MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by senshan | 2025-11-25 23:35:56+00:00
In the book "How Big Things Get Done" [1], Bent Flyvbjerg, among other things, identifies one common feature of the projects that do not have large outliers to go over-budget and under-deliver: modularity. Ideally, fractal modularity. His favorite examples: solar power, electric transmission, pipelines, roads. Ironically, IT/software is only slightly better than nuclear power and Olympic games [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/-/en/dp/B0B63ZG71H

[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/826859800/How-Big-Things-Get...
by simonh | 2025-11-25 23:36:02+00:00
Agreed, for space being humanoid is optional. Legs are superfluous for a start. However the issue with current automated systems we’re sending out there is they are function specific, and not very adaptable to novel or unanticipated activities.

This is why sending humans is often advantageous, we can do lots of different and new things. The ideal multipurpose space robot may not have to be humanoid, but it would need to replicate or ideally exceed this kind of flexibility of function.
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-25 23:37:49+00:00
Perfect solution for doing analysis on tables. Wes McKinney (inventor of pandas is rumored to have been inspired by it too).

My problem with APL is 1.) the syntax is less amazing at other more mundane stuff, and 2.) the only production worthy versions are all commercial. I'm not creating something that requires me to pay for a development license as well as distribution royalties.
by river_otter | 2025-11-25 23:38:39+00:00
One thing from the podcast that jumped out to me was the statement that in pre training "you don't have to think closely about the data". Like I guess the success of pre training supports the point somewhat but it feels to me slightly opposed to Karpathy talking about what a large percentage of pretraining data is complete garbage. I guess I would hope that more work in cleaning the pre training data would result in stronger and more coherent base models.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-25 23:38:48+00:00
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.

Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
by solarkraft | 2025-11-25 23:38:48+00:00
One thing I really care about is extensibility. Every now and then one of the big consumer apps adds a feature I really like and the self-hosted solution should have some way to integrate that.

The main thing I really care about is voice mode, as that's my far preferred way of interacting with LLMs for longer backs and forths (most apps I've seen disable a lot of other functionality during it, which I hate, btw).

Two other things I would like to see are canvas mode and scheduled actions (with decision making capability - e.g. "send a notification if X happens").

I assume such features are going to continue being invented, so I find extensibility to be a huge deal. So much so that one thing I could imagine going really well would be a UI on top of Langchain, which already has most of the facilities for that!
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-25 23:38:51+00:00
SQL is not just about a table but multiple tables and their relationships. If it was just about running queries against a single table then basic ordering, filtering, aggregation, and annotation would be easy to achieve in almost any language.

Soon as you start doing things like joins, it gets complicated but in theory you could do something like an API of an ORM to do most things. With using just operators you quickly run into the fact that you have to overload (abuse) operators or write a new language with different operator semantics:

orders * customers | (customers.id == orders.customer_id | orders.amount > Decimal(‘10.00’)

Where * means cross product/outer join and | means filter. Once you add an ordering operator, a group by, etc. you basically get SQL with extra steps.

But it would be nice to have it built in so talking to a database would be a bit more native.
by dmix | 2025-11-25 23:38:51+00:00
I've used all 3 browsers (chrome/safari/ff) daily doing web dev for years now and I'm convinced Safari just feels faster as a cohesive Mac app, with the animations and what not, but isn't in general when using the internet day-to-day. FF is little different than Chrome/Safari.

Also as a dev Safari is becoming the new IE. I've had a whole suite of Safari-only bugs in the past 2yrs and lots of browser crash reports from users.
by cedws | 2025-11-25 23:38:58+00:00
The episode with Zelensky exposed him as a complete idiot. I can maybe tolerate grifters but fuck the whole 'love and peace bro' act while implying Ukraine should make peace with invaders who have ruthlessly killed civilian men, women, and children.

I wish we stopped giving airtime to grifters. Maybe then things would start looking up in the world.
by jorl17 | 2025-11-25 23:39:24+00:00
Maybe it's a matter of the websites I use and my specific usage patterns.

I've used many browsers throughout the years: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Arc, Zen, Orion. For many years I ran safari because it was so energy-efficient and the integration was absolutely great. I would LOVE to get back to safari!...

For my usage patterns, though, Safari is noticeably slower and much more sluggish. I can't really put it any other way.

Things that are pretty terrible for me in Safari: YouYube, Google Docs, GitHub diff viewer, just to name a few. Safari was also noticeably terrible on pages that do HTML animations via JS and not CSS (they shouldn't do it, but they do, and I can instantly tell on Safari).

