MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taraindara | 2025-04-17 22:44:31+00:00
> Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made

I’ve done this for all social media, and more recently deleted all social apps. I’ll go on Facebook sometime through the web browser, mainly for marketplace.

Facebook was the first app I tested disabling notifications on. This had to be about 10 years ago, I noticed they would give me a new notification every 5-10 minutes. I was addicted to checking what the notification as. Usually garbage, and the less I used Facebook the more garbage the notice. Since I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything but marketplace my entire feed is now garbage. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with me now and its former history.

Having no social apps has been a hard change to get used to. But I feel so much better not feeling like I need to scroll.

I only scroll on hacker news now… which is easy because the top page doesn’t get that many updates in a day, and after several minutes of browsing “new” I’m satiated I’ve seen all I might want to see
by xenadu02 | 2025-04-17 22:44:54+00:00
Fun fact: you can be the change you want to see!

I fill out all paper forms and typed dates as yyyy-MM-dd wherever possible. No one has ever been confused by it. Some have even copied it.

I also give units in metric sometimes and set some of my thermometers to C to help build my intuition for what different C temps feel like.

On the other hand I'm setting up a hobby machine shop at home and trying to use metric or a metric lathe would involve too much swimming upstream so alas - it is all imperial stuff.
by noefingway | 2025-04-17 22:46:15+00:00
I have a substantial investment in both Dewalt and Milwaukee tools that I use regularly in my farming operation. I definitely prefer the Milwaukee tools to the Dewalt. I recently bought a 6" Milwaukee chain saw for light duty cutting. I get a lot of cuts before I have to change batteries. Also the torque in the Milwaukee 3/4" impact gun is truly amazing and the battery lasts through a lot of bolt removals.
by danenania | 2025-04-17 22:46:28+00:00
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

> Oddly, in the default mode out of box it does not want to discuss the plan with me but just jumps to implementation.

It should be starting you out in "chat mode". Do you mean that you're prompted to begin implementation at the end of the chat response? You can just choose the 'no' option if that's the case and keep chatting.

Once you're in 'tell mode', you can always switch back to chat mode with the '\chat' command if you don't want anything to be implemented.

> And when it's done writing code it aggressively wants me to decide whether to apply -- there's no option to discuss changes, rewind back to planning, etc. Just "APPLY OR REJECT!!!". Even Ctrl-C does not work! Not what I expected from software focused on planning...

This is just a menu to make the commands you're most likely to need after a set of changes is finished. If you press 'enter', you'll return back to the repl prompt where you can discuss the changes (switch back to chat mode with \chat if you only want to discuss, rather than iterate), or use commands (like \rewind) as needed.
by ahdanggit | 2025-04-17 22:47:39+00:00
I am also wondering the same thing, how can they even hold him?

He was charged with a DUI (not even an ICE matter) other than that his crime seems to be that he doesn't speak English and lived in Mexico most of his life?

Also... shouldn't you be assumed to be a citizen (e.g. innocent) unless proven otherwise? Have we turned in to Nazi Germany (Papers please...)

Did they pass an executive order voiding birth right citizenship and I missed it? I know they were trying to...
by jkaplowitz | 2025-04-17 22:47:54+00:00
By data privacy risks I meant the risk of a breach, compromise, or other leak of the database of verified IDs. No information about the IDs are generally collected in a corner shop, at least when there's no suspicion of fraud; they're just viewed temporarily and returned. Not only do online service providers retain a lot of information about their required verifications, they do so for hugely more people than a typical corner shop.

Also, corner shop cameras don't generally retain data for nearly as long as typical online age verification laws would require. Depending on the country and the technical configuration, physical surveillance cameras retain data for anywhere from 48 hours to 1 year. Are you really saying that most online age verification laws worldwide require or allow comparably short retention periods? (This might actually be the case for the UK law, if I'm correctly reading Ofcom's corresponding guidance, but I doubt that's true for most of the similar US state laws.)
by btilly | 2025-04-17 22:48:37+00:00
There are several ways to make this rigorous.

An explicit epsilon-delta style proof is not that hard to produce, it's just a little messy. What you have to do is, for a given x and 0<ε, pick N large enough that you can bound the tail after x^N/N! onwards with a geometric series adding up to at most ε/2. Now pick n large enough enough that the sum of errors in the terms up to N is also bounded by ε/2. From that n on, (1+x/n)^n is within ε of the power series for e^x.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-17 22:49:56+00:00
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...

