MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HPsquared | 2025-04-12 21:36:32+00:00
50% number of particulates might not amount to 50% of the health risk.

Not all particles are the same. Diesel exhaust particulates are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, i.e. pure carcinogen. Whereas I really doubt tire and brake dust has the same health risk "per particle".

Granted it may even be higher! But comparing two different things by simply "number of particles" isn't helpful.
by empiko | 2025-04-12 21:36:48+00:00
But the signals used to filter out human garbage are not the same the signals that would be needed to filter LLM garbage. LLMs generate texts that look high-quality at a glance, but might be factually inaccurate. For example, an LLM can generate a codebase that is well-formatted, contains docstrings, comments, maybe even tests; but it will use a non-existent library or be logically incorrect.
by metalman | 2025-04-12 21:37:16+00:00
everything with a mass over 1kg+- in the air, is carrying a "gps" and something that is transmitting its location, and all air traffic world wide is(theoreticaly) assigned a flight path for each trip,witha specific flight level, ie: the planning is 3d, so the density per layer, never gets very high, and there are specific paths taken to change layers, there are never any dogs, or horses, or people trying to deek, there are no signs or maps, and in case of fully automated vtol taxis, navigation will be to mm accuracy, with likely a routine to land fully autonomously on loosing the network, and a backup ballistic recovery parachute, if power is completly lost or another emergency situation occurs. and also likely is that forward speeds will be low enough, that collisions with birds will be a low probability, and rotors will likely be schrouded, keeping the idiots heads attached when determinidly trying for that gota have selfie.
by autoexec | 2025-04-12 21:38:22+00:00
What it doesn't say next to the price is that if you don't connect to the internet and allow your device to beg them for permission to use the thing you already purchased your software will stop working, or that if their servers are ever down or inaccessible for any reason you may not be able to use the software you paid for on your own machine. Adobe is a shit company. The business practices they use should be outlawed.
by mrandish | 2025-04-12 21:38:50+00:00
> There are strongly diminishing returns going from filmstrips* to movies to color films to HD to 4K to 3D, at each step you gain less and less.

I agree. For cinematic content viewed in a theater or in a living room couch context, going from analog SD to digital HD was huge. Going from HD (2K) to 4K can be good but the quality is mostly from more bits being devoted to the compression than from the extra pixels. Most theatrical digital presentation is in DCP format and still 2k and people think it looks great.

Other video engineering things most people don't know:

* Well done HDR10 (or Dolbyvision) can contribute hugely to image quality. For example, I'd choose a 2K movie in HDR10 every time over the same movie in 4K without HDR.

* Theatrical 3D presentation is generally pretty bad and should be avoided if you care about visual quality. It's often around half the brightness and half the resolution and yet costs more. Even if done ideally, the end effect doesn't deliver anything like how your eyes actually see a real environment. The details get technical but theatrical 3D projection is an unnatural artificially constructed effect that's just weird. People claiming "It looked just like reality!" just shows the power of the placebo effect and suggestion, because objectively measured, it's just not. Famous directors don't usually come out against theatrical 3D the way they do against some other things. The reason is 3D is a pricey up sell that's mostly all margin, so it generates serious money but, privately, they despise 3D from both a quality and aesthetic viewpoint.
Ask HN: Has Google Search's index shrunk?
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-12 21:39:28+00:00
I've noticed that when I'm finally able to force my way past its behind-the-scenes AI query butchering, the number of pages that it's able to return is limited. Much more so than even a few years ago. Is it conceivable that Google has not only curtailed its forward indexing, but also purged some of its historical index (particularly of less popular pages)? I'll give my suspected reason: they're simply running out of cheap storage. From a layman's perspective, the loss of webpage caches, various aspects of their cloud storage situation (increased usage by users, increased pricing, incidents like the accidental loss of many users' location history), the data-heavy nature of their AI ventures, and the pace of data center buildout, all point (circumstantially) to data storage woes. But I don't have any direct insight or experience with these matters. So I'm wondering if anyone else is coming to similar conclusions, or at least has similar suspicions.
by jraines | 2025-04-12 21:40:49+00:00
Most Senators are not well known nationally (sadly) unless they’ve either:

- done a non-negligible Presidential campaign

- been born from a famous family

- the press either love them or love to hate them

- have a leadership position and/or are conspicuously ancient

Relentless self-promotors are a superset of 3, the ones who succeed

Unfortunately being sensible, cooperative, or good with policy isn’t on the list

It can occasionally work for state Governors
by djeastm | 2025-04-12 21:42:17+00:00
Wow you had these at-the-ready, didn't you. Thanks.

