skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, in the US the median pre-tax household income is $80k and the median renter spends <35% of their income on rent.

Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average family earns, in one of the richest countries in the world and living in a one-bedroom apartment - and such a low standard of living isn't even cheap.

The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!
My library has an incredible selection of ebooks I can send straight to my Kindle. The process is less hassle than pirating, too. I get 90% or more of what I read on my Kindle from my library. The only books I buy are from a couple series I adore and always go back to and reference books. Those are few and far between.
Learning happens in environments optimized for understanding, not winning
Unironically, the Lumen Database [0].

[0] https://lumendatabase.org/
https://www.benzworld.org/threads/700-battery-change.1494104...
In Italy even saying "stop genocide" without further elaboration on state tv is enough to get the Israelian ambassador to call the prime minister.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2024/02/14/travaglio-a-la7-...
Why scaling LLMs might work
The theory of evolution is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, helping us understand the past, present, and future. Although evolution typically operates over tens of thousands of years, for the first time, evolutionary thinking might offer insights into what could happen in the coming decades. But before diving into this idea, let’s recall one of the key ingredients necessary for evolution to occur:

Incremental changes with selective advantage

An eye does not evolve in a single generation, nor does a wing appear overnight. Every adaptation requires a series of small, cumulative changes, where each step provides a competitive advantage over the previous one.

You may already see where this is going. If we see the human brain through an evolutionary lens, we can agree that the journey from a single neuron to the complexity of a human brain involved countless small, incremental improvements. Each step built upon the last, offering some advantage over previous generations.

Here’s the first hint, if we allow ourselves to consider the cortical column as a fundamental unit, we can observe how nature scaled up the size of the network by increasing cortical folding over time.

For the second hint, evolution also suggests that larger models require more data for training. For example, in cognitive development, larger brains tend to require longer periods of learning and adaptation. A human baby, for instance, takes months to walk, whereas some species are capable of moving independently almost immediately after birth.

And the final hint come from selective pressure. While biological evolution is driven by survival pressures, the evolution of AI is shaped by economic forces. The selective advantage here isn’t survival in a natural environment but rather market viability. Models that perform better receive more funding, compute, and training, while less effective ones are abandoned. In this sense, LLMs are evolving under artificial selection, where money acts as the primary selective pressure.

So, to conclude, it is possible that in the next couple decades we might just need bigger models, more data and probably a couple tricks to go beyond human intelligence. Of course, these analogies between LLMs and biological brains are not exact, and we shouldn’t take them too literally. However, when pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, small hints and intuition are often all it takes to explore uncharted territory.
Can’t really tell what most of you are complaining about. You can say anything on X (short of doxing and inciting violence and things that are against the law), you can follow or block anyone on X.

If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.

Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).
I just did after reading this comment - that's not what I saw.
Grok 3 is an unreleased product, he has access only because of his job and he's not authorized to speak publicly about it. So both of those apply.
That makes me wonder what the Wikimedia Foundation's disaster recovery plan looks like.

The crucial bit of infrastructure (and the most vulnerable point right now) might be the domain name.
The funny thing though is that china can extort obviously corrupt external markets. Just synthesize wegovy, sell it a gestation price, shake down a cartel or industry for the price difference. If your oligarchy can not compete and the corruption prevents it form keeping up, it has to take over to prevent extinction by the external competition.
If you work at a 'real' paper pusher office they have a three month calendars with week numbers hanging at every office wall, gifted from the wholesale and office center!

(You can activate week numbers in Office Outlook as well. Or go to ukenummer.no for simple display)
I could search X and provide many more examples, including from feminists who appealed and were unbanned after Musk took over the company, others from screenshots posted of emails with the reason for the ban.

Would that change your view?
When Idiocracy the comedy film becomes a documentary.
> As I've found out from other comments, "better" requires rooting your TV,

This is not accurate. Most alternatives, in fact, do not require rooting your TV.

Look, if you like Plex, you like Plex -- you don't have to justify your preference by confidently posting incorrect information about everything else.
> Government is a huge ship where everything happens slowly. If you fire all sailors at once, you won't notice the difference immediately. The phantom ship continues to sail.

