MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mncharity | 2026-02-11 23:50:52+00:00
Sigh. One impact of AI will hopefully be more readily available systemic survey papers. [1] might-or-not be a good place to start... but it's paywalled (by the National Science Teacher Association no less), and I don't quickly see preprints/scihub/etc. Here's an old unordered list for browsing[2], and a more recent one[3]. Trumper did a series of papers asking the same few questions of various populations, to give a feel for numbers - like half not knowing day-night cause. Most lists are on subsets of astronomy, and most info on frequency on short lists. So... it's a mess. As are textbook reviews. Key phrases are "astronomy education research" and "misconceptions".

The one bit I explored was 'what color is the Sun (the ball)'. Asking first-tier astronomy graduate students became a hobby, as most get it wrong (except... for those who had taken a graduate seminar covering common misconceptions in astronomy education). So I libgen'ed the 10-ish most used intro astronomy textbooks in US according to some list. IIRC, it broke down roughly into thirds of: correct (white); didn't explicitly say but given surrounding photos, or "yellow" (as classification without clarification), there's no way students won't be misled; and explicitly incorrect (yellow). Hmm, bulk evaluation of textbooks against some criteria is another thing multi-modal models could help with.

[1] https://www.per-central.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=14009
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070209033543/http://www.physic...
[3] appendix A of https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/2200/
[4] https://www.oranim.ac.il/sites/heb/SiteCollectionImages/pers...
by efreak | 2026-02-11 23:51:06+00:00
This perfectly describes my former experience with Reddit: I used to browse quite frequently without being logged in. If I wanted to post a reply badly enough to bother with logging in, I would then start commenting on other parts as well; the next day I'd likely be logged out again and not be willing to bother with signing in again for a few more months. Though this did change when the I started using mobile apps more.
by lap5j | 2026-02-11 23:51:12+00:00
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by adriand | 2026-02-11 23:51:42+00:00
I’m witnessing him respond in real time with not just feedback but also actual changes, in a respectful and constructive manner - which is not easy to do, when there are people who communicate in this rude of a manner. If that’s not listening, then I don’t know what is.

And it shouldn’t need to be said, but the words that appear on the screen are from an actual person with, you know, feelings.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-02-11 23:51:43+00:00
I don't see much of a point in replying with this comment. It reads like your point is "I don't understand your perspective so it must be wrong", which is folly.

If you're looking for a suggestion of how to gain such an understanding, I've certainly got one of those: put more effort into arguing in favor of perspectives you disagree with. Not only will it help you to understand the disagreeable point of view, it will additionally help you to strengthen your beliefs.

I appreciate the added context nonetheless.
by cherryteastain | 2026-02-11 23:52:33+00:00
I took the "for inference" bit from that sentence you quoted as a qualifier applied to the chips, as in the chips were originally developed for inference but were now used for training too.

Note that Z.ai also publically announced that they trained another model, GLM-Image, entirely on Huawei Ascend silicon a month ago [1].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3339869/zhipu-ai-...
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-11 23:52:38+00:00
I've been curious about Oxide for a year or two without fully understanding their product. People talking about the "hyperconverged" market in this thread gave me an understanding for the first time.

Given this, can you help me understand in what ways they are different?

When I went to the Nutanix website yesterday, the link showed that'd I'd previously visited them (not a surprise, I look up lots of things I see mentioned in discussions) but their website does an extremely poor job of explaining their business to someone who lacks foundational understanding, even once I'd started reading about "hyperconverged" just before.
by some_furry | 2026-02-11 23:52:49+00:00
The part that was "alarmingly cavalier" was when you admitted to knowing about these problems for years and not fixing them or telling the ecosystem of competing clients about them so they could mitigate their risk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249371

You deprecated Olm after my disclosures went public. When I last checked, only Element and its forks actually use vodozemac, so the rest of the ecosystem which still binds libolm was still vulnerable, and probably still is today.

That's alarmingly cavalier.
by mikepavone | 2026-02-11 23:53:18+00:00
As someone with a self-hosted Mercurial instance dealing with this, I will say that the big names (OpenAI included, but not exclusively them) generally at least use proper user-agents and respect robots.txt, but they are still needlessly aggressive compared to traditional search indexers.

There are also scrapers that are hiding behind normal browser user agents. When I looked at IP ranges, at least some of them seemed to be coming from data centers in China.
by cco | 2026-02-11 23:54:22+00:00
Hmm, does this change our understanding of the route Hannibal took?