Note that this link says absolutely nothing to support the sentence before it. Which isn't a surprise given that limiting the number of bidders could hardly drive the prices those bidders are paying up. But the issue isn't even mentioned.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-17 22:50:43+00:00
Regardless of whether one would necessarily argue China's ownership of Tiktok is worse than Musk's ownership of Twitter, is you're in the US, China is a foreign adversary. Any country would be nuts to have one of their biggest media distribution channels (especially the way Tiktok's algorithm works) be owned by their largest rival.
by JPKab | 2025-04-17 22:51:39+00:00
True. They are ONLY good when they have competition. The sense of complacency that creeps in is so obvious as a customer.

To this day, the Google Home (or is it called Nest now?) speaker is the only physical product i've ever owned where it lost features over time. I used to be able to play the audio of a Youtube video (like a podcast) through it, but then Google decided that it was very very important that I only be able to play a Youtube video through a device with a screen, because it is imperative that I see a still image when I play a longform history podcast.

Obviously, this is a silly and highly specific example, but it is emblematic of how they neglect or enshittify massive swathes of their products as soon as the executive team loses interest and puts their A team on some shiny new object.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 22:52:59+00:00
libuv is more or less abstraction around an event loop for async i/o right?

The BEAM is also more or less an abstraction around an event loop for async i/o. If you want async i/o in nifs, I think you want to integrate with BEAM's event loop. Inside NIFs, I think you want to use enif_select [1] (and friends), available since OTP 20 originally from 2017-06-21. In a port driver, you'd use driver_select [2] which I think has been around forever --- there's mentions of changes in R13 which I think was mostly release 2009-11-20 (that may have been R13B though).

[1] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_nif.html#enif_selec...

[2] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_driver.html#driver_...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-17 22:53:48+00:00
All restaurants and food service facilities use “rinse agents” or “drying agents”; they simply never have the time or capacity to air-dry dishes and silverware, so eff whatever the training courses tell us to do, from the County Department of Public Health. Just slather everything with chemicals and make sure nobody can smell them from the dining room or taste it on a spoon.

And yes they’re toxic. Of course they are! Next, let us coat all surfaces with antimicrobial toxins, starting with everything in the hospital, and your infant’s diaper-changing stations, and your stapler at work.

It will be just like Nethack, where you open a spellbook to read it, but it is “coated with contact poison!” so I hope your Unicorn Horn is available.
by biophysboy | 2025-04-17 22:53:54+00:00
Brains are low-frequency, energy-efficient, organic, self-reproducing, asynchronous, self-repairing, and extremely highly connected (thousands of synapses). If AGI is defined as "approximate humans", I think its gonna be a while.

That said, I don't think computers need to be human to have an emergent intelligence. It can be different in kind if not in degree.
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 22:54:07+00:00
Why do you believe AGI is important for the future of humanity? That's probably the most controversial part of your post but you don't even bother to defend it. Just because it features in some significant (but hardly universal) chunk of Sci Fi doesn't mean we need it in order to have a great future, nor do I see any evidence that it would be a net positive to create a whole different form of sentience.
by titzer | 2025-04-17 22:54:27+00:00
Who hired you and why are they paying you money?

I don't want to be a hater, but holy moley, that sounds like the absolute laziest possible way to solve things. Do you have training, skills, knowledge?

This is an HN comment thread and all, but you're doing yourself no favors. Software professionals should offer their employers some due diligence and deliver working solutions that at least they understand.
Ask HN: What are the best books on talking to users?
by terrellbm | 2025-04-17 22:54:28+00:00
Hi HN!

With AI making it easier than ever to create software, it feels more important than ever to understand how to speak to users

That said, I feel like there's a ton of content online on how to build, but far fewer recommendations on how to figure out what users want and what to build that avoids confirmation bias, false signals, etc.

I'm looking for recommendations on insightful books (or other resources) that others have personally found helpful for developing user interviewing skills, framing good questions, and generally becoming better at interacting with real-world users.

What has helped you bridge that gap between the code/AI/product creation side, and actually communicating with users?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! :)
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-17 22:54:31+00:00
It is a shameful exercise in grandstanding, but the article cited by Ars about the difficulty in transporting the shuttle is, in my opinion, wrong.

When they needed to move the shuttle-sized Muon G-2 magnet ring from Brookhaven to Fermilab, they carefully packaged it up and sent it by barge for 85% of the trip. The east coast and gulf coast portions used the intracoastal waterway, which is exactly the same route they would use for the shuttle. And yes, that magnet ring is a hell of a lot more fragile than a shuttle.