Happens to business too. People don’t realise how long these entities can circle the drain.
I'm not sunshowers, but I think the point isn't the exact number or a way of measuring it. For example, the reason I prefer to write Rust over C++ is not that I have measured it to be 2.6X faster for me to work with. My interpretation of what sunshowers was saying was more like "'technically better' can be enough, depending on much better it is, and I think Jujutsu is a big enough improvement [for me] that it's worth it".
i sprint regularly like 4 times a week but holy hell i can do a max 1 km not 21 loool and even with that, it wont be halfway close to world record time
I definitely had Nokia wellies in the mid eighties. I think the boots-and-tyres brand name changed from Nokia to Nokian around 1990-ish.
Thank you! This was a great help in getting everything saved.
This is a frustrating comment because it doesn't engage with anything the article is saying and just tries to counter it with the truism that "he doesn't owe anyone anything", something which the author specifically addressed at the beginning of his post.

Guess what, if the project leader doesn't owe anyone anything, then the author of TFA also doesn't owe him anything.
> To be clear, you're comparing anti-semites (a racist "group") with Jews (an ethnic/religious group). One is defined by holding a targeted, hateful ideology. The other is a group of human beings, by birth/existence.

I disagree. In this context they are 2 groups of people who disagree about something, everything else is irrelevant. It is your opinion to colour one side or the other 'hateful', 'racist' or any other word. You are applying your opionin and bias to other people arguments to paint one side better than the other.

Take this same opinion and apply it to Israel/Palestine, and suddenly it becomes not so clear cut. Both sides claim something about the other side, and both are killing each other because if it. In this instance, who would you call hateful and racist? It completely depends on who you sympathise with as there is no correct answer here. It is no different to any other groups of people who you are not part of.
This comment appears to be the only place between article and thread where mongo getting recommended is even mentioned. Maybe stop giving them free press. I certainly haven't heard anyone seriously suggest them for about about ten years now.

Edit: ok the other guy mentioning mongo is clearly being sarcastic
great list of criteria. I'd also add

5) End the moment there's nothing left to cover.
Bsky doesn't train AIs using your data. They're warning you that your data may be scraped and used as such by third parties.
the person suggesting mongodb in the replies isnt serious, its just a meme reference
He NACKed the patch. Blocking the pack would mean that he is in a position where that NACK is final, which isn't clear at all. If that isn't the case then the NACK is only an opinion that it's a bad idea.

But saying that he is't going to have have any additional maintenance burden just because the rust code using his subsystem is in a different subtree is also not an honest assesment of the situation. That's not how the kernel developent works.
Just to be a bit more clear, this was more a Chesterton Fence comment than a condemnation. Everything has trade-offs and I hope our next solution to this problem is better, not worse.
The environmental impacts of these technologies are well documented and reported. However the emissions are negligible compared to the running emissions of fossil fuels which you don't seem to actively dislike. Assuming that the world's power usage does not dramatically shrink in the future, especially solar farms will have to be built on a massive scale because we simply can't emit as much carbon as would be required for fossil power plants. Again, you can check the numbers for yourself.

> you probably emit more carbon than almost every person who’s ever lived.

That seems exaggerated. I live a vegetarian diet and do not own a car, my home electricity is 100% local renewables and I am very mindful of the carbon impact of any products I buy. While the Western industrial lifestyle is still unsustainable, I do think these small-scale changes are beneficial. Of course the ambient societal carbon emissions are incomparable to pre-Industrial timeframes, but that is widely known.
Show HN: share Signal links on X without getting censored
Interesting thesis, hadn’t heard that! There’s lots of people on Twitter who admitted to losing tons of money unintentionally, but of course it’s hard to prove what the silent majority was thinking. I am still a little dubious tho, sorry:

1. Why didn’t any of the marketing materials say that?

2. Why launch $MELANIA?

3. Why didn’t people just trade around a couple bucks over and over to rack up fees, rather than investing as usual?

4. This is edging on partisan politics I guess, but: why donate to the billionaire president…? He doesn’t need a legal fund, he now has free housing, and he’s selling more direct merchandise (watches, NFTs, bibles, etc.) than ever. Just seems like a weird time to donate.
FYI I had some time in the morning so built a simple site to share Signal links on X:

https://link-in-a-box.vercel.app

HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078736
> My understanding has always been that its specifically the government that can't censor me, a private company or citizen can.

Then you have no free speech. I can just refuse you internet access, or not sell ink and paper to you…

So my take is that no, it should not be allowed to private companies to censor arbitrarily. And of course an "algorithm" that sorts stuff in any other way than chronologically is censorship. The feed should just show chronological ordered stuff of followed accounts. No more and no less.
He's just queried records with dead=FALSE. It's not active recipients of social security payments. All its showing is that some portion of people die without the death being officially logged on their record in the social security database.