*I've read through a few of these and it seems like perhaps Trump still thinks it's 2018/19, but China's position has only gotten stronger.

It seems the attempt to jack up tariffs so high this time was a bluff to "show" how strong we can be, but he miscalculated on how shaky the stock/bond markets actually currently are and the financial players know we're not in a position to go it alone.

And China knows this and they know they can wait us out. I believe it will be considered a misstep, at best and a catastrophe at worst.
by pornel | 2025-04-12 21:42:17+00:00
Heavy particles and gaseous emissions are not comparable in such a simplistic way. If you take a dump on the street it doesn't mean you caused 50 million times more emissions than the EPA limits for ICE car exhaust.

For example, iron from brakes is heavy but ecologically pretty harmless. OTOH NO₂ weighs almost nothing, but is toxic. You can eat 30mg of iron per day to stay healthy (just don't lick it off the asphalt directly), but a similar amount of NO₂ would be lethal.

Heavy particles don't stay in the air for long, and don't get easily absorbed into organisms. OTOH gaseous emissions and small particulates from combustion can linger in the air, and can get absorbed into the lungs and the bloodsteam.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-12 21:43:04+00:00
I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.

And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)
by lelanthran | 2025-04-12 21:43:26+00:00
> I swear, the affliction of failing to understand the underlying concepts upon which a technology A or B is built is a plague upon our industry. Instead, everything clearly must fit into the concepts limited to whatever “mother tongue” language a particular developer has mastered.

Ironic, since any time you post about a programming language it's to inform that C# does it better.

Not just here; someone with your nick also whined when the creator of C# made a technical deficient decision when choosing Go over C# to implement typescript.

It's hard for a rational person to believe that someone would make the argument that the creator of the language must have made a mistake just because he reached for (in his words) a more appropriate language in that context.

You have a blind spot when it comes to C#. You also probably already know it.
by js_chap | 2025-04-12 21:43:38+00:00
JsPad is a web-based HTML/CSS/JS editor focused on speed, simplicity, and offline access. No bloat — just open and start coding.

What makes it different:

Live Preview – Edit HTML, CSS, and JS side-by-side with instant feedback.

Offline support – Works without internet. You can even install it as a PWA and use it like a native app.

Cross device support– It is responsive across different resolutions. PWA availability on iOS and android makes it even better. Use it on windows, macOs, iOS, Linux or android.

No Login Required – Just visit, code, and preview. Login only if you want to save/share.

Savable & Shareable Links – Save scripts in the cloud and get shareable links.

Customizable Editor – Themes, fonts, auto-format on save, layout tweaks, line wrapping, etc.

Hotkey Support – Power user shortcuts with tooltips showing keybinds.

Export your code to zip or Github gist – Export your project with HTML/CSS/JS files separated.

Ideal for tinkering, prototyping, teaching, or even building micro-tools. It’s intentionally simple, fast and accessible.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-12 21:44:32+00:00
Singapore will always be Disneyland with the Death Penalty (early 90s) in my book. But seriously, china built outs its cities much later than the west, and they have a cyberpunk feel. But it feels like a lot of gimmicks, even Japan feels like that (they build things like Tokyo's Skytree, but it isn't very practical, and they just repeat this all over the country). If you live in a city, the basics matter, like...nice public transit, which china has built out very nicely in the last two decades.
by blackoil | 2025-04-12 21:46:07+00:00
You are assuming manufacturing trade as only income. Services export and IP export are other where USA leads. When Apple sells iPhone in India and China, it gets to bring back the profits to the USA. Same goes for EU paying for Netflix and Disney movies and Google services. Same for McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Collectively, US companies make 100s of billions of profits from outside USA. Another perk is being the reserve currency, you print bonds for free, get clothes/toys for that and rest of the world is just holding onto that IOU. Again, trillions of dollars.
by dogmatism | 2025-04-12 21:46:17+00:00
A close relative is in fairly rigorous data science in climate based littoral oceanographic research (maintains a couple R packages) doing PhD, funding cut as part of reprisals against a certain governor

exploring offers at 3 Canadian universities

so, only a couple hours drive further north to continue fairly rigorous data science research

yeah, we don't need that "soft science" nonsense here
by boulos | 2025-04-12 21:46:32+00:00
What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did:

> Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image.

