MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abletonlive | 2025-04-17 20:47:27+00:00
> Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves.

You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the state of society and technology. It’s not the other way around. What you’re observing is not profound, it’s literally how the writers approach their process for the show.

In fact, you’re doing this weird thing where you make it seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all the observations about tech and society, when it was clearly the other way around.

The criticism from the thread you’re referencing is that their approach is too on the nose and the villains are cartoonish. There’s no subtlety or even anything interesting anymore in the latest seasons. A critique on software subscriptions? We’ve been doing that since it was invented.

Those are fair criticisms.

What’s missing from black mirror, this article, and your perspective is how much social media has benefited everybody. How many jobs has it created? How many brand new careers and small businesses exist only because of social media? It’s an entire economy at this point. The good and bad effects of democratization of information dissemination.

There’s hardly an interesting analysis or critique of the actual current state of tech & society because you’re out here looking for the bad and ignoring the good. Much like black mirror is doing. Its main goal is to be as shocking as possible. That’s why in the thronglets episode, which I did enjoy, there was so much pointless gore. Yes, the point was that the throng had to see what humans are capable of, but there’s no reason to show all the gore associated with drilling through your head or dismembering a dead body. All of that is bottom of the barrel shock value stuff, which is ultimately what black mirror has devolved into.
by nyanpasu64 | 2025-04-17 20:47:30+00:00
Frankly I'm scared by governments and corporations going "papers, please" for people to be allowed to access the Internet. On top of endangering privacy by tying pseudonymous online interactions to real-life ID and biometrics, attempts to block under-18 people from finding information or interacting online will only amplify how society regards them as not having rights. This will isolate people (especially gay and trans teens) living with abusive parents from finding support networks, and prevent them from learning (by talking to friends in different situations) that being beaten or emotionally put down by parents is abusive and traumatizing.

I know all too well that when you grow up you're psychologically wired to assume that the way the parents treated you is normal, and if they harmed you then you deserve to be hurt. I've made friends with and assisted many teens and young adults in unsafe living situations (and talked to people who grew up in fundamentalist religions and cults), and they're dependent on online support networks to recognize and cope with abuse, get advice, and seek help in dangerous situations.
by kazinator | 2025-04-17 20:48:09+00:00
All sorts of stuff containing no original ideas is copyrighted. It legally belongs to someone and they can license it to others, etc.

E.g. pop songs with no original chord progressions or melodies, and hackneyed lyrics are still copyrighted.

Plagiarized and uncopyrightable code is radioactive; it can't be pulled into FOSS or commercial codebases alike.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-17 20:49:31+00:00
It is a shame when people let current alliances override their actual thinking on general principles. I mean, it is necessary to make compromises for the sake of accomplishing things, but we should be aware of the fact that it is a compromise.

Also, I sort of wish the language around “big plans from the center of power” was more… nuanced I guess. Like we can believe that centralized organizations generally are not so bad for producing healthcare guidance but still not want them to make people’s healthcare decisions for them.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-17 20:49:47+00:00
There's been a complaint for several decades that "AI can never succeed" - because when, say, expert systems are developed from AI research, and they become capable of doing useful things, then the nay-sayer say "That's not AI, that's just expert systems".

This is somewhat defensible, because what the non-AI-researcher means by AI - which may be AGI - is something more than expert systems by themselves can deliver. It is possible that "real AI" will be the combination of multiple approaches, but so far all the reductionist approaches (that expert systems, say, are all that it takes to be an AI) have proven to be inadequate compared to what the expectations are.

The GP may have been riffing off of this "that's not AI" issue that goes way back.
by ac29 | 2025-04-17 20:50:08+00:00
A lot of Kurzweil's predictions are nowhere close to coming correct though.

For example, he thought by 2019 we'd have millions of nanorobots in our blood, fighting disease and improving cognition. As near as I can tell we are not tangibly closer to that than we were when he wrote about it 25 years ago. By 2030, he expected humans to be immortal.
by yibg | 2025-04-17 20:51:16+00:00
Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because:

1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI

Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.
by neilv | 2025-04-17 20:51:27+00:00
FWIW, I can confirm that user 9283409232 didn't make that up. I heard that multiple reputable places, years ago.

And it was believable, given a history of genuine but inept attempts by some to address real societal problems. (As well as given the history of fake attempts to solve problems for political points for "doing something". And also given the history of "won't someone think of the children" disingenuous pretexts often used by others to advance unrelated goals.) Basically, no one is surprised when many governments do something that seems nonsensical.

So, accusing someone of making up a story of a government doing something odd in this space might be hasty.

