MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frozenseven | 2025-04-22 14:38:16+00:00
If you're after those oh-so precious credentials, Bengio, Hinton and Russell have been echoing much of the same statements. Yoshua Bengio even shared the "AI 2027" article, recommending that people read it.

Also, pretty laughable you cite Timnit Gebru as any type of "researcher". She's a political activist with precisely zero contributions to hard science.
by mdhb | 2025-04-22 14:38:26+00:00
I mean I think it would be a fair assumption that there’s a very very real chance that havinng worked at DOGE will come with credible threats to your safety in the future. This is a team that is currently in the process of killing peoples grandparents by cutting them off from social security, building databases of immigrants and people with autism among a million other fuckups.

People aren’t going to just let that slide. I really don’t think they should expect to live in comfort and anonymity for the rest of their days if you look at how these kinds of things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples (I.e the East German Stasi come to mind as one)
Ask HN: Debit Card PIN, significative digits
by pincard | 2025-04-22 14:38:28+00:00
Hi, today casually I discovered that I can authorize debit card payments by POS using only first 4 digits of the 5 digits "official" PIN . Doing some research I found article suggesting that, to make PINs portable to different systems, they use a workaround based on padding or truncation, so, for example, having 12345 as assigned PIN also valid variations are: 012345, 123450, 001234, 123400 and 1234 , if I understood correctly. See:

https://www.quora.com/What-if-the-ATM-asks-for-a-6-digit-PIN-but-your-cards-only-have-4-digit-PINs

https://together.bunq.com/d/396-pin-number-with-more-than-4-digits

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm very grateful is someone can point me to the related standard code (ISO, etc) or documentation. Kind regards.
by senkora | 2025-04-22 14:38:32+00:00
> pons asinorums

This is a new one for me, so, in the spirit of the article, I will "act in the world to acquire more information as needed".

> An obstacle which will defeat a beginner or foolish person. [from 17th c.]

> From New Latin pons asinorum, from Latin pōns (“bridge”) + genitive plural of asinus (“donkey”). Literally, “bridge of donkeys”.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pons_asinorum
by troupo | 2025-04-22 14:38:35+00:00
> We have very different ideas of what "literal" means. You _interpreted_ what I wrote as "just Google it". I didn't say those words verbatim _nor_ do I mean that. Use a search engine if you want to find some high-quality papers. Or use Google Scholar. Or go straight to Arxiv. Or ask people on a forum.

Aka "I will make some vague references to some literature, go Google it"

> Instead, you could do more reading and research.

Instead of vague "just google it", and vague ad hominems you could actually provide constructive feedback.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-22 14:38:58+00:00
Cash is vastly vastly preferred for restaurants in the USA by both sides.

This is also has the advantage that if for whatever reason it is impossible to pay because all the servers have disappeared and no is up front, you can just calculate out the bill+tax+tip from the prices in the menu, lay it on the table, and leave.

Most the problems around credit/phones revolve around the fact that restaurants are operating around customs and inertia of the cash system, and awkwardly injecting other collection methods into this routine, personally I don't bother fighting it.
by acureau | 2025-04-22 14:39:07+00:00
You come off extremely rude, and for someone so enamored with the scientific method you make a lot of baseless assumptions about what I think and understand.

Understanding comes from all kinds of places. When a child touches a hot stove, they come to understand the consequences. That child doesn't gather 30 participants and record their reactions as they take turns burning their fingers. I'll leave you to extrapolate.
by timtimmy | 2025-04-22 14:39:24+00:00
It's becoming quite common in S Korea for there to be a fixed tablet on a stand at each table. You order from the digital menu and then immediately pay with the integrated PoS. If there's no tablet you pay on your way out. There's a button at each table to summon the waiter. No tips.

