skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea I think it’s a very Christian thing actually, visiting the sick is one of the works of mercy and all Christians are called to perform them regularly.

I’m a Catholic and admittingly I fall short of it, perhaps I should take a page from our Lutheran brothers.. Thanks for sharing!
I think for the purpose of this topic, we only care about the nutrition (to use your word) question. We can assume humans can intelligently bootstrap past the other abiogenesis problems.

And surely this shouldn't be a difficult question to answer, right? Put an autotroph (the simplest that we know of) in a test tube and give it a ever-stricter diet and observe how far you can go without it dying off.
> Linkedin is by far the most respectable social platform.

huh, that is … definitely not my experience of LinkedIn. My experience of LinkedIn is that it is a wasteland of hustle grindcore fake-it-till-you-make-it dipshittery.
Thank you for the kind words! A project should never be about me, personally, anyhow -- it's always joint decisions between the team and the communities actually using the software. Please email me at jatwood@codinghorror.com if you'd like to review a draft of an upcoming blog post I'm planning to make that relates to Discourse, but is far wider in scope.
Your feeling is confirmed by real-world results. Google has consistently improved the quality of its models, and we've seen BIG jumps in the output of AI results.

That's positive, but the tradeoff is that Google is now focusing mainly on AI search (RAG) instead of traditional search results.

One of the main problems of RAG, in my opinion? The system focuses on a few trusted sources and generates content based on the retrieved data.

Where are the small publishers? Almost inexistant. But going back to your Stackoverflow example, there are other issues, such as giving too much weight to old/outdated answers. I don't know if that's also something you noticed?
The concept has been around for a while in many countries:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_runway

About two dozen were made in Sweden:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_60#List_of_Bas_60_road_run...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_90#Kortbanor_—_Short_runwa...
As a follow up, it's being communicated that we knew about these drones for 6 years. Not sure I buy it. They have been showing up in multiple states, not just the army post that had the TFR. Or it's mass hysteria.
I hadn't heard of this one; great article and website, cheers :)
o1-preview is far superior to doctors on reasoning tasks
Per second. Messages in the Kafka sense not the WhatsApp sense.
> I have to admit I hate the AI results that are now generated at the top of a search query.

Google Opinion Rewards keeps asking me to rate those AI summaries and I always tell it they suck, and get a dollar for my trouble. I'm doing my part!
Your mental model of startups is a lottery?

Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”.

Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.
>Postgres / MSSQL / all RDBMS is slow because of network I/O.

I assume in situations where you're choosing between Postgres and sqlite, everything is running on a single machine anyways.
I think this article misses the point. The issue with exercise isn't that exertion feels bad. The issue is opportunity cost. All the more interesting things you could have done with that time.
> What is vector based 2D graphics if not a direct application of geometry? Were we not using well known maths results when 2D graphics was first implemented on a computer?

We were, but in high school, they aren't teaching you computer graphics, they're teaching you how to apply weirdly specific rules to transform some scribbles into more scribbles, for no good reason - hence the common student question, "what will I ever need that for?".

FWIW, I actually got into gamedev as a hobby as a kid, and it saved my life prospects, because it gave me a reason to be interested in trigonometry and algebra - all those random scribble transformation rules were directly applicable to problems relevant to me, such as "how do I rotate the bitmaps that are spaceships and rockets and turrets?", and such.
Internet subbscribers routinely produce and publish content to be consumed by other subscribers without payment. (Middlemen calling themselves "tech" companies have created websites to exploit this phenomenon.)

For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment.

Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.
Have you tried Brave Search? I actually find its AI summary valuable at times.
I used the expression "toxic positivity" in my article because LI is, by default, a wasteland of FAKE content.

But, and that's a BIG BUT, your feed completely changes if you train the algorithms for a while!

I tested with multiple accounts, and while the default feed looks like a parody, the main account rarely displays those pathetic posts.
Discussion (48 points, 10 hours ago, 43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42442107
great to see how you guys worked with the community on discord over the last year to build Langfuse
That's literally how it works everywhere else...? For example, when I go to amazon.jp, even without logging in, it will show you tax included prices once you enter your postal code.
Sales of nuclear bunkers increase, despite warnings they aren't protection
I've had success with LLMs producing mermaid.js or three.js output but that is a different use case.
Progressive income tax is also silly. Just because you earn more money than someone else doesn't mean you derive more benefits from the government.