I suspect better would be to give a quick check and then "I couldn't find a reference to that; do you have a link?"
by antonvs | 2025-04-17 20:51:29+00:00
I was interested in how this compares in a kind of absolute sense. For comparison, an optimized C hello world program gave these results using `perf` on my Dell XPS 13 laptop:

0.000636230 seconds time elapsed 0.000759000 seconds user 0.000000000 seconds sys

That's 36,800% faster. Hand-written assembly was very slightly slower. Using the standard library for output instead of a syscall brought it down to 20,900% faster.

(Yes I used percentages to underscore how big the difference is. It's 368x and 209x respectively. That's huge.)

Begrudgingly, here are the standard Python numbers:

real 0m0.019s user 0m0.015s sys 0m0.004s

About 1230% faster than the sandbox, i.e. 12.3x. About an order of magnitude, which is typical for these kinds of exercises.
by pesus | 2025-04-17 20:52:08+00:00
I worked at a Pizza Hut in college that had one that washed a full load of dishes in just a few minutes. I'm blanking on the exact time, but I'm almost certain it was under 10 minutes. It got extremely hot, so it probably wouldn't work for a lot of dishes people have at home, but it was very efficient! We saved at least a few hours of labor a day from it, and an unquantifiable amount of sanity.

It wasn't designed like a normal home dishwasher, it was open on all sides and you would slide a rack of dishes under the top part of it, pull a lever, and the dishwasher walls would come down around it and start the washing.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-17 20:52:18+00:00
Nobody has really talked about what I think is an advantage just as powerful as the custom chips: Google Books. They already won a landmark fair use lawsuit against book publishers, digitized more books than anyone on earth, and used their Captcha service to crowdsource its OCR. They've got the best* legal cover and all of the best sources of human knowledge already there. Then Youtube for video.

The chips of course push them over the top. I don't know how much Deep Research is costing them but it's by far the best experience with AI I've had so far with a generous 20/day rate limit. At this point I must be using up at least 5-10 compute hours a day. Until about a week ago I had almost completely written off Google.

* For what it's worth, I don't know. IANAL
by throwaway23597 | 2025-04-17 20:52:34+00:00
Windmills? They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.

- Donald J. Trump
by kybernetikos | 2025-04-17 20:52:43+00:00
Of course! Fairy tales for children are how we communicate some of our best understandings of what it means to live a good life.

Many important things in life are fictions or rely on fictions - money, nations, property, family, art, justice, legitimacy, banks. All of them are fairytales. And like a fairy in Peter Pan, belief can make them real, powerful facts of our world while lack of belief can destroy them.

It works too - I know lots of real people who make the world a better place because of the fairy tales they choose to believe.
by mmaunder | 2025-04-17 20:52:46+00:00
Agreed. Once they dial in the training for sheets it's going to be incredible. I'm already using notebooklm to upload finance PDFs, then having it generate tabular data and copypasta into sheets, but it's a garage solution compared to just telling it to create or update a sheet with parsed data from other sheets, PDFs, docs, etc.

And as far as gmail goes, I periodically try to ask it to unsubscribe from everything marketing related, and not from my own company, but it's not even close to being there. I think there will continue to be a gap in the market for more aggressive email integration with AI, given how useless email has become. I know A16Z has invested in a startup working on this. I doubt Gmail will integrate as deep as is possible, so the opportunity will remain.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-17 20:52:46+00:00
That's how my textbook did it as well (well, it defined e as ln(e) = 1, but only because it introduced e before exp).

The problem with this approach is that, since we were already introduced to exponents and logarithms in algebra but via different definitions, it always left this unanswered question in my head about how we knew these two definitions were the same, since everyone quickly glossed over that fact.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-04-17 20:52:47+00:00
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could

No way. Not if you're washing with a scrub sponge and scraping the corners of everything. The argument for the dishwasher is that you're not using an old sponge. If your sponge is not nasty, washing by hand should be as good or better.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-17 20:52:57+00:00
> Even isolating yourself from society like a hermit is still a political decision

That is a nonsensical definition of that term. It implies that literally any action you take falls into the set "political" instead of outside of it. That defeats the purpose of the term. The point of qualifiers is to differentiate between different sorts of things.

Obviously the intention of the person using such a term is to distinguish between things. Thus such a rebuttal amounts to intellectual dishonesty by intentionally misinterpreting what was said.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-17 20:53:27+00:00
>You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?

Because you seem to think you're owed something 'back' when in fact the people you're asking something 'back' weren't people that you paid SS to.

What's more accurate is that SS is you paying the elderly back for their investment, not that you somehow create a debt for the children because you paid SS to the elderly. Your position there made zero sense.

