules of camera optics and physics. In other "styles", the models learn how to draw Pixar shaded volumes, thick lines, or whatever rules and patterns and aesthetics you teach.

Different styles can reinforce one another across stylistic boundaries and mixed data sets can make the generalization better (at the cost of excelling in one domain).

"Real life", it seems, might just be a filter amongst many equally valid interpretations.
Ask HN: Hard and deep tech – why are Jira and Confluence the go-to PM tools?
by dnlh_lvg | 2025-11-26 01:54:49+00:00
Genuinely curious for folks working in hard tech and deep tech (industries like aerospace, aeronautics, maritime, nuclear, biotech/pharma, etc.) -- why are Jira and Confluence still the prominent tools for project management?

Atlassian was built for software workflows, so I get why software teams rely on it. But for hardware/ops-heavy teams, it always felt like an odd fit to me.

My take for why hardware/ops teams still use it are below but I'm curious to hear other people's opinions.

1) Regulatory + data security requirements (ITAR, export control, validated systems, etc.) box teams into whatever their org already approved years ago.// 2) Heritage + inertia. Jira/Confluence have been around forever, most companies already use them, and no one wants to be the person who tries to introduce something new.// 3) “At least everyone knows how to use it.” In mixed orgs (prime <> supplier <> test house <> customer), Jira/Confluence are the lowest common denominator tools people can agree on, even if they're a bad fit.// 4) No one wants to adopt or pay for another system. Hardware teams already juggle spreadsheets, slides, GSE databases, readiness trackers, etc. Jira and Confluence are “good enough,” so they stick.

If Jira and Confluence aren't a great fit for hardware/ops work, what would a better tool actually need to do? And what would make adoption difficult?
by Loughla | 2025-11-26 01:54:54+00:00
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.

I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
by Krutonium | 2025-11-26 01:55:04+00:00
I think it's important to remember that Dotnet projects can use code built for older releases; to an almost absurd degree, and if you don't go to before the .NET Framework divide, you largely don't even need to change anything to move projects to newer frameworks. They largely just work.

The .Net platform is honestly the most stable it has ever been.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 01:56:06+00:00
How much energy does BFL have to keep playing this game against Google and ByteDance (SeeDream)?

If their new fancy model is only middle of the pack, and they're not as open source as the Chinese Qwen image models (or ByteDance / Alibaba / Lightricks video models), what's the point?

It's not just prompt adherence, the image quality of Flux models has been pretty bad. Plastic skin, inhumanely chiseled chins, that general faux "AI" aura.

Indeed, the Flux samples in your test suite that "pass" look God-awful. It might "pass" from a technical standpoint, but there's no way I'd choose Flux to solve my workflows. It looks bad.

(I wonder if they lack people on their data team with good aesthetic taste. It may be as simple as that.)

I think this company is struggling. They're pinned between Google and the Chinese. It's a tough, unenviable spot to be in.

I think a lot of the foundation model companies in media are having a really hard time: RunwayML, PikaLabs, LumaLabs. Some of them have pivoted hard away from solving media for everyone. I don't think they can beat the deep-pocketed hyperscalers or the Chinese ecosystem.

BFL just raised a massive round, so what do I know? I just can't help but feel that even though Runway raised similar money, they're struggling really hard now. And I would really not want to be fighting against Google who is already ahead in the game.
by stewoconnor | 2025-11-26 01:56:25+00:00
> congrats on the release

Thank you!

> Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out?

No regrets! This Abilities system is really straightforward and flexible. You find yourself saying that you don't miss monads, if you were already of the FP affiliation. But were glad that it means that you don't have to understand why a monad is like a burrito to do FP.

> Do you like the syntax?

So this one is very loaded. Yes we LOVE the syntax and it is very natural to us, but that is because most of us that are working on the language had either already been fluent in haskell, or at least had gotten to at least a basic understanding to the point of of "I need to be able to read these slides". However we recognize that the current syntax of the language is NOT natural to the bulk of who we would like to be our audience.

But here's the super cool thing about our language! Since we don't store your code in a text/source code representation, and instead as a typechecked AST, we have the freedom to change the surface syntax of the language very easily, which is something we've done several times in the past. We have this unique possibility that other languages don't have, in that we could have more than one "surface syntax" for the language. We could have our current syntax, but also a javascript-like syntax, or a python-like syntax.

And so we have had lots of serious discussions recently about changing the surface syntax to something that would be less "weird" to newcomers. The most obvious one being changing function application from the haskell style "function arg1 arg2" style to the more familier "c?" like style of "function(arg1, arg2)". The difficulties for us will be trying to figure out how to map some of our more unique features like "what abilities are available during function application" onto a more familiar syntax.