The idea of "Paying what you can afford" is BS everywhere it's been implemented - from school tuition to soccer camp to taxes. Everyone feels burned and like the "others" aren't paying what they should be.

Federal taxes should be a flat percentage, no deductions, no credits, no so-called "loop holes"... nothing. Every citizen pays the same percentage (whatever it needs to be).

The incumbent tax apparatus would never allow us to have something so simple, though.

For a nation that got it's start in no small part due to being over-taxed, it's very interesting to see just how much tax shenanigans we tolerate today.
Not all would, but most worthwhile clients support end to end encryption, or some form of authentication which is time consuming to circumvent, meaning it becomes quite difficult to efficiently spoof random identities.
I'm pretty sure the pyramids were powered by nuclear fusion, something we should master in the coming 100 years! :D

/S
Show HN: Instagram Unfollow/Follow-Back Checker without any up/download zips
I have been searching for a reliable Instagram unfollow tool, only to find ones that require you to repeatedly upload and download your IG data, or even hand over your password to a third-party app? These are common frustrations many users face.
Introducing www.whounfollowyou.com – a simple, secure, and policy-compliant Instagram unfollow/follow-back checker. Unlike other tools, it doesn’t ask you to upload ZIP files, share cookies, or provide your password.

Now offering a completely free trial with no login or credit card required. Give it a try today
How often has it confidently told you the wrong answer?
I've found it pretty useful. I switched from DDG to Google a few years ago because the knowledge graph results were noticeably better. We only just got AI results here in Australia about a month ago, and so far I've just found even more answers have a correct top result where I don't need to go digging.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything related to search. I use plenty of non-Google stuff in my personal life so while I am biased, I have every chance to not use their search.
Fair, I guess it's a cultural thing then. I absolutely have no idea what other municipality's taxes are the second I get out of mine. I wouldn't want to randomly predict whether it's 10, 12, or 15%.
Can a Personal Semantic Web Spark a Global Revolution?
The Semantic Web has struggled to gain traction, but what if its foundation started small—on personal servers? A recent post explores the idea of using an RDF-like system to create a personal semantic web, enabling individuals to structure and link their own data. This approach could provide the foundation for an eventual decentralized, world-wide semantic web.

Could personal servers be the key to realizing the Semantic Web's potential? How might this shift the balance of power in a centralized internet? Curious to hear the HN community's thoughts on this concept
Thank you for making the internet a better place :D

Jokes aside, are the AI summaries always bad in your experience?
I agreed that it costs more and read the study you linked. You are having a hard time accepting that some people might have a different opinion than you and are taking it like they are being obstinate. Sorry it costs more, but I don't think we need to be uniformly opposed to a viable option due to cost.
Real example of a crap AI response from the other day…

“What is the axle to crown measurement for a Fox StepCast 34 120mm fork?”

Answer: “120mm” plus a few garbage sentences about fork travel. Which is absolutely not the same as a fork’s axle to crown measurement.

The real answer is readily available online. I just wanted a direct link to a site with the data.
It definitely has, but I usually have enough context to know when this has happened.
Google's new "AI overview" takes up about half of the screen on a phone and cannot be disabled. This is one of the most user-hostile choices they've ever made.
Difficulty in finding good niche resources is not a new problem. Search enables it, but of course it still requires significant effort to actually surface deeper information.
It's technically and superficially breathtaking, but on closer inspection, it's a mishmash of styles across like 500 years.

- gold everywhere is excessive - more Rococo (1730s-1760s) than Renaissance (1300-1600 roughly), which was a lot more restrained

- mirror way too big and clear. Renaissance mirrors were small polished metal or darker imperfect glass

- candelabras too ornate and numerous for Renaissance. Multi tier candleholders are more Baroque (1600-1750), and candles look suspiciously perfect, as opposed to period-appropriate uneven tallow or beeswax

- white paper too pristine (parchment or vellum would be expected), pen holders hilariously modern, gold-plated(??) desk surface is absurd

- woman's clothing looks too recent (Victorian?); sleeves and hair are theatrical

- hard to tell, but background dudes are lurking in what look like theatrical costumes rather than anything historically accurate
Your analysis seems really handwavey. Of course, rent seeking is not considered particularly valuable. But some amount is inevitable. You haven't been very specific about the rule change that you think would reduce rent seeking, or why you believe it would be helpful.
> Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems.