I will add that although I did have Safari as my main browser several years ago, it was never for its speed. It felt "OK" in terms of speed (a bit slower, but not too noticeable back then), but it felt AMAZING in terms of better life and OS integration.
by immibis | 2025-11-25 23:40:04+00:00
Linux supports raw flash, called an MTD device (memory technology device). It's often used in embedded systems. And it has MTD-native filesystems such as ubifs. But it's only really used in embedded systems because... PC SSDs don't expose that kind of interface. (Nor would you necessarily want them to. A faulty driver would quietly brick your hardware in a matter of minutes to hours)
by Aeglaecia | 2025-11-25 23:40:29+00:00
ok thanks , so theres 3 spots of advertisement :

1. using the company name to label an isolated incident

2. providing a link to the company research unit that directs to the main company page, forcing a second click to view the research unit

3. advertising the company's black friday sale

i have to say 1 pisses me off as it trojans an ad into an existing pattern (uniquely naming disclosures/exploits), 2 and 3 are both slimy but id probably be able to forgive the company if they only implemented one of those two points, as is this is a bit much
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-25 23:40:46+00:00
The bare python/stdlib example used (as well as bare python and avoiding add-on data science oriented libraries not being the way most people would use python for data science) is just...bad? (And, by bad here I mean showing signs of deliberately avoiding stdlib features in order to increase the appearance of the things the author then complains about.)

A better stdlib-only version would be:

from palmerpenguins import load_penguins import math from itertools import groupby from statistics import fmean, stdev penguins = load_penguins() # Convert DataFrame to list of dictionaries penguins_list = penguins.to_dict('records') # create key function for grouping/sorting by species/island def key_func(x): return x['species'], x['island'] # Filter out rows where body_mass_g is missing and sort by species and island filtered = sorted((row for row in penguins_list if not math.isnan(row['body_mass_g'])), key=key_func) # Group by species and island groups = groupby(filtered, key=key_func) # Calculate mean and standard deviation for each group results = [] for (species, island), group in groups: values = [row['body_mass_g'] for row in group] mean_value = fmean(values) sd_value = stdev(values, xbar=mean_value) results.append({ 'species': species, 'island': island, 'body_weight_mean': mean_value, 'body_weight_sd': sd_value })
by ModernMech | 2025-11-25 23:41:08+00:00
I dunno. Numpy has its own data types, its own collections, its own semantics which are all different enough from Python, I think it's fair to consider it a DSL on its own. It'd be one thing if it was just, operator overloading to provide broadcasting for python, but Numpy's whole existence is to patch the various shortcomings Python has in DS.
by rossdavidh | 2025-11-25 23:41:24+00:00
Speaking as a python programmer who has occasionally done work in R: yes, of course. Python is not a great language for anything; it's a pretty good language for just about anything. That is, and always has been, its strength.

If you're doing data science all day, you should learn R, even if it's so weird at first (for somebody coming from a C-style language) that it seems way harder; R is made for the way statisticians work and think, not the way computer programmers work and think. If you're doing data science all day, you should start thinking and working like a statistician and working in R, and the fact that it seems to bend your mind is probably at least in part good, because a statistician needs to think differently than a programmer.

I work in python, though, almost all of the time.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-25 23:41:39+00:00
It amuses me to no end that there are groups in the US that would probably consider both Terence McKenna and Michel Foucault as "far right" conservatives if they were alive and had podcasts in 2025.

Absolutely no way Timothy Leary would be considered a liberal in 2025.

Those three I think represent a pretty good mirror of the present situation.
by toraway | 2025-11-25 23:41:42+00:00
For me at least it definitely wasn't quite so abrupt, it was probably about 2.5 months before I noticed the trend line ever so slowly moving up. Pre-Zepbound I had already lost about 30 pounds from my max weight of 260ish thanks to a strict Keto diet I began at the beginning of COVID lockdowns which was a lot of effort to maintain long term, so when I saw I met the criteria for my insurance to cover Zepbound I was like "sure, why not?".

I'd probably just go back to Keto if I decided or was forced to stop a GLP-1a completely. Keto was the first and only way I've had success losing weight in my life. But once the initial novelty wears off it takes a lot of discipline to stick to and continually avoid the pressure from friends/family to eat with everyone else. I'm also vaguely concerned about cholesterol impact long term doing it for life, but relative to obesity probably still a good trade off.

