MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-19 01:55:52+00:00
"Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable (..)"

It's annoying (and ignorant) author lumps aircraft & boats into 1 category.

Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.

But there's also short-haul flights. Routes with say, 15..20min between take-off & landing. For such flights, electric aircraft is entirely feasible. And being done (successfully) in some places. Not to mention eg. training aircraft.

Boats: veeerry different. Weight isn't a biggie, neither is volume. And there's short-haul ferries, long(er)-haul ferries, cruise ships, 10000+ container giants, tug boats, recreational boats that hardly ever leave lakes/canals/rivers, sailboats with engine that's mostly used while entering/leaving port but not out @ sea, etc etc.

Each of these have their own economics. Where they're used and (energy) infrastructure there, is also a factor. Container giant on Asia-Europe route? Good luck electrifying that. Small tourist boat doing 20..30km/day in a natural park? Electric is a no-brainer, today.

And there's existing vessels vs. newly built ones. Most boats get old (like aircraft), more so than cars. Retrofits can be difficult/expensive. But for yet-to-build boats, different story.

Lumping that all in 1 aircraft/boat category, and claiming "uneconomical!" is just dumb.
by manoDev | 2025-04-19 01:56:32+00:00
> LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history.

See, that’s what the article is about.

Saying LLM is on the same level of steam power, the computer, the internet, airplanes, etc. when the technology hasn’t even been around enough to have real impact, and all I read is extrapolation about how everything will be based on it “in the future” — that’s the definition of hype.
by roenxi | 2025-04-19 01:57:38+00:00
> Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"?

I doubt anyone claimed 10-15 years specifically, but it does actually seem like a pretty reasonable claim that without databases progress will be a snails pace and with databases it will be more of a horses trot. I imagine the human body requires a fair amount of data to be organised to analyse and simulate all the parts and I'd recommend storing all that in some sort of database.

This might count as unsatisfying semantics, but there is a huge leap going from physical ledgers and ad-hoc formats to organised and standardised data storage (ie, a database - even if it is just excel sheets that counts to me). Suddenly scientists can record and theorise on order(s) of magnitude more raw material and the results are interchangeable! That is a big deal and a necessary step to make the sort of progress we can make in modern times.

Regardless, it does seem fair to compare the AI boom to the renaissance or industrial revolution. We appear to be poking at the biggest thing to ever be poked in history.
by kragen | 2025-04-19 01:58:50+00:00
Generally not automatically, and not for civil lawsuits or for all crimes, and in the US expungement from court records does not obligate any third party to falsify newspaper archives, etc.: https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/50-s...

A recent law review article on the prospects of this so-called "right" under US law is https://mttlr.org/2020/02/why-the-right-to-be-forgotten-wont..., citing https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/420/469/ ("It is unconstitutional under the First Amendment to criminalize releasing the name of a rape victim or to permit a private right of action against the press for doing so."), and https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/12.... See also https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/13....
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-19 01:59:58+00:00
>I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey.

You said IQ by country doesn't exist. And i said, IQ is so pervasive it fucking does. You also referenced something completely off topic. Some random book claiming that because that random book is invalid the whole concept of IQ by country doesn't exist which is absolutely wrong.

>Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectively.

I'm well versed enough in IQ to know that even the first link on google is good enough to refute you. You don't have to believe me, but you can always do your own research to find out I'm right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM&list=PL_K7XH1AIG... this can help
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 02:00:06+00:00
The premise of that proposal is that the test scores are inaccurate as a result of the economic disparity, because people with less income have less resources to prepare for the test. That would apply in the case of an economic disparity because having more resources allows you to artificially receive a higher score. It's not about accepting someone with less merit out of charity but rather about adjusting for a measurement error.

But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.

Which is the reason doing the latter is controversial.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-19 02:00:28+00:00
I think you are describing the situation well. I would put myself in the bucket of equal opportunity. I prefer addressing the causes, and think poverty is a better proxy for the core issue than skin color, and doesn't have the collateral damage.

A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.

A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.

Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.

It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.

This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.

If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
by filoeleven | 2025-04-19 02:00:31+00:00
>>> By the way, Hillary and her cronies never accepted the 2016 election.

>> She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.

> She "conceded" then continued smearing Trump for years and literally called him illegitimate.

It's like the goalposts keep moving to try and get away from the bullshit, but there's always more up ahead...
by gus_massa | 2025-04-19 02:02:53+00:00
Stealing a comment by darknavi in a previous submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35945006 (68 points | May 2023 | 10 comments))

> I know videos aren't everyone's favorite format, but Zack (voidstarlab) has a great video on Hextraction and is just a fun person to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqz7ZDdP25A .
by WalterBright | 2025-04-19 02:03:20+00:00
I don't see any heritage of unix in CP/M, but I do see a heritage from DEC. Not an exact copy, of course.

> if I didn't tell you it had happened, you would never have known

That's right, and now I know. Thanks!

> My apologies if it sounded like I was blaming you for it.

Thank you. Apology accepted!
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-19 02:03:21+00:00
The moon is further away than you think. The Apollo mission architecture was a lot more feasible than others that have been considered. The current plan to use a Starship returns about the same payload with a much larger and taller vehicle that is inclined to tip over. You really want a landing pad.

Refueling from lunar materials might be possible but volatiles seem precious. The mission with that vehicle that makes the most sense to me is to land it with a full payload and use it for habitat, workshop, storage tanks or scrap metal.

Space tourism to a micro O’Neill colony in LEO decked out as a flashy space hotel seems more believable to me. I designed one that needs 15 Starship loads of LN2 for the atmosphere but that is fewer launches than they plan to put one Starship on the moon.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-19 02:05:23+00:00
It's funnily enough the opposite for me, people always give me weird looks when I say that Lovecraft is my favorite author to read when I'm anxious or stressed but there's something cathartic and honest about it.