So changing the syntax is something that we are seriously considering, but don't yet have a short term plan for.
by gerdesj | 2025-11-26 01:56:52+00:00
There are a lot of happy open source projects rocking along ... happily.

You may not hear about them here or on your socials but it is possible you are not hearing everything. For example, do you have a presence on Mastodon or Lemmy (for example)?

There are a lot more channels too (you mentioned blogs).

Just like the roads you drive on seem to repair themselves sometimes (sort of), FOSS keeps on rocking along with minimal fuss, driven by a vast army of people who do what they can when they fancy it.

Look at the evidence: There is a vast, publicly accessible, free and open source, pool of software for you to download and play with. It gets larger daily but individual stories are immaterial - they might be described or not.

Look at the community: Along with all that software, often there will be a community. Arch, Gentoo and many others are legendary in providing resources to engage with.
by markvitals | 2025-11-26 01:56:54+00:00
Tech stack: Built on Next.js/React, pulling data from the Ahrefs API and Open Food Facts API. We used OpenAI's API for the heavy lifting - deduplicating, aggregating, and categorizing 800,000+ products to build comprehensive profiles across 609 food additives. The data work was surprisingly tricky. We had to refine our Ahrefs methodology to use "matching terms" rather than "related terms" - otherwise we got flooded with irrelevant keywords (MSG search volume was massively inflated by "Madison Square Garden" ). Filtered for 100+ monthly searches to eliminate spam while keeping meaningful queries. The result: real search demand data paired with actual product usage patterns, so you can see both what people are curious about AND where additives actually show up in products. Happy to answer any technical questions!
by stevage | 2025-11-26 01:57:12+00:00
>the honest truth

>maintaining an open source, self-hosted project is:

> more work than building it > different fun than building it > more rewarding than you'd expect > harder than you'd expect > worth it

I'd say the title is not misleading: what they don't tell you is that is more rewarding than you'd expect and worth it. (Because yes, we mostly hear the "it's too much work and not worth it" story.)
by tedggh | 2025-11-26 01:57:18+00:00
Looking at other domains where companies are developing complex products in highly regulated industries there’s one thing they all share in common, they invest a lot of capital in infrastructure for testing their designs. I spent years at a company trying to convince upper management in setting up a lab where we could simulate a production environment that would allow us to do a real integration test. It’s an idea hard to sell because testing is actually part of the budget in every project, so lack of testing couldn’t be attributed to our high rate of failures (going over budget fixing bugs during commissioning). Perhaps we should stop calling unit testing, testing so that we don’t confuse people. Until you we don’t put all the pieces together and do a proper stress test under close-to-realistic production conditions, our software cannot be considered tested. I think that’s the case for 99% of software companies.
by eru | 2025-11-26 01:57:28+00:00
> If you need to make a national payroll, you have to use it for a small town with a payroll of 50 people first, get the bugs worked out, then try it with a larger town, then a small city, then a large city, then a province, and then and only then are you ready to try it at a national level.

You could also try to buy some off-the-shelf solutions? Making payroll, even for very large organisations, isn't exactly a new problem.

As a corollary I would also suggest: subsidiarity.

> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)

If you solve more problems more locally, you don't need that many people at the national level, thus making payroll there is easier.
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-26 01:57:38+00:00
> Amazingly enough, these aren't even the worst kinds of garbage health plans that you can buy in America: those would be the religious "health share" programs that sleazy evangelical "entrepreneurs" suck their co-religionists into, which cost the world and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick:

Seems worth noting that "sleazy" and "suck their co-religionists into" are (unfounded, as far as I can tell) opinions, "cost the world" is flat-out false and the exact reason why they are an appealing option, and "and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick" is also an unfounded claim. His only citation for any of this is talking about someone who doesn't like morality clauses, but...picked it anyways, presumably because it didn't cost the world?

Some are better than others. I picked the one that looked the most like real insurance and has a >30 year track record of not leaving people high and dry. I've been on it for almost seven years and it's worked out well so far.
by bccdee | 2025-11-26 01:58:13+00:00
None of the graphics libraries you've ever used were built with mixins, decorators, or multiple inheritance? I confess I never went too deep with GUI toolkit programming, but Swing, for instance, definitely uses decorators (e.g. JLayer).

Neither Go nor Rust have inheritance, so any graphic library implemented in those languages will be inheritance-free; ditto anything in a functional language, for the most part. In general, these tend to be very declarative toolkits, being post-React, but they should illustrate the point. For something more widely used in industry, I know Imgui is a popular immediate-mode library.