Edit: Also, it's not clear that the death field is the sole criteria for determining the eligibility for payments (i.e. determining the recipient is alive)
Ask HN: Locally Run Text to Speech+AI: ePub|PDF –> Audio Book
I've been researching this for a while, without success.
Maybe, as I am not entirely connected to the AI-trendy world there's a solution for this?

I am looking for a text to speech (TTS) tool/toolchain. That would ideally transform a document such as an EPUB into an audio book.

An adjacent request would be, to understand HOW to generate locally the equivalent of "NotebookLM Podcasts".

If you don't know what those are:

* go there https://notebooklm.google.com/

* create a new notebook

* upload a document, like a big complicated book

* press "generate" on the right part;

* wait a little

* boom, now you can listen to an audio podcast entirely based on the book you sent where two fictional hosts discuss the book in question in a relatively thorough manner.

---

So yeah, I wonder what are the available, Free Software/Open Source, tools or tool chains that we can use locally on a reasonably powerful hardware at home to create text to speech using AI.

My ultimate goal would be to be able to generate audio books from EPUB/PDFs.
Once you see it, it gets really annoying really fast.

Especially in a third party country where there is no good reason to pretend to think Meta or whatever are in the patriotic yay Fooland#1 woho-team.
Biases in Apple's Image Playground
What reasons? Would love to know for future ref.

If your org is amenable to Google Spanner or already using Spanner, it has preview support for Cypher and graph semantics: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/graph/overview
Languages of the World by Resourcedness
In my experience, it appears (and keeps changing) while typing. Maybe I do not write fluently enough.
Or burning a flag you don't like…
Sabine really represents the “apathetic disillusioned” - no hope for fundamental physics. I left after we discovered the Higgs based on similar observations, there was too much invested in group think. If you have to raise $50B to ask “what happens if…” then the “if” has to be damned likely, or you have to share the risk with a large group.
My own conclusion, back then, was that the collider paradigm had run its course. Without economical tools, and no theory to guide experiments, the field was stuck.
I’m not apathetic though, and believe there are ways for both theories and experiments to break the stall.
Theory could dig into the backlog of shortcuts and dirty tricks, that underlines the machinery of QFT, are there other ways of probing the quantum fields?
Experimentalists can at the least get behind novel acceleration schemes like laser plasma wake fields, to reduce the massive capital risk of conducting model-free searches for new signatures. Or as the theorists, hunt for alternative ways to “excite the quantum fields”.
This may
Not be recipes, but as a community Particle physics has been way to focused on chasing resonances with ever larger machines.
Staying their and listening to people make false claims over and over again without challenging them on any of the lies or grandstanding is not a service to anyone. At the very least, no one should be looking at a Lex Friedman interview hoping to hear the truth of any kind.
> Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?

Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse.

Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state, not from others' opinions.

Platforms themselves also have speech-based rights. Even if one portrays itself as a neutral 'town square,' it puts its own rights to work as soon as it implements an algorithmic feed, implicitly deciding what content to promote or hide.

You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.
So, I had a kindle, amazon prime, everything.. until the pandemic, and here in Norway we don't have an amazon webshop of our own. Up until this point I had been buying from Amazon US. The pandemic made shipping from the US hard, and so I decided to use AmazonUK, my login worked there, so i just switched to using that one. Then shipping from the UK became hard (brexit), so I started using AmazonDE.

Then Amazon locked my account, and said I needed to prove who I am. So I did, sent in documents to prove who I was. Didn't matter, apparently I had broken some rule about using my login in different amazon stores or something. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do that.

So now I lost all my books I had bought, because Amazon decided to ban me.

If I had bought these books from any open store, I would still have my books.. but because I bought from Amazon, I've lost them all.

That's why DRM free books are important.
But that's exactly my point. Nothing happens for decades (apparently!) and then it all crashes in minutes.
Huh, how is it an n=1 ? It affected a lot of folks that they're trying to gather in a class action.
When you look at AWS Neptune database implementation details, it looks realy close to the Aurora backend... :-)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/migrati...
This seems like a very interesting comment, if only I could make sense of it. Could you elaborate and/or give examples of what you're describing?
Yeah, the second `dbRead` should prob be `dbWrite`:

dbWrite, _ := connectSqliteDb("dbname.db")

I was a bit confused by the code, then assumed it was a typo
Author here - any tips on dirty tricks somehow using %fs + offset from a shared library, without calling __tls_get_addr and without recompiling the executable (for instance, from a Python extension module) are most welcome! (I have one such trick - mmaping an address produced by ORing some high bit into %fs, and accessing that - but it's seriously dirty and I doubt it would survive outside a limited set of use cases.)