Japan has ticket vending machines in many restaurants. You prepay and order at the front of the restaurant, it prints a little ticket, and you give that to the waiter or kitchen.
by Volundr | 2025-04-22 14:39:33+00:00
It certainly wasn't sold to the public as "these are going to be forgiven". After all they are called loans not grants. And given all the retoric around "it's simple you took out a loan, now you pay it back" or "why should my tax dollars pay for your loan forgiveness" I think it's very fair to why this logic applies to people not businesses.
by iamthemonster | 2025-04-22 14:39:44+00:00
There is a long history of euphemisms taking over - one day we may say "unalived" as a perfectly normal replacement for "killed", just as we don't call bears "arkto" or "ursa" any more, we just euphemistically call them "brown things", i.e. "bero" in protogermanic hence "bear" in English.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-22 14:40:05+00:00
Just like social media is the cigarettes of our generation, student loans will be the "preexisting conditions" of it.

Student loans are an odious conflict of interest. People will hold themselves in disbelief that we offered predatory "no risk" loans to literal children, burdening their entire futures with decisions made before they had the faculties to consider it. The moral hazard of protecting a class of loans from completely irresponsible lending alone is enough before even looking at the consequences for the people who took them.

Then you have second and third order effects... Authoritarians don't consult experts believing they know better so Nth order effects of short sighted policy are authoritarian kryptonite. Nth order effects have a way of asserting themselves into reality and breaking through authoritarian denial about the state of reality and nobody is happy when reality asserts itself.
by Aromasin | 2025-04-22 14:40:41+00:00
The problem is, I haven't used it in 8 years, so there's no way to know my preference. The email is also not tied to any other accounts than perhaps a few browser video game accounts from my youth (miniclips, runescape and the like). My guess is that it fills the feed with sexualised content because it's the most popular kind, and eventually repopulates it depending on subsequent follows. The problem is I only follow friends and family, not celebrities, so that would prove difficult to do.
by sundaeofshock | 2025-04-22 14:40:54+00:00
I’m 58 and use my Apple Watch for pretty much everything. I only carry a single card for those rare times where I enter an establishment that does not have a chip reader.

I love it not only for convenience, but for the security as well. I don’t have to worry about a potential pickpocket seeing where I keep my wallet or how much cash is on me. I keep my transit pass on my watch for the same reason.
Ask HN: Looking for a past post about heart cell excitation
by geiser | 2025-04-22 14:41:36+00:00
Hey!

I’m looking for a recent post (around 3-6 months old) in which grid animations are shown to demonstrate the process of heart muscle cell activation, and on a later stage, how a clump of dead cells can provoke a “vortex” and electrical reanimation is needed. I tried searching for it with Algolia but it’s not showing up.

Thank you in advance.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-22 14:41:38+00:00
It just comes down to popular sentiment. if it pisses of the american people enough, then it will be similar to the Iraq war in terms of almost everyone in congress supporting a declaration of war.

I get what you're saying, but I like to think there are at least a majority in the US military that would desire a war in such a situation. So long as the evidence is indisputable, like Putin himself declaring what he did.
by petertodd | 2025-04-22 14:41:40+00:00
Bitcoin mining is doing exactly in some cases. E.g. there's a fair number of small, remote, hydroelectric plants whose construction and/or renovation were financed by Bitcoin mining, with the amount of mining declining over time as the community using them grew and ramped up consumption. Also in Canada there's a company working on making finance deals for small scale nuclear energy plants in the far north where the excess capacity will be temporarily used for Bitcoin mining while the community grows and/or industrial uses like mines ramp up production.

Re: the nuclear version, good chance none of it happens due to anti-nuclear sentiment of course. So far exactly zero of these small scale nuclear plants have been built.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-22 14:42:23+00:00
Yeah, my electronics hobbies are probably severely curtailed. I am assuming that the cancelling the de minimus exception is the real killer. I assume I can no longer afford PCBWay, AliExpress.