I’m sorry to say, but transportation is not at all a barrier to such a move.

Here is a photo of it passing St. Louis. You can see how tiny it looks compared to the kind of barge they’d use:

https://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/bigmove/images/gallery/20130719-St...
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-04-17 22:54:38+00:00
Parenting was the answer to kids not wearing their seatbelt, and getting maimed and killed by very survivable accidents. Simply teach your kids to wear their seatbelt. Yet seatbelt laws reduced fatality (8%) and serious injury (9%) in kids. It follows that "piling" such a law "on top", one that people decried as unconstitutional, was a better idea than deferring to the parents.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13408/w134...
by steine65 | 2025-04-17 22:54:45+00:00
This is great. If you ever wrote about your entire setup I'd love to read it. Got a few new ideas from your post. To anyone reading, the most helpful tool for setting up my homelab is the community helper-scripts (formerly tteck, RIP). Those have saved me soooo much time, and showed me best practices in setup, and the list of scripts give you a good idea of tools that are commonly used.
by nonchalantsui | 2025-04-17 22:54:51+00:00
There is no research that states such. Most online articles are referencing a study done on professional dishwashers, in which they complete their task within 2 minutes and some rinse aid was still found on the dishes.

Home dishwashers, the ones that take 4 hours on average, are not going to result in the same thing. Claiming such would be like claiming you won't use dish soap since technically it can still be left on your dishes when quickly washed.
by achierius | 2025-04-17 22:57:24+00:00
Re.: self driving cars -- vision systems have all sorts of problems sure, but on the other hand that _is_ what we use. The most successful platforms use Lidar + vision -- vision can handle the streetlights, lidar detects objects, etc.

And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.
by jfil | 2025-04-17 22:57:24+00:00
It's neat that folks like John Southward [1] and John Earhart [2] left us with several how-to books for printing from the 1890s!

[1] https://archive.org/details/artisticprinting00sout/page/26/m... [2] https://archive.org/details/colorprintertrea00earh/page/92/m...
by vimus | 2025-04-17 22:57:36+00:00
> In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events.

On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.

Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).

This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.

For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.

Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.

It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.
by johnwalkr | 2025-04-17 22:57:45+00:00
Too bad this wasn't real, especially since at the end of the day, all these things are just using 18560 cells.

I tried to standardize on one system (Hikoki 18/36V). This was great as they use the same battery across consumer and pro products. But I moved from Japan to Europe and they are far less available, and more expensive. Now I buy Parkside stuff (Lidl brand) and they are probably a tier lower but better value and also use the same battery across consumer and pro products.

Anyway I felt lucky that I could buy both low and high(er) end cordless tools in two countries/brands and also find adapters to use both batteries in both sets of tools. Both systems don't have any sort of data handshake between tool and battery. Going forward, this will probably increasingly be the case so I would love for a standard to be enforced.
by imiric | 2025-04-17 22:57:54+00:00
You're implying that smart people are somehow inherently ethical, but were manipulated by unethical (and less smart?) people. Whereas some of the least ethical people in history were also very smart. Intelligence is practically a requirement for truly abhorrent behavior.

Greed is humanity's greatest weakness. When faced with the opportunity of unimaginable wealth, most people would sacrifice their ethics and morals, assuming they had any to begin with.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-04-17 22:58:19+00:00
In this case, Google is a large investor in Anthropic.

I agree that giving away access to expensive models long term is not a good idea on several fronts. Personally, I subscribe to Gemini Advanced and I pay for using the Gemini APIs.

EDIT: a very good deal, at $10/month is https://apps.abacus.ai/chatllm/ that gives you access to almost all commercial models as well as the best open weight models. I have never come close at all to using my monthly credits with them. If you like to experiment with many models the service is a lot of fun.
by grepLeigh | 2025-04-17 22:58:49+00:00
"Give yourself permission" here means acknowledging you're doing a "good enough" job (for now) instead of a "perfect" job, and not beating yourself up about it in the short term. The Wiki article on self-compassion [1] has more context on the therapeutic value of practicing self-compassion and the impact on measurements of life satisfaction/happiness, curiosity, resilience, etc.

Depending on the task/behavior, you may carry the same attitude into the medium/long term, OR figure out how to course-correct medium/long term to align with your values. E.g., if one of your core values is militant conservation of water, either because it's expensive or one of the disappearing resources on Earth, you might strategize ways to conserve your energy to do the best possible dishwasher-loading job every day. That's what I was getting at when I said these type of tasks are "microcosms" because sometimes they reveal misalignment of values.