Any debt you think you're owed 'back' from children who will pay you SS would be created when the children actually received something from you -- i.e. being raised, schooled, etc. Not created because you paid a 3rd party.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-17 20:53:48+00:00
Issues I've noticed when running it against more threads:

- don't use Legacy voices as they seem to be of much lower quality (sounds like someone is calling in from an international landline)

- when the same poster appears many times, it gets tedious to hear them restate who they are. I think after the first 3, we should recognize the voice so that's not necessary anymore

Feature requests I'll add:

- emphasize quotes better

- add audio chapter marks if possible, so it's possible to skip ahead

- attach a speaker's voice to the relevant voice in the 11Labs account if there's a voice with the same name as the username

- add sound effects if people write down sound effects in their comments (this seems tough)

Anything I'm missing?
by derelicta | 2025-04-17 20:54:14+00:00
We have an anonymous forum where we can ask questions and get anonymous answers as well. I'm very intrigued to ask my lecturers what they think of us.

Now, I am not from the US, so this sort of pressure doesn't apply as much to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if the this sword of damocles that is student debt hovering above students heads influenced students behaviours.

If failing a year meant raking up 30k USD in debt, then yes, I would cheat my way through university too. Because now the risk associated with failing are just too high. One failed calculus class could cascade into a failed year, or a full drop-out, which could translate into possibly decades of poverty, if not much worse.
by PeterWhittaker | 2025-04-17 20:54:39+00:00
Great presentation. I've been writing bash for waaaay too long, and, while I nodded and said yup, yup, a few times, I also learned some new tricks, so thank you!

The social graces having been observed, if you were to update this presentation to reflect modern bash, and especially reference variables, what would be your top 3 additions?

(I am a big fan of reference variables. They make it possible to, among other things, do some funky things that would otherwise require liberal use of eval, which I eschew. Figuring out how to ensure that the target of a reference variable was in fact an associative array while running under `set -u` was a trick of which I am proud. Note: what I did works and isn't totally ugly, there may be a better way, YMMV, IANAL, etc.)

Second Q, if you will permit: Given the memory leaks in associative array management that have been corrected over the last several years, what are your thoughts on a) whether or not bash should have ever gone that route, and, potentially more controversially, b) the current state of bash maintenance?

(I'm not going to ask about embedding multiple levels of ${...#...} or ${...#...}, because even if it worked, readability would tend to 0 very, very quickly. I'd rather be repetitive and readable and maintainable. Well. Most of the time.)
by _mlbt | 2025-04-17 20:55:39+00:00
I'm not saying they don't deserve some form of due process, but they are not entitled to full on trials that citizens get.

Due process could be as simple as can you prove that you have a legal right to be in this country? If yes, you can stay, if no, then you get deported. He absolutely should have had due process prior to being deported. I am not arguing against that.

From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
by bityard | 2025-04-17 20:55:43+00:00
One Christmas, I was given a shiny new 14.4V Craftsman NiCad drill with two batteries. These were not cheap and I was young and broke and very grateful for the thoughtful gift. It worked great and I enjoyed it immensely. For about a year.

After that, neither pack would hold a charge long enough to be useful. Which I thought was pretty disgusting. Come to find out, this was basically the normal standard to which Craftsman had finally sunk. Rather than do the rational thing and throw it out, I held onto it with with a grudge and a goal of actually making it useful again one day.

A few years back, I found a decent deal on brand-new 18650 high-current LiFePo4 batteries from a reputable supplier ($2.50 each, sadly NLA) and bought up a bunch to remake the packs for this drill and a couple others I had laying around for similar reasons. I added an inexpensive but well-made BMS (which I tested thoroughly before implementing) and the voltage was upped to 16V nominal for a little extra kick. Don't ask how I spot-welded the tabs to the batteries.

4.5 years later and these drills are still going strong, I use them at least once a week on both small and large projects. They are not speed demons or torque monsters, but they drill all the holes I ask them to. Would I have been better off economically throwing these ones in the garbage and just buying the cheapest thing from Harbor Freight? Maybe.

But spite, it turns out, is its own reward and I would do it all over again a heartbeat.
by parliament32 | 2025-04-17 20:57:17+00:00
More like 90-120s. There's the type that close from the top (expensive) and the conveyor type (more expensive), but they're incredibly fast, mostly because they blast near-boiling water at pressure-washer velocities. They also don't typically have a "drying" cycle -- because the dishes are so superheated they dry themselves in another half minute. Downside is no plastics or anything else meltable. See https://www.cafemutfak.com/en/blog/content/industrial-dishwa...
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-17 20:57:27+00:00
Someone raised the point in another recent HN LLM thread that the primary productivity benefit of LLMs in programing is the copyright laundering.

The argument went that the main reason the now-ancient push for code reuse failed to deliver anything close to its hypothetical maximum benefit was because copyright got in the way. Result: tons and tons of wheel-reinvention, like, to the point that most of what programmers do day to day is reinvent wheels.