Yes but I feel this is largely resolved with his desire to remove police powers. If police, or at least the majority of, have no powers to abuse, then the potential for abuse is significantly lower.

>But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure.

You miss

>And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day.

The issue isnt with the goal, like you suggest people want these crimes solved. I dont want to pretend laws on the book exactly match community expectations but that is the idea. The issue is that the scheme as described doesnt just require the high manpower option but incentivises it.

His whole shtick is that you lose the intangibles. The parts of policing that cannot be measured. The crimes that are deterred by that beat cop not spending 4 hours after every interaction writing paperwork that needs to be analysed and reviewed by other people.

You take that guy off the street, and then a new crime occurs, another cop has to be dispatched, he needs to follow those leads, file more paperwork etc etc ad nauseum.

Its like, taking vaccines off the shelf because you need statistics about diseases.

Heck your own analogy "doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together" is much like the authors assertion that cops preventing more crime just by being a visible presence than all their other work put together.
> In other words, the datasets would have to contain multiple occurrences of the various very unlikely words you wrote for the model to be decent natural language understanding

That is a common misunderstanding. LLMs are not Markov chains, and don't need their training dataset to contain multiple (or any!) occurrences of any particular words to be able to understand what is being said in a sentence.

Using the example sentence from the GP, this is what o1-mini replied:

> No, inserting two gherkins into your nostrils will not enable you to fly. [...] Flying requires overcoming the force of gravity, which cannot be achieved through such means.

I tried a few times and got broadly similar negative answers. This ability to generalize beyond the exact contents of their training datasets is what allows other AIs to e.g. produce images of astronauts on the moon riding horses -- they know what astronauts look like, they know what horses and people riding them look like, and they combine the two to make impossible images like that.
Yeah, I've given up on expecting to know what people will understand "next Wednesday" to mean. I either say "this coming Wednesday" or "next week on Wednesday". Problems solved.

Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."

If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."
> It was shown how easy it is to create a XOR texture, which makes the XOR texture useful to test if a texture renderer is working.

> However, it's not suitable for applications such as art or games.

uhhh why not suitable for art? I'm digging into it right now and made some trippy stuff!

https://xor-pattern.netlify.app/
I'm mostly using yandex.com now. It's pretty much what google used to be.
Brick and mortar stores know exactly how much tax they have to pay, yet they don't show an all-inclusive price. It's clearly not a case of online retailers just not showing the tax because it's difficult. If they wanted to they could let you give your post code before checking out, and query the same database to show the post-tax price for everything.
The pain of job searching varies. The more competent you are, the more opportunities fall out of sky (recruiters and personal network). The more underpaid you are, the better those opportunities look.

If it's hard to find a job, then, well, yeah, you should expect a mediocre and stagnant salary.
The problem with click-to-cancel is that there should be confirmations built into important cancellations.

But require it to be practical to do online, with no delays and no requirement about when relative to renewals.
Ask HN: Lightweight, low-level image loading usable from Python?
I'm looking for a bare-bones image loading and saving library for Python on Linux. Of course I'm aware of the standard options (PIL is possibly the smallest but it's still quite large), but I'm looking to prioritize something that is fast, simple and lightweight at the expense of anything else. I don't want to depend on NumPy and I don't want explicit functionality for manipulating the data in any way - I ideally just want a(n ideally mutable) byte buffer with the bitmap data and a `dict` with metadata such as the pixel format and dimensions (the bitmap itself could also be under a key, whatever).

The best candidate I could find on my own is https://pypi.org/project/smc.freeimage/ (by someone who's now a Python core developer), but it seems to have been abandoned 12 years ago at the 0.x stage (and while there's a source tarball, the BitBucket repo seems to have vanished).

Anyone know of alternatives? Is there a fork of PIL that cuts it down to just the Image module, for example?
I switched back to google from DDG because I like the AI summaries for a lot of my searches. If your queries relate to physics and programming I find the AI summaries are quite useful.
That is why I think the solution would be to use Lisp, and to have the students develop a custom language during the course which would then be used for assignments.
Very cool. Both his story and that of his master.
The section near the start about the alleged shadow ban on the author's Youtube video poking fun at Google I wasn't really convinced about and imo detracts from the rest of the article which focuses on user criticisms.