I've always seen pictures like the one on this Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_crossing_of_the_A...) where his army landed in Cartagena and then marched East.

But this article mentions the bone was found in Cordoba which is West by a few hundred miles and pretty far inland.
by dkarl | 2026-02-11 23:54:24+00:00
I've worked with some really good product managers, as well as some total duds. They all talked to customers on a regular basis. There is so much more to the job than that. Every time I think I understand a product manager's job completely, I see one fail in a way I hadn't thought about.

For example, I had one product manager who made themselves irrelevant because they wouldn't work with sales. The company needed to sell the product to pay us, and sales talked with potential buyers about what might swing their purchase decision and what they would pay extra for. Since the PM only talked to users and ignored sales when doing product design and product roadmaps, the way sales input got integrated into product development is that we frequently got top-down directives from management to prioritize one-off requests from sales over the roadmap. Needless to say, this didn't lead to a cohesive and easy-to-understand product.

Before I saw that PM failing, I hadn't thought about the relationship between product and sales.
by bartblast | 2026-02-11 23:54:59+00:00
Creator here. Hologram compiles Elixir to JavaScript to run in the browser, enabling full-stack development in pure Elixir - and soon, Local-First applications.

This release is a milestone for our porting initiative. 49 contributors ported 150 Erlang functions across 19 modules, pushing client-side Erlang runtime coverage from 34% to 96% and overall Elixir standard library readiness from 74% to 87%.

This means the vast majority of Elixir standard library functions needed for full-stack web and basic local-first apps now work in the browser - string processing, collections, sets, binary operations, Unicode normalization, math, time operations, file path handling, and more.

Beyond porting, the release includes enhancements, bug fixes, and infrastructure groundwork.

Happy to answer any questions!
by snohobro | 2026-02-11 23:55:57+00:00
I suppose in many ways this is a deeper philosophical discussion. Your observations are correct, and as others posted, a healthy community is an ever changing one. Effectively it becomes the Community of Theseus. All its parts, the people, the technology, the geographic aspects can and maybe have changed. Is it still the same community and can it be referred to as such?

I think the authors point about history is a key element of this. If I can track how the community has evolved and changed, I can still identify that community in its current form as the sum of all its changes.

I’m not sure that holds true if an outside entity tries to dismantle and rebuild the existing community without the context of the history.
by consumer451 | 2026-02-11 23:56:10+00:00
This is an interesting and complex ui decision to make.

Might it have been better to retire and/or rename the feature?

I work on silly basic stuff compared to Claude Code, but I find that I confuse fewer users if I rename a button instead of just changing the underlying effect.

This causes me to have to create new docs, and hopefully triggers affected users to find those docs, when they ask themselves “what happened to that button?”
by tialaramex | 2026-02-11 23:57:43+00:00
Sure, it's a marginal price. It is surprising to me that HN struggles to understand marginal pricing, it makes me more likely to assume when I see such people unhappy with taxation that they probably also don't understand marginal taxation.

Marginal differences have a cliff effect, which is one of the things US Republicans are worried about in the event Trump isn't able to subvert or abolish entirely this year's elections. If you've gerrymandered every seat so that you'll win by 3-5% and then your support collapses 10% across the board then you lose all those seats, not 10% of them. Ouch.

For that 1% in reality it's probably not quite the case, my understanding is that most of the gas plants pay a significant price in terms of efficiency loss and wear on the turbine, for restarts, so e.g. make 10MW for an hour, switch off for an hour, then make 10MW for an hour is 20MWh produced, but incurred a stop-start. The 20MWh might equate to £1000 of gas burned, but the stop-start has an effective price of £500. So you need to charge £75 per MWh to break even. Or, you could sell for £60 per MWh, deliver 10MWh for all three hours, 30MWh, £1500 of gas burned, no stop-start overhead, your overall costs were the same but you got more profit because 30 x £60 = £1800 instead of 20 x £75 = £1500.
by gassi | 2026-02-11 23:57:58+00:00
> In a world where we can type anything into a text box and get the information back instantly we are circumventing the need to visit websites altogether.