LLMs essentially provide fine-grained contextual search of existing code, while also stripping copyright from whatever they find. Ta-da! Problem solved.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-17 20:57:57+00:00
> The new technique involved repeatedly twisting a sample of 304 austenitic stainless steel in a machine in certain ways. This led to spatially grading the cells that made up the metal, resulting in the build-up of what the team describes as a submicron-scale, three-dimensional, anti-crash wall.

Interesting. Not a metallurgist but this takes advantage of stainless steels natural tendency to work harden. e.g. if you have ever broken a paperclip or other piece of steel by bending it back and forth until it fatigues, fractures, and beaks off. That happens in soft standard steels like A36 (edit forgot to finish this...) However, in stainless steel instead of a fracture forming at the bends crease, it hardens. As you try to bend it again, it bends in a new place as the original crease has hardened.

> Such improvements, the team claims, could allow products made using the metal to be up to 10,000 times more resistant to fatigue.

Very bold claim that if true is a game changer. My concern is how does this process scale to large complex structural pieces? Assuming since this internal structure will be ruined by annealing it must be performed after final shaping of the material. Welding should not be effected, especially low heat effect zone processes like laser and electron beam as you account for material alteration from welding during design.
by morsch | 2025-04-17 20:57:57+00:00
I used a commercial dishwasher in an Airbnb that had the fittings for a catering operation. It had an initial heat up time of like twenty minutes, after that each cycle of dishes took like... two minutes? Maybe five.

But it was much worse at actually cleaning dishes than a regular home dishwasher. I never prerinse at home, but you really had to with this thing. Maybe it was just crap, but some searching around it seems like that's just how they're designed to operate.

Anyway they use a shit-ton of power and energy (wired for 5 KW, 2-3 kWh per cycle), they're loud, it's not something you'd want in your home kitchen.
by aylmao | 2025-04-17 20:58:02+00:00
> You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time.

There might be bias here if one remembers one's own teenage years, because I'm sure many teenagers _think_ their parents don't have influence over them. If you ask the parents though I'm sure many would agree aren't fully in control, but do notice they have a lot of influence still.

Personally, the older I grow, the more I realize how much influence in general my parents actually had over me.
by kriro | 2025-04-17 20:58:18+00:00
Agreed. One of Google's big advantages is the data access and integrations. They are also positioned really well for the "AI as entertainment" sector with youtube which will be huge (imo). They also have the knowledge in adtech and well injecting adds into AI is an obvious play. As is harvesting AI chat data.

Meta and Google are the long term players to watch as Meta also has similar access (Insta, FB, WhatsApp).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-17 20:58:47+00:00
Yeah, the hairiest part is probably the existence and uniqueness of the antiderivative, followed by the existence of an inverse for exp(1). In fact, I can't quite recall whether the book defined it as a Riemann integral or an antiderivative, but of course it had a statement of the FTC which would connect the two. (It was just a high-school textbook, so it tended to gloss over the finer points of existence and uniqueness.)
by ac29 | 2025-04-17 20:59:00+00:00
I wonder how much this really matters. For me my dishwasher is far enough from the hot water heater that it generally takes several gallons for the water to run hot. But the wash cycle is 2+ hours long and uses very minimal water (~3 gallons/cycle). Even if I preheated the lines using the tap near the washer, it wouldnt even be lukewarm by the end of the wash cycle.
by ogogmad | 2025-04-17 20:59:37+00:00
Did you eventually realise that the expression a^b should be understood to "really" mean exp(b * ln(a)), at least in the case that b might not be an integer?

I think even in complex analysis, the above definition a^b := exp(b ln(a)) makes sense, since the function ln() admits a Riemann surface as its natural domain and the usual complex numbers as its codomain.

[EDIT] Addressing your response:

> Calculus glosses over the case when a is negative

The Riemann surface approach mostly rescues this. When "a" is negative, and b is 1/3 (for instance), choose "a" = (r, theta) = (|a|, 3 pi). This gives ln(a) = ln |a| + i (3 pi). Then a^b = exp((|a| + i 3 pi) / 3) = exp(ln |a|/3 + i pi) = -|a|^(1/3), as desired.

Notice though that I chose to represent "a" using theta=3pi, instead of let's say 5pi.
by primitivesuave | 2025-04-17 21:00:13+00:00
The UI is awesome, amazing work! However, arbitrary precision implies that there is no fixed upper limit to the number of digits - simple tests like `0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3` and `2^53 == 2^53 + 1` (both produce "false") indicates you're still using IEEE 754 double precision floats.

If "arbitrary precision" is not as important to you as "high precision", a 128 bit decimal has enough precision for 99% of real-world applications.