The author started a new channel exclusively for a single video after prompting from some users on LinkedIn but paints the plateauing of views as a shadow ban rather than just perhaps only the moderate follow-through from LinkedIn, lack of existing subscriber numbers to bolster spread, own promotion, etc. This is isn't something unique to that video, it occurs for any number of benign videos.
What a beautiful photo! You have a good eye.

I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.

The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.

Moon over Menlo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/24118398766/

Moon, Mars, Venus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/16598905865/
A series of web searches found one of the driver boards often used in LED tail lights: the Valeo b003809. Some images of it show an identifiable TLE4242 linear driver IC.

I was starting to suspect that would be the case after reading the explanation about slow PWM and a short duty cycle resulting in greater perceived brightness from cheap LEDs that aren't rated for much power. Direct drive from the car's electrical system wouldn't result in the constant brightness seen in LED tail lights because the voltage is lower at idle, so there has to be some kind of regulation.

There would be little reason to use a more efficient, more expensive switched-mode power supply, though an aftermarket replacement for the Valeo board does use one. Even an inefficient LED design will be far more efficient than an incandescent bulb, and the power requirement of any taillight is trivial relative to a modern car's electrical system. Linear makes the most sense for the application.

Linear regulators aren't rare in LED flashlights nor is direct drive with PWM on a FET for low modes. Neither is good in flashlights, but that only matters to the manufacturer if their customers know the difference. Most customers don't; lights marketed to discerning customers use a switched-mode power supply.
If you're interested in that sort of thing, come hang out with ArchiveTeam:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
Can't wait to get locked in a waymo in a bad part of town.
Ascending Mount FujiNet
Discord is electron/web based. And tbh it shows that asking for native just for the sake of being native is weird. Discord has a better UX than most native clients.
I thought I covered this in the article.

You are right: their search empire is based on ads.

To be precise, of 237.9 billion Alphabet generated in ad revenue in 2023, $175.0 billion, or 73.6%, came from Google Search (!).

It may appear counterintuitive, but the entire Alphabet/Google business model is based on the quality of organic results.

Why would companies buy ads to outrank terrible organic/free results? It does not make sense!

I understand what you mean: it seems logical to "push" users to click on ads, but this type of business model wouldn't last long.

I'm ready to change my mind if you can give me logical reasons.
Also worth a mention is their “how to cook the perfect…” series. While I don’t always agree with the conclusions drawn (taste being subjective, after all), I can usually divine a reasonable starting place for my own perfect version based on the research.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/how-to-cook-the-perf...
You can add `&udm=14` to the URL to disable AI and get regular text results, or use https://udm14.com/ to keep things easy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40450267
Oh, no if someone asks me to come I undertsand that it's important for them. So, I'd go to support my friend, but I'd keep feeling like I'm wasting my time. Just as if a friend asked my be go to their Mormon baptism.
I find this article pretty confusing. It ends with "dear Google, I know you will but please don’t steal my stuff", but the author/blog is literally called "SEM (Search Engine Marketing) King". Surely the point of SEM is to have search engines scrape, summarise, and link to your content?

Additionally, it covers ChatGPT Search as an alternative, but is criticising Google search as "the search engine that's forgotten how to search". Like, do you want traditional search or do you want AI search, pick one?

I get the frustration with web search. So much of the web is copy-pasted/generated rubbish that no search engine is giving the results we used to get 10 years ago. But personally (and I am biased), I'm still getting better results from Google than from DDG, and since getting access to AI overviews in Australia a month ago or so I'm getting fairly consistent good answers with that.
I just did that exact search, it provided the real answer. It's obviously improved since you searched for it.

Although I would definitely agree that rolling out AI search results has been premature. Positive is that you can scroll past them.

Same goes for the AI Google assistant. The "old" Google assistant can do more and is better.
Not any more. SLS drops them in the ocean.
This is exactly right. I've stopped publishing to my blog because I know my words will be slurped up and sausaged out into ChatGPT or Gemini. And, without people writing about technical subjects, or talking about current events, or other thoughtful discourse, Google has no future in Search nor ads.

In the future, maybe OpenAI or Google or Perplexity will pay for people to write about interesting subjects because doing it for free online is no longer rewarding.
I certainly didn't mean literally the gherkin example. It was a fictitious example of the kind of question which has had surprising results. If you have high confidence this either cannot happen, or hasn't happened to you then for your question forms this is good. I am concerned that having seen it, even if I now cannot recreate it, the risk exists.