"Cozy games" actually always unnerve me, they give me this uncanny valley feeling of "what are they trying to hide from me here, what am I not supposed to think about", like can I actually go and walk out from the farm or is this a Never Let me Go or Truman Show situation. Granted maybe this is a lesson of not having your kids grow up on Lovecraft but I've always found it hilarious how it makes me feel the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do
by saithound | 2025-04-19 02:05:43+00:00
OpenAI o3 and o4-mini are massive disappointments for me so far. I have a private benchmark of 10 proof-based geometric group theory questions that I throw at new models upon release.

Both new models gave inconsistent answers, always with wrong or fake proofs, or using assumptions that are not in the queation, and are often outright unsatisfiable.

The now inaccessible o3-mini was not great, but much better than o3 and o4-mini at these questions: o3-mini can give approximately correct proof sketches for half of them, whereas I can't get a single correct proof sketch out of o3 full. o4-mini performs slightly worse than o3-mini. I think the allegations that OpenAI cheated FrontierMath have unambiguously been proven correct by this release.
by martinald | 2025-04-19 02:06:43+00:00
Not really. Buses need to be charged whenever, not just overnight (it creates enormous logistical problems otherwise). A typical bus route running 5am to midnight say is not going to last with one charge, depending on length.

Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?

Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
by 9d | 2025-04-19 02:07:09+00:00
Somewhere in the world right now, someone is suffering immensely, unjustly, and with no hope of relief. This is always true at any given moment. How can we sit back and be happy when these forgotten people die daily? And statistics indicate they're probably living next door to each one of us. The status quo is not good. Do what you will, but I'm not going to pretend this life is a paradise.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-19 02:07:15+00:00
> I don’t know much about this stuff, so probably a silly question. Why the heck would Yale or Harvard need so much federal funding?

All universities are research institutions and the funding at issue are research grants.

> For how much students pay and how many wealthy donors they have, why are tax payers funding Yale?

Students pay basically for the costs associated with having students at the university, but that's not the primary function of the university.

> This is probably one of the rare times I support a funding cut.

Yeah, I mean, if you qant to slit the throat of progress in all fields of science, that makes a lot of sense.
by iDon | 2025-04-19 02:07:35+00:00
The name I recall from using it on a PDP 11/04 was 'Text Editor and Corrector' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

I vaguely recall it had a line-open / visual mode, like ex/vi, which we didn't use because we were on a dot-matrix line printer / teletype. The ADM-3A had the Ctrl key on the home line; this design made it easy for editors from that period (vi, emacs) to make heavy use of Ctrl.

Thanks to those who posted bits of TECO - I'd forgotten how the character movement was similar to vi. A fellow student in our CS honours year had a semester thesis project analysing the grammar of vi commands and specifying it in a formal grammar. The combination of action x movement is powerful, simple and concise.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-19 02:09:39+00:00
> The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.

Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they can do the job.

That's what people tend to... conveniently overlook... in these conversations. No one is hiring "the best" or only accepting "the best" into their college or whatever else. They pick a good one from the pool of candidates they have available.

Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-19 02:11:56+00:00
I don't know why you think this; the asn1-rust crate is in fact used to implement not only X.509 certificate decoding[1] but also path validation[2].

Edit: Here's an example of a CHOICE implemented with rust-asn1 that has more than three variants[3].

[1]: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/x509/reference/

[2]: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/x509/verification/

[3]: https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/blob/be6c53dd03172dde6a...
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-19 02:12:03+00:00
I gave a talk at the first Thorium Energy Conference where I offered a projection of when a test reactor could be running using the low-effort-but-high-accuracy method of taking the projections from the Oak Ridge project and moving them up to the present days and got… about now. Folks weren’t happy with that but I said the only thing you can do is start sooner.

The toughest problem identified in the 1970s was that the Hastelloy N alloy they were using had corrosion problems which probably could be fixed. My personal take is that fluoride salt reactors based on Thorium have the problem that they will ruin graphite moderator cores too quickly and that the appealing idea now is to use chloride salts and a plutonium cycle, not least that we can get the plutonium to launch those from spent nuclear fuel. See

https://www.moltexenergy.com/
by Lalabadie | 2025-04-19 02:14:04+00:00
Isn't it a myth that women don't play as much? If I recall correctly, they just don't play the same games.

Much like women-dominated professions, their choices tend to end up labeled "not real games". Cozy games, social games, mobile arcade à la Candy Crush, etc. You need that exclusionary lens applied to what is a game to then get a tally where women comparatively don't play.
by skydhash | 2025-04-19 02:15:19+00:00
We have the same generative ability, but we gradually learn the correct answers (not necessarily truths), so we don't go around generating incorrect ones (not necessarily falsehoods). Then we know when we don't have any answers, so generating one is fruitless.

LLMs is just generation. Whatever pattern they embedded, they will happily extrapolate and add wrong information than just use it as a meta model.
Show HN: CR4SH3R – Fast WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Scanner
by m-o-z-z-i-x | 2025-04-19 02:16:07+00:00
A few months ago, a friend asked me to check his WordPress site for vulnerabilities. What I found shocked me – critical flaws exposing sensitive data everywhere. That's why I built CR4SH3R: a focused tool to detect Arbitrary File Download flaws before attackers do

Key Features: Lightning-fast multi-threaded scanning, Extracts credentials from exposed files (like wp-config.php), Generates actionable Excel reports, Simple GUI for one-click security checks

Would love your feedback!
by saagarjha | 2025-04-19 02:16:18+00:00
> What I wish GCC and Clang would do instead, is formally document the magic