> The photographer revealed that "there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake."

> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.

> The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine's Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.
by jonhohle | 2025-04-12 21:46:42+00:00
That’s the first thing I thought of as well. I had to integrate one into our custom CMS early in my career. I vaguely remember explaining to management that I was not responsible for the order or quality of search results and tweaking queries (now prompts?) with hints to restrict searches to certain paths. It was such an opaque device, but provided better results than MySQL did at the time.
by gruez | 2025-04-12 21:46:45+00:00
>Isn't the word for that "criminal"? You can add intensifiers like "serious", "hardened", "deadly", etc to emphasize how bright the line violation is.

So what, the only difference between a serial killer and some guy committing tax fraud is that the former is more "serious"/"hardened"/"deadly"? You don't think mental health has any role to this? When people mean "insane", that's what they're gesturing to, not what the DSM-5 or whatever says.

>but that consensus breaking down does not mean that 41% of 18-29 year olds are insane. That's just not what insane means.)

"acceptable" isn't the same as willing to undertake the action themselves. Mangione is being called "insane" because he actually killed someone, not because he answered yes on a poll asking whether it's acceptable to kill healthcare CEOs.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-04-12 21:47:01+00:00
Looking at the fine print of bank accounts, I would assume they completely absolve themselves of responsibility after a catastrophic event (call it C-Day). Or maybe they defer to FDIC insurance which guarantees I will have at least $250,000 after C-Day.

That said, as a consumer, I have no comprehension of how that would actually work. Do I get my guaranteed money 7 days after C-Day or 6 months after C-Day?

If an EMP blitzes my bank's electronic hard-drive records, is it my responsibility to prove I had X dollars in the account? If so, how? I can easily print a statement, but a statement clearly easily be forged. If it's the bank's responsibility, is there any guarantee they maintain physical and up-to-date records? Is there any regulation mandating they keep such records?

What happens if hyperinflation occurs and the 250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC is enough to buy a week's worth of groceries?

There's a lot of unknown variables and potential fragility in the system.

In other complex realms like software engineering, we get evidence that those complex systems really only have the budget to build the "happy path" and lawyers fight the cases when customers get damaged by the "unhappy paths."

It seems like our monetary system is on the happy path and very few times have the unhappy paths been tested.
by indigodaddy | 2025-04-12 21:47:59+00:00
"They're also small, which makes them perfect for edge applications and phone integration."

- you can't locally install or onprem Gemini right, so why does small make it better for edge applications, essentially because small means light and fast, so it will respond quicker and with less latency? Requests are still going out over the network to Google though right?
by toast0 | 2025-04-12 21:48:00+00:00
Mnesia isn't in-memory only. It also journals to disk. You can also use disk only tables that don't hold the whole table in memory (but from what I've read, perf sucks... otoh, a lot of what people say about Mnesia conflicts with my experience, so maybe disc_copies is worth trying).

OTP ships with mnesia_frag which allows fragmenting a logical table into many smaller tables. You don't need to have all of the tables on all of the nodes that share an mnesia schema. That's at least one way to scale mnesia beyond what fits in memory on a single node. Single nodes are pretty big though; we were running 512GB mnesia nodes 10 years ago on commodity hardware, and GCP says 32TB is available. You can do a lot within a limit of 32TB per node.

There's other ways to shard too, at WhatsApp pre-FB, our pattern was to run mnesia schemas with 4 nodes where one half of the nodes were in service, the other was in our standby colo, all nodes had all the tables in this schema, and requests would be sharded so each schema group would only serve 1/N users and each of the two active nodes in a schema group would get half of the requests (except during failure/maintenance). We found 4 node schemas were easiest to operate, and ensuring that in normal operations, a single node (and in most cases, a single worker process) would touch specific data made us comfortable running our data operations in the async_dirty context that avoids locking.