Separately, the post describes one of a few aspects of optimizing funtrace (https://github.com/yosefk/funtrace), which I think is the fastest open-source function tracing profiler for C++ today, and which can be ported relatively easily to Rust/other languages producing native code (the runtime is ~1200 LOC of C++; the trace decoder would need very few changes.) A description of how funtrace works as well as why you'd want a tracing profiler (as opposed to a sampling profiler like perf) and how you'd use it is here: https://yosefk.com/blog/profiling-in-production-with-functio...
how is federal employees accessing federal data considered a data breach?
In earlier days, it may have been more commercially viable to create polished developer tooling -- Turbo Pascal was a great example. Unfortunately, the world has become more complex, as everything is now interconnected, and processing power has increased. Open source, while great, probably diminished competition.

We now live in a world where complex sociological patterns dictate which tools get the most traction. It is easier for a tool to gain more popularity if it has company backing, if you are good at presenting, or if you make only small incremental changes. Technical merit is often less relevant. There is also "first-mover advantage" and countless other processes at play.

All this to say that, indeed, from a technological perspective, the world is totally crazy. But from a sociological perspective it is fascinating, and it is a great time to be alive.

If you don't like the Node ecosystem, then perhaps you may consider doing Java back-end development, as many people in that space adhere to the Lindy effect [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
3D BIM model from 2D sketch
It doesn't really matter. After failed attempt at adopting "terrorism" as new enemy, USA firmly fixated its sights on China in hopes that a strong enemy will help US regain former prosperity.

What Trump currently is doing fits perfectly this goal. Russia is natural, local ally of USA against China, that's what Trump means when he voices hopes for future cooperation between "our great countries". It is further reinforced by plans to sell F35 to India, another natural ally, which means those planes will be copied by Russia as soon as possible.

In all this Europe is just abandoned. USA knows that in conflict against China, Europe is useless as it has no business in making enemy out of China.

What he might be not appreciating sufficiently (because he percieves Europe as weak and restricted by its morals) is that Europe can be motivated to align themselves with China against Russia. While Europe can't (and doesn't want to) threaten China in any way they can offer China a lot. For starters they could start delivering most advanced litography machines, which only they know how to make to China, instead of Taiwan. And they could also internationally recognize China taking into their zone of influnece eastern parts of Russia if China agrees to provide military assistance and suplemental nuclear deterrence in the war of Europe against Russia that's almost inevitably coming.

I think at some point sobering realization will come that evading your responsibility of global hegemon (even if at this point it's only nominal role) and leaving Europe hanging might have severe consequences for Trump's imperial project.
They also voted in a republican majority many of whom parroted the same talking points the Donald spouted
It would be a bigger problem if there was a productive discussion.
New Monarchy: A Rethinking of the Values of Democracy
I have a Onyx Boox Go Color 7, and I love it.
WeChat Integrates AI Search with DeepSeek
I agree that the actions are unconstitutional. A House acting constitutionally would impeach, and a Senate acting constitutionally would convict.

I also agree that Congress is self-serving and corrupt.

The part I disgreed with in my earlier comment was specifically the link between Congress's corruption and their inaction.

For 8+ years the left has been putting forward comments like "if only republican voters knew ..." This far in, I think the simpler explanation is that they do know, and approve of Trump doing it.
The guy could be caught in the humpback’s mouth for a few seconds instead of actually being fully swallowed. It’s hard to say with the video.

We need you, Captain!
its infuriatingly bad
A recent study published in Science Advances reveals that fluoxetine, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, offers protective benefits against sepsis. The research demonstrates that fluoxetine enhances interleukin-10 (IL-10)–dependent metabolic defenses, leading to improved survival rates in sepsis-induced disease models. This protective effect is achieved through multiple mechanisms, including antimicrobial properties and modulation of inflammatory responses. The findings suggest that fluoxetine's anti-inflammatory and metabolic effects could be harnessed as a therapeutic strategy for sepsis.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body's response to an infection goes out of control, leading to widespread inflammation, tissue damage, and organ failure. It happens when the immune system, instead of fighting off the infection, starts attacking the body's own tissues.
> You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.

Brilliant statement, I fully agree.

The issue is who chooses to give them an audience. IMO it is up to the audience not to listen, but it seems to be the opinion of a lot of people here that gatekeepers (companies) should have the power to decide that and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.
Elon described himself as a free speech absolutist. There is no inconsistency in pointing out that his actions don’t align with this description, regardless of whether or not the person doing so is themselves a free speech absolutist.