Recent purchases I am not likely to be able to afford: NVIDIA TESLA M40 cards from China I found on eBay and a "mining rig" mother board from AliExpress. (Was putting together a, formerly, inexpensive local-Llama rig.)

To be sure, these are things I don't need but they were on the cusp of affordability from the point of view of a hobbyist and so I indulged — and I will not now because they will now cross that threshold.

And I expect to see the price double on my Zenni glasses going forward. I used to like to find old medium-format cameras from Asian countries on eBay (probably not now). I already bailed on purchasing what would have been my first drone with what has happened to the prices on them.
by atiedebee | 2025-04-22 14:42:26+00:00
Going off of the description, since I currently can't watch videos or anything with audio:

> How one guy in his bedroom (kind of) beat all of PNG's combined multi-decade effort in one year, and why that's strange.

PNG is a 30 year old format and hasn't changed much over the years (as far as I am aware). PNG at it's core is still just some basic filters with DEFLATE on top. The decades of work would mostly be spend on optimizing the encoding speed and finding better heuristics for selecting filters. There is a lot more impressive codecs nowadays.

Apart from that I am still a big fan of QOI. It has amazing results for how simple the format is.
by ajmurmann | 2025-04-22 14:42:53+00:00
This touches on something I'm curious to see play out: How much shopping tourism will we see? If a laptop costs twice as much due to tariffs (as indicated by the forecast in the article) how many US consumers will wait with buying a new laptop or phone till they happen to be in another country? I'm also curious if we'll see a huge spike in smuggling which might give more justification for more spending on border security.
by mindslight | 2025-04-22 14:43:07+00:00
Let's just call it what it is - a national sales tax. The only way significant bottom-up manufacturing ecosystems would come back to the US would be through targeted government investment, long term stability, and effective anti-trust enforcement - all things beyond the current administration. If three decades of economic neoliberalism was a steamroller crushing our industrial base, the Trumpist solution is to just throw it in reverse and destroy what domestic industry had managed to spring up in its wake.

I would have thought that despite the general comfort with hypocrisy of the larger Republican party, they would at least have reacted against overtly raising taxes especially to levels of hundreds of percent. But nope, use one synonym and whatever Dear Leader says goes. It's truly a cult.
by prennert | 2025-04-22 14:43:10+00:00
> These developments follow more than £150m of investment by the Company in its UK munitions facilities since 2022

The sustained need for artillery shells since 2022 did not arise because more countries wanted to decouple from American dependence, but because a war was started that did not allow for the typical NATO doctrine of air superiority to be used. I wonder when so many artillery shells were last used as they have been in Ukraine.
by sudhishnair | 2025-04-22 14:43:14+00:00
Today, we are kicking off a series of blogs on scaling Rails applications.

Ruby on Rails makes it easy to get started. However, if you want your application to scale, you need to answer questions like how many processes to have, how many threads, and whether the application is IO-bound or CPU-bound. What about connection pooling? Do you have pre-booting?

In this series, we will be looking at these questions more. The first blog is about understanding Puma, Concurrency, and the Effect of the GVL on Performance.

https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/scaling-rails-series
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-22 14:43:31+00:00
I've only had one incident of someone trying to defraud me using my card in the last few decades and the card vendor instantly blocked it and texted me. I am obviously only one person but I have been careful where I use that card. If I suspect anything I just report it stolen and get another one. That only takes a few minutes at the bank. With exception to Amazon I only use it in places that everyone knows me and I know everyone. Most of the time I use cash, especially if buying anything the government may wish to track. I will never tie my fondle-slab to a financial institution. To many entities have access to it.
by stumpfkevin | 2025-04-22 14:43:54+00:00
A couple months back, I built a feature engineering co-pilot agent directly into our product. Then, Cursor agent + MCP + Cursor rules saw the light of day and I decided to start from scratch. The blog shares a couple lessons I've learned trying to bend the Cursor Agent + LLMs to my will by leveraging MCP and Cursor Rules.
by prmoustache | 2025-04-22 14:44:19+00:00
This is self induced misery.

Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop.

You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.
by detectd | 2025-04-22 14:44:25+00:00
I was never a fan of the skeuomorphic icons (and design in general), personally. I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons, etc. It is interactive elements that should be the ones to stand out, not everything.

If the homogeny of flat design makes the main interactive elements less salient, then everything designed to look 3D with glossy surfaces and brushed metal outlines does the same, just with noise.

I think there should be a combination of both, which I think is why many find the older interfaces from the 90s and early 2000s much more usable.

That's a long way of saying that I prefer the flat application icons and dock on current macOS. The dock stays in the peripheral and the icons identify the application all while not drawing my attention until I purposefully go to it.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-22 14:44:37+00:00
> If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.

If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).
by mdhb | 2025-04-22 14:45:20+00:00
Are you really telling me with a straight face that there isn’t manual intervention every day to deemphasise political content? Like we are all watching it happen in real time. Every day the gap between what people are ACTUALLY voting for that’s only available on a hidden page (https://news.ycombinator.com/active) not linked to from anywhere on the website as far as I can tell and what is presented as the most popular content is considerable.
by colesantiago | 2025-04-22 14:45:49+00:00
My prediction made 4 months ago before this statement from the Academy [0] is slowly becoming truer day by day.

"The first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar will be less than 5 years away."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-22 14:45:57+00:00
> Over time I came to believe, this is what people in dysfunctional organizations say to justify endless political back and forth over painfully trivial matters and constant turf wars

Maybe yes

But I'm really referring to the idea that at some point you should more or less create a solution in a spec, and then code should just be an implementation of the spec

If you are still spending 95% of your time writing code after 20 years as a programmer, then either you are incredible at creating specs in a short period of time, or you are still just doing "I'll start coding and figure it out as I go"

Or worse: "I'll just hack something together without thinking about how it fits overall into the whole"

Writing the code is translating a solution into computer language. Creating the solution is the part that should take majority of your time
by hedora | 2025-04-22 14:46:00+00:00
I watched extreme programming, and then agile morph into "waterfall, but on a one week cycle!" (For extreme programming, two weeks for agile.)

"Modern" software development is based on the idea that waterfall doesn't work, but that you can fix it by only allowing projects that take either one week (dot com boom) or two weeks (web 2.0 boom).

Personally, I avoid all this stuff as much as possible, since I've never seen any of it work.

I have had good luck with LLMs, for what it's worth. I've found for step 4, writing an informal spec at the top of the source file works well:

// $ curl https://api.com/foo/bar?baz // { json: "response", goes: "here" }

along with instructions like "implement the interface defined in some other file", and "look at some other existing file for guidance" works well, as does "implement some trivial data structure from scratch".

Then I have to read what it wrote and fix the inevitable 2-3 bugs + compilation errors. It usually gets the boilerplate right, but misunderstands fundamental things. This maybe saves me 50% of coding time, since my first draft usually has bugs + doesn't compile on the first attempt either.

This really shines in step 5 (not listed above): Writing tests. I generally end up with more thorough tests than I'd write from scratch in maybe 20% of the time.

Anyway, LLM's let me get about 10-20% more done per week. Most time is still spent designing stuff and evaluating solutions. The above workflow doesn't work for non-trivial modules. It just saves time on boilerplate. It's plagiarism the same way IDE auto-complete and copy / paste (from the same codebase) are.
by solardev | 2025-04-22 14:46:00+00:00
If you add a few cups of water to the orange juice, it'll be much healthier. Because there would be no orange juice left, and thus way less sugar.

OJ isn't a health food, it's junk. Eat an orange if you must, or just drink water and pop a multivitamin if you're worried about that. But don't drink OJ. Certainly not every morning. Your gut and teeth will both be better off without it.