This is purely anecdotal, but the only people in my extended circle making this transition (to any extent) are the technically savvy; everyone else is slowly realizing how awful AI tools and "AI-first experiences" can be and are actively trying to avoid them.
by OldRonin | 2026-02-11 23:58:16+00:00
The field C is a tool, just as with any other abstraction in math. Accountants don't need it, so ignore it. In abstract algebra they arise - and so do many other abstractions, such as quaternions. Quaternions can be regarded as a further development of the concept of number. Note that every such development gives up some property its predecessors had. In the case of quaternions, commutativity. If a field of application finds a mathematical invention useful, it gets used. Often, too, it's a matter of simplicity. Use mathematical invention X in applied field Y and it simplifies the work. Abstain from using invention X, and then the work could still be done in a less simple way. That's all there is to it.
by rchaud | 2026-02-11 23:58:22+00:00
- Pro-business think tanks to write "policy reports" with a predetermined outcome

- PR firms that can get their policy mouthpieces on cable TV news

- Police unions to get their endorsement (a favorite of "law and order" candidates)

- TV and radio ads for preferred candidates

- Online influencers and podcasters

- Telemarketing campaigns

- and of course, "campaign contributions"
by atombender | 2026-02-11 23:58:33+00:00
Echopraxia is great. I never understood those who thought it was disappointing. Blindsight is wonderful, but Echopraxia is possibly the more inventive one. It certainly pulls the narrative in a different direction.

I also really, really recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It's about the crew on an starship trying to stop the rogue (sort of) AI that runs everything, the twist being that the crew is constantly under surveillance and must periodically hibernate in shifts for months or years at a time. It's a novella plus a handful of short stories set before and after the novel (all available for free on Peter Watts' website). Be warned, it's one bleak, dark universe.

Also, don't miss out on "The Colonel" (also on his website), a standalone short story that also happens to be a direct sequel to Blindsight.
by ayewo | 2026-02-11 23:59:54+00:00
> While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me.

TIL that there's an especially apt xkcd comic for this scenario: "Zealous Autoconfig"

https://xkcd.com/416/
by abustamam | 2026-02-12 00:00:41+00:00
I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever.

Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it! Share your sadness with others. But don't be surprised when people who are experiencing the same thing are not sad and share their experiences.

If you want to join an AI/anti-AI echo chamber, there's plenty of places on the Internet that will gladly agree with your opinion and you can have shared joy or sadness. HN isn't that place, nor do I ever want it to become an echo-chamber.
by dark-star | 2026-02-12 00:01:42+00:00
I think you massively overestimate how many people actually care.

My guess is that 95% or more of all Discord users do not care and simply upload their selfie or ID card and be done with it. I know I will (although they did say that they expect 80%+ to not require verification since they can somehow infer their age from other parameters)
by xanderlewis | 2026-02-12 00:01:59+00:00
Opposing view (that I happen to hold, at least if I had to choose one side or the other): not only is mathematics 'reality'; it is arguably the only thing that has a reasonable claim to being 'reality' itself.

After all, facts (whatever that means) about the physical world can only be obtained by proxy (through measurement), whereas mathematical facts are just... evident. They're nakedly apparent. Nothing is being modelled. What you call the 'model' is the object of study itself.

A denial of the 'reality' of pure mathematics would imply the claim that an alien civilisation given enough time would not discover the same facts or would even discover different – perhaps contradictory – facts. This seems implausible, excluding very technical foundational issues. And even then it's hard to believe.

> To the best of our knowledge, such cases are basically coincidence.

This couldn't be further from the truth. It's not coincidence at all. The reason that mathematics inevitably ends up being 'useful' (whatever that means; it heavily depends on who you ask!) is because it's very much real. It might be somewhat 'theoretical', but that doesn't mean it's made up. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that an understanding of the most basic principles of reality turns out to be somewhat useful.
by westurner | 2026-02-12 00:02:06+00:00
Electronic waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269481 :

> From "Turning waste into gold" (2024) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240229124612.h... :

>> Researchers have recovered gold from electronic waste. Their highly sustainable new method is based on a protein fibril sponge, which the scientists derive from whey

/? e-waste: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"“Toasterlike” Process Recovers Rare Earths From E-waste: Flash joule heating can recover important magnet metals" (2026) FJH
https://spectrum.ieee.org/rare-earth-minerals-recycling-ewas...

Hydrogen plasma and hydrogen cold plasma can recycle plastic with less energy than FJH, FWIU.

I have some notes on a semiconductor fabrication process with just sustainable inputs: Ethyl Lactate,
Lignin-Vitrimer, Nitrogen, CO2, Laser-induced Graphene, A-CNT, PCLP Photo-cleavable Lignin Polymer, Hexyl Cellulose

But A-CNT need to be encased in something to prevent health hazard if they burn. Phytic acid from e.g. Bran seed is high in phosphorous which might prevent health risks of CNT.
by scoofy | 2026-02-12 00:03:03+00:00
> but allowing climate action to become a political issue

What the hell are you talking about? What?!? This entire issue was a solved problem with a simple carbon tax (which is a conservative leaning policy) and then one party decided their strategy was going to be deny, then delay, then pose it as a fait accompli.