Why do you say "therapist" here (with the air quotes)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-compassion
by antonvs | 2025-04-17 22:59:10+00:00
Without specifics it's difficult to evaluate what you're saying.

What are some examples of the timeless mistakes in those programs? I think X was a pretty good effort, it's just that it essentially ossified and has been left behind compared to some more modern systems (although I'm using it right now.) Sendmail approach to dynamic configuration was sub-optimal. But these aren't examples of mistakes that I see recapitulated often.
by skissane | 2025-04-17 22:59:22+00:00
> But from my point of view, it's more of a demonstration of the problem with governments that are designed to have a very strong executive. Eventually you get an executive that really sucks, and when that happens they can do a lot of damage.

The presidential system, widespread in Latin America, has an inherent tendency to produce caudillos. The US had the good fortune of escaping that fate for decade after decade, but maybe with Trump its luck has finally run out.

The parliamentary system, as used in the rest of the Anglosphere and most of Western Europe – it doesn't require a monarchy, see parliamentary republics such as Germany and Ireland – avoids this problem by putting greater limits on executive power – Prime Ministers derive their authority from the legislature and can be removed by it with a simple majority; while the US cabinet is essentially an advisory body to the President, Westminster cabinets are collegial bodies in which the Prime Minister is just one vote among many and can be outvoted by their colleagues.

> One of the biggest influences on my thinking from listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a point he made about hereditary monarchy, that among its problems is that sometimes the next ruler in line is just a total dud, and you're just stuck with them.

"Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)
by the_gipsy | 2025-04-17 22:59:25+00:00
I know it's bad to say this - lile telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that someone truly has no inner monologue and at the same is capable of expressing complex ideas in writing or speech.

What IS there then, if it's not quiet like the author describes?

Could it be a lack of introspection? Have you been examined by any kind of specialist or is it self diagnosed?
by thimabi | 2025-04-17 23:00:00+00:00
I find it baffling that Google offers such impressive models through the API and even the free AI Studio with fine-grained control, yet the models used in the Gemini app feel much worse.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Gemini Advanced on my Workspace account. There, the models think for shorter times, provide shorter outputs, and even their context window is far from the advertised 1 million tokens. It makes me think that Google is intentionally limiting the Gemini app.

Perhaps the goal is to steer users toward the API or AI Studio, with the free tier that involves data collection for training purposes.
by mark336 | 2025-04-17 23:00:15+00:00
Part of the problem is the Capitalist system. Google shares are traded on the market. They have an obligation to grow every year. Sure when your a small hungry startup you can grow fast, but when you are the size of Google and try the same thing you inevitably get into these types of problems where you try to dominate, but you are also the biggest player because of pressure from your shareholders.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-17 23:00:34+00:00
ICAO compliant ID cards (aka passports) and many national ID cards already are smartcards with powerful crypto processors.

Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.

Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
by bhl | 2025-04-17 23:00:34+00:00
It's cheap but also lazy. It sometimes generates empty strings or empty arrays for tool calls, and then I just re-route the request to a stronger model for the tool call.

I've spent a lot of time on prompts and tool-calls to get Flash models to reason and execute well. When I give the same context to stronger models like 4o or Gemini 2.5 Pro, it's able to get to the same answers in less steps but at higher token cost.

Which is to be expected: more guardrails for smaller, weaker models. But then it's a tradeoff; no easy way to pick which models to use.

Instead of SQL optimization, it's now model optimization.
by hermitShell | 2025-04-17 23:00:52+00:00
That’s an awesome point, and honestly I hope lawmakers start to dig into advertising as an industry in general. Hate being exposed to ads and the only alternative is to pay to avoid them. Should be considered predatory and limited in scope somehow. Big Tech can just focus on good products, please. It’s not just preference, it’s and outcome of the final analysis of incentives in society, so S and B could foresee it so many years ago
by gertlex | 2025-04-17 23:02:44+00:00
It is unsurprising that it varies by country, etc. Below is pure speculation while eating a snack:

Likely dishwashers for the NZ market are designed to actually spend sufficient time heating the water.

My impression from watching the TC videos a while ago is that at least in the US, (many) dishwashers probably only do a insufficient time interval of adding more heat to the water.

It makes sense that different markets developed different ways; the brands that optimize for the local trends (cold vs hot water) can skimp on some features and have lower costs.