The supplements industry is mostly a sham. You don't need any fancy chemicals to function well. Just eat enough, but not too much, of a relatively balanced diet. Supplement it with a cheap multivitamin if you're worried. That's all you need. Get some exercise, minimize stress, and you'll be way healthier than any supplement addict.
by piva00 | 2025-04-22 14:46:32+00:00
Unreasonable if there are no alternatives to achieve higher education. You start solving the problem by cutting potential opportunities without no replacement scheme for it, only creating bigger problems.

There's no easy solution to this, it's structural, it's systemic, the model the USA uses for higher-ed funding is structurally unsound and unsustainable. Replacement the model can only be done through a measured policy change but I don't see much of that coming from the US in the past 10-15 years, it's mostly flailing around with no clear vision for what it wants to be in the future, just an everlasting chase for GDP growth no matter how, at some point this narrow objective comes crashing down.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-22 14:47:32+00:00
One way would be to make a "Kugelblitz". It works by concentrating a huge amount of energy in a very small space. Because of E=mc2, concentrating energy does the same thing as concentrating mass, and could create a black hole from which even the photons that created it can't escape, at least in theory.

In practice, probably impossible, or at least well beyond our current technological capabilities.
by kbolino | 2025-04-22 14:47:37+00:00
We're not talking about optical discs or backup tapes which usually get written in full in a single session. Hard drive storage in general use is constantly changing.

As such, fragmentation is always there; absolute disk sizes don't change the propensity for typical workloads to produce fragmentation. A modern file system is not merely a bucket of files, it is a database that manages directories, metadata, files, and free space. If you mix small and large directories, small and large files, creation and deletion of files, appending to or truncating from existing files, etc., you will get fragmentation. When you get close to full, everything gets slower. Files written early in the volume's life and which haven't been altered may remain fast to access, but creating new files will be slower, and reading those files afterward will be slower too. Large directories follow the same rules as larger files, they can easily get fragmented (or, if they must be kept compact, then there will be time spent on defragmentation). If your free space is spread across the volume in small chunks, and at 95% full it almost certainly will be, then the fact that the sum of it is 1 TB confers no benefit by dint of absolute size.

Even if you had SSDs accessed with NVMe, fragmentation would still be an issue, since the file system must still store lists or trees of all the fragments, and accessing those data structures still takes more time as they grow. But most NAS setups are still using conventional spinning-platter hard drives, where the effects of fragmentation are massively amplified. A 7200 RPM drive takes 8.33 ms to complete one rotation. No improvements in technology have any effect on this number (though there used to be faster-spinning drives on the market). The denser storage of modern drives improves throughput when reading sequential data, but not random seek times. Fragmentation increases the frequency of random seeks relative to sequential access. Capacity issues tend to manifest as performance cliffs, whereby operations which used to take e.g. 5 ms suddenly take 500 or 5000. Everything can seem fine one day and then not the next, or fine on some operations but terrible on others.

Of course, you should be free to (ab)use the things you own as much as you wish. But make no mistake, 5% free is deep into abuse territory.

Also, as a bit of an aside, a 20 TB volume split into 1 GB slabs means there's 20,000 slabs. That's about the same as the number of 512-byte sectors in a 10 MB hard drive, which was the size of the first commercially available consumer hard drive for the IBM PC in the late 1980s. That's just a coincidence of course, but I find it funny that the numbers are so close.

Now, I assume the slabs are allocated from the start of the volume forward, which means external slab fragmentation is nonexistent (unless slabs can also be freed). But unless you plan to create no more than 20,000 files, each exactly 1 GB in size, in the root directory only, and never change anything on the volume ever again, then internal slab fragmentation will occur all the same.
by keyringlight | 2025-04-22 14:47:53+00:00
I'm interested to see how this affects Microsoft's messaging to some win10 users for "you need to buy a new PC to continue to be updated" while there's still a significant [0] amount of people to switch in 5-6 months.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...