I was pretty damn conservative on a lot of issues when I started college... as it became more and more clear to me -- from taking earth science classes -- that climate change was very obviously happening and that we've known about it since the 1960s and that no serious person trying to suggest that it's not being made worse by human activity, that's when I started to thing that the Republicans were not going to take this issue seriously, ever.

Any centrist or conservative person who takes the issues seriously has no idea what to do because on party just decided to just say "lol, who cares." How in the hell is that environmental movement's fault!?! You look at the UK and environmentalism is not a partisan issue. Here, we have idiots holding snowballs in congress trying to score cheap political points.
by phkahler | 2026-02-12 00:03:10+00:00
I dont understand this line of reasoning at all. The holocene looks like the most recent in a cycle of short warming periods that has been going on for over 1M years. There is little reason to think its stable. One could argue that we should push warming to prevent the coming glaciation. I rather suspect that would hasten it instead, but the runaway hot house thing is not supported by the historic record. Perhaps the collapse of the AMOC is what tips it. Either way, saying its the most whatever in 125K years is irrelevant since we should be aiming for conditions from before the ice age. If you frame it in the longer history briefly mentioned in the article it looks quite different.
by _carbyau_ | 2026-02-12 00:03:23+00:00
If they haven't recorded it in some way then it doesn't matter. And if they have, then it's what a human historian could do too.

Can you recall well what you did ten years ago to the day?
How much is a vampire is going to accurately recall from a hundred years ago?

At best, the vampire has bragging rights like "I hung out with Gandhi."

We'd need some evidence the vampire has super-recall AND is somehow trustworthy enough to not change the story depending on motivations of the day.
by 0x4e | 2026-02-12 00:04:46+00:00
I agree. It’s still being figured out.

My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.

I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued.

My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
by mrob | 2026-02-12 00:04:46+00:00
The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.
by cassepipe | 2026-02-12 00:05:06+00:00
No what's crazy is that something as apolitical as "many scientists specialized in climate have come to the conclusion" was successfully turned into something political thanks to a now well proven denialist playbook. We really need to stop both-siding that kind of thing. One side just said "We should do something about it to save us all" and the other side tried to come up with anything that could make them look evil but in the end what worked was bypassing reason entirely with this new thing called identity politics.

Elon Musk is a half-closeted white supremacist, he was always going to side with Trump. I don't mean that as an insult, this is just what I could gather from his tweets, preoccupations and "roman" salutes.

> If we had created a broad-based constituency for climate action, say, working with industry to build nuclear power or supporting natural gas to displace coal or even funding more conservative think tanks, then we'd be in better shape.

Or those conservatives could have come up with their own version of tackling the issue: nuclear and gas displacing coal. Some of them did I believe, it's just not the version who won in the end. It seems strange to blame the other side for their own "aesthetic" preferences (i.e renewables)

I really don't mean to start a flamewar but your comment gives me the vibe of "I became a nazi because my daughter wanted me to sort my trash" meme or something of the genre where there is no accountability and you are always just reacting to the wrongs of the other side.
by erwald | 2026-02-12 00:06:32+00:00
Thanks. I'm like 95% sure that you're wrong, and that GLM-5 was trained on NVIDIA GPUs, or at least not on Huawei Ascends.

As I wrote in another comment, I think so for a few reasons:

1. The z.ai blog post says GML-5 is compatible with Ascends for inference, without mentioning training -- it says they support "deploying GLM-5 on non-NVIDIA chips, including Huawei Ascend, Moore Threads, Cambricon, Kunlun Chip, MetaX, Enflame, and Hygon" -- many different domestic chips. Note "deploying". https://z.ai/blog/glm-5

2. The SCMP piece you linked just says: "Huawei’s Ascend chips have proven effective at training smaller models like Zhipu’s GLM-Image, but their efficacy for training the company’s flagship series of large language models, such as the next-generation GLM-5, was still to be determined, according to a person familiar with the matter."

3. You're right that z.ai trained a small image model on Ascends. They made a big fuss about it too. If they had trained GLM-5 with Ascends, they likely would've shouted it from the rooftops. https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawe...

4. Ascends just aren't that good