It's definitely doable though, I did it for 2 years so I know the drill and that's my fallback. But not being obese is much more enjoyable than being obese, and it's a lot easier to exercise at a normal weight, so I don't have much interest in going back to 260 pounds. If that meant taking a drug for life, so be it unless it turns out to cause turbo-cancer or something.

I mostly eat "healthy" foods by preference (and habit from growing up in a "health food" family), but for me my problem is managing portion control while never feeling completely full at the target calories per meal/day. Which can feel pretty miserable to stick with especially comparing to others in my family who more or less eat the same foods but don't have that problem at all. Keto was so effective because I actually felt "full" (at the expense of excluding a lot of otherwise healthy but carb-rich foods).

Taking Zepbound definitely reshaped my perception of obesity though, compared to Keto which required constant, intense self-enforced discipline avoiding 4/5 of any menu, being on a GLP1-a and able to eat what everyone else is eating but just stop and not feel hunger pains or cravings convinced me the attitude of "fat=lacking discipline" is antiquated and ignores real variance in how different people experience hunger/satiation.
by pron | 2025-11-25 23:42:10+00:00
> My definition of intelligence is the capability to process and formalize a deterministic action from given inputs as transferable entity/medium.

I don't think that's a good definition because many deterministic processes - including those at the core of important problems, such as those pertaining to the economy - are highly non-linear and we don't necessarily think that "more intelligence" is what's needed to simulate them better. I mean, we've proven that predicting certain things (even those that require nothing but deduction) require more computational resources regardless of the algorithm used for the prediction. Formalising a process, i.e. inferring the rules from observation through induction, may also be dependent on available computational resources.

> What is your definition?

I don't have one except for "an overall quality of the mental processes humans present more than other animals".
by rlmark | 2025-11-25 23:42:41+00:00
Not a dumb question at all! Unison's type system uses Abilities (algebraic effects) for functional effect management. On a type level, that means we can prevent effects like "run arbitrary IO" on a distributed runtime. Things that run on shared infrastructure can be "sandboxed" and prevented with type safety.

The browser or mobile apps cannot execute arbitrary code on the server. Those would typically call regular Unison services in a standard API.
by UncleEntity | 2025-11-25 23:42:55+00:00
No, no... I know better than putting too much work into something before poking the core devs and seeing if it's something they'd be interested in.

If they don't want code written by a robot then what do I care? Mostly I wanted to see how well the daffy robots could work in an established code base and I chose one I was familiar with to experiment on and they were less than receptive so, their loss, I suppose...
by jfim | 2025-11-25 23:43:01+00:00
Counting letters is tricky for LLMs because they operate on tokens, not letters. From the perspective of a LLM, if you ask it "this is a sentence, count the letters in it" it doesn't see a stream of characters like we do, it sees [851, 382, 261, 21872, 11, 3605, 290, 18151, 306, 480].
by thrw888 | 2025-11-25 23:43:15+00:00
I use 43" Dell Ultrasharp, it comes with built-in kvm for switching between signal sources so I can connect both my macbook and linux laptop. There is only one tiny but very annoying problem with this setup, macbook will cause screen to restart randomly, sometimes it will make cracking noise... if this was not happening I would say it's almost perfect.
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-25 23:44:47+00:00
>You could actually wonder that one possible explanation for the human sample efficiency that needs to be considered is evolution. Evolution has given us a small amount of the most useful information possible.

It's definitely not small. Evolution performed a humongous amount of learning, with modern homo sapiens, an insanely complex molecular machine, as a result. We are able to learn quickly by leveraging this "pretrained" evolutionary knowledge/architecture. Same reason as why ICL has great sample efficiency.

Moreover, the community of humans created a mountain of knowledge as well, communicating, passing it over the generations, and iteratively compressing it. Everything that you can do beyond your very basic functions, from counting to quantum physics, is learned from the 100% synthetic data optimized for faster learning by that collective, massively parallel, process.

It's pretty obvious that artificially created models don't have synthetic datasets of the quality even remotely comparable to what we're able to use.
by blaiz2025 | 2025-11-25 23:45:04+00:00
Haven't used either of those apps myself directly, but from a few quick searches online they look to be doing the same job. It's probably a matter of settings - even when I had Qsynth and Jack running right, I had to go into Jack and align the audio streams etc and fiddle around a bit. Qsynth was a bit better, just had to get one midi device working and it was OK then.