We did have scaling challenges (many of which you can watch old Erlang Factory presentations about), but it was all surmountable, and many of the things would be easier today given improvements to BEAM and improvements in available servers.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-12 21:48:39+00:00
There's been plenty of significant discoveries, many, many. (O(10)s hadrons, consistent standard model discrepancies are really big news, those weren't expected)

There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs, as far back as 2006 when I was still screwing around in graduate physics.

I honestly can't remember the last time a new particle was randomly discovered by experiment that wasn't already proposed and agreed to as sound-in-theory. It's much cheaper and faster to do theory, then built what you need to verify, than to crank up energy as high as you can and hope for the best (I'd hazard a guess this ran out of steam by the 50s/60s at the latest)
by Nifty3929 | 2025-04-12 21:48:55+00:00
Not sure I quite agree - I think it's fine to have "persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game" within the proper roguelike genre, as long as they don't make the run easier. Gungeon is an example, with unlocks for skipping lower levels once you have demonstrated sufficient mastery that they're merely time-wasters rather than adding to the challenge.
by proggy | 2025-04-12 21:49:36+00:00
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-12 21:49:44+00:00
You know "puréed orphan extract" is just salt, right? You can extract it from seawater in an expensive process that, nonetheless, is way cheaper than crushing orphans (not to mention the ethical implications). Sure, you have to live near the ocean, but plenty of people do, and we already have distribution networks to transport the resulting salt to your local market. Just one fist-sized container is the equivalent of, like, three or four dozen orphans; and you can get that without needing a fancy press or an expensive meat-sink.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-12 21:50:45+00:00
Depending on who you're talking to, none of those are realistic prospects anyway. Your borrowing rate will be crap, no matter what, because of your age/credit history/place of residence/skin color (and, if you really need funding, you turn to the BNPL shadow lenders or GFM); you will never earn enough to rent an entire home, or an apartment with a corporate landlord; none of those jobs will ever even look at your resume.

We are reaching a critical mass of people who have no buy-in to these structures because they've been previously cut out.
by greatgib | 2025-04-12 21:52:05+00:00
This article is so full of bullshit!

Car are still a lot in Paris and there are conflicting studies about the air quality evolution in Paris, some days it is better, some days not. But the Parisian regulation on car as no real effect so far.

Paris is like at a bottom of a curve and it is said that the car might account only for less than 20% of it, the biggest contributor being industry in the region.

What had a big impact on thin particules are the evolution of car technologies. Now every engine in France has to be equiped with efficient catalytic exhaust pipes and efficient engine to reduce this kind of bad particules.

In this article, you can see a very deceptive image comparison. There is a picture of the Eiffel tower long time ago and now.

The picture of before has a strong fog, but it is just because being taken on a foggy day but the article would like you to think that it is how a picture would have been everyday due to the popultof the air...
by arduanika | 2025-04-12 21:54:20+00:00
It's the more expansive definition of paradox, meaning something like "counterintuitive result". In expectancy, a randomly chosen person has an average number of friends. You might therefore think that a random person and their friends, all of whom seem randomly chosen, would have the same expected number of friends. But you'd be wrong, because the friends weren't random after all: they had at least one friend. Not a logical paradox, but a surprising fact.
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-12 21:54:50+00:00
I created a niche CLI tool to clean messy CSVs. It was too small for a startup, so I made a simple landing page. Then, I shared it in forums and added a 'buy me a coffee' link. To my surprise, it brought in small but steady income. You can also bundle tools into a digital product (like a 'developer toolkit') and sell on Gumroad. APIs and microservices on RapidAPI or GitHub Sponsors also work if your tool solves a real pain point.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-12 21:55:05+00:00
Let me clarify: This is Recall, a Microsoft product, installed and working across a large number of machines. While Microsoft claims all Recall snapshots and processing are local to the machine, it's a all but given that all those Windows machines are using some kind of Microsoft cloud, Azure, Office 365, or OneDrive storage.

Not a bunch of independent, disorganized one-offs.

Consider this: your boss or another senior person at work has Recall and brings up information related to your employment, performance, and compensation. A friend has Recall, and reads some email from you in which you confide something sensitive. That customer support agent at the company you do frequent business with has Recall, because their employer wants to monitor their minute-to-minute activities, and brings up your account history.

Independently and uncoordinated, maybe not so bad. Together, tied back to Microsoft, it's easy to imagine constructing a profile of you from your interactions with these seemingly independent but in really collective third parties.