Online is stating that PipeWire is now the default instead of PulseAudio or Jack. From my understanding they both sit on top of ALSA, the audio hardware driver.

So for things to go right you need: 1) Cynthia directed to playback through a working midi input device (she has a playback device range of 1-10, or "A" for all of them at once) 2) The midi input device is synthesised by FluidSynth which takes Cynthia's midi instructions and converts them into wave audio output 3) The wave audio output is directed to PipeWire/PulseAudio/Jack Audio 4) PipeWire/PulseAudio/Jack Audio ultimately direct it at your machine's hardware driver/handler, ALSA, which directs to your soundcard/sound chip and out to your speakers/headphones if all goes well.

I've read online that Jack is the pro option, which is why it was so complicated to do the basics, and PipeWire/PulseAudio are a little more user friendly?

If you switch Cynthia's Playback Device to "A" (bottom right of main GUI), she will play/broadcast her midi notes/instructions to all available midi input devices simultaneously, so if you have at least one midi input device producing sound, you should get something coming through to your speakers/headphones.

Unfortunately, I can't offer you much more help than this, as I'm not familiar with PipeWire/PulseAudio, and as far as I know FluidSynth was controlled behind the scenes (under the hood) by Qsynth's GUI.
by cbeach | 2025-11-25 23:45:13+00:00
The BBC is currently embroiled in an election interference scandal after it doctored a video of the President to fit the BBC's chosen political narrative.

And it turns out this was just one of a series of political interventions made by the BBC.

This comes after a string of child sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups perpetrated by senior members of the BBC.

The BBC is an alternative news source we'd do well to avoid
by jltsiren | 2025-11-25 23:46:17+00:00
In CS, types are usually a higher level of abstraction built on top of more fundamental layers. If you choose to break the abstraction, you can definitely use an integer as a string, a list, or a function. The outcome is unlikely to be useful, unless your construct was designed with such hacks in mind.

When I did a PhD in theoretical computer science, type theory felt like one niche topic among many. It was certainly of interest to some subfield, but most people didn't find it particularly relevant to the kind of TCS they were doing.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-25 23:47:13+00:00
> Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie.

Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.

And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.

https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/taiwan/kaohsiung/kaohsiung

https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta

AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
by superkuh | 2025-11-25 23:47:24+00:00
You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to.

! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 3 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3 !important;) ! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section to maintain clean 3x3 grid youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:style(display:none !important;)

But also, yikes.
by inesranzo | 2025-11-25 23:48:38+00:00
> I would also very much like it if Orion was open source, it would make me feel a lot better committing to and recommending a browser if I had actual assurances it's behaving appropriately, beyond a company saying "trust me", no matter how nice/cool they seem at the time.

Kagi isn't 100% open source but you still use it and recommend it?

How do you know they aren't spying on the backend?
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-25 23:48:46+00:00
You have a point, it's about the priorities, and different choices or distributions can be made. Though, I still think knowing just a small amount of information about a person should not have such a high monetary value and banking has a lot of blame on this.

It's also about the number of applications being made across the campus, so I don't know how much a handful of people can review or improve things. Every department and school has multiple applications written by students or enthusiastic faculty members, or purchased from various vendors.

Seeing an environment like this, one could quickly assume, somehow correctly, they're just hired to be the neck to hang, and not make much changes.
by belter | 2025-11-25 23:48:47+00:00
A little piece of history...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas

"...Use of Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority..."

"...In an interview with Israeli journalist, Dan Margalit in December 2012, Netanyahu told Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu also added that having two strong rivals, this would lessen pressure on him to negotiate towards a Palestinian state..."
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-25 23:49:09+00:00
> Numpy has mean and variance functions built in for arrays.

Even outside of Numpy, the stdlib has the statistics packages which provides mean, variance, population/sample standard deviation, and other statistics functions for normal iterables. The attempt to make Python out-of-the-box code look bad was either deliberately constructed to exaggerate the problems complained of, or was the product of a very convenient ignorance of the applicable parts of Python and its stdlib.
by causalzap | 2025-11-25 23:49:17+00:00
I made a website that collects strategies, guides, and gameplay resources for the mobile game X-Clash. It includes hero information, puzzle solutions, combat tips, and other resources that players usually have to search across multiple platforms.

I’m sharing it here to get feedback on the site's structure, usability, content organization, and what additional tools or features might be helpful for players.

Any suggestions from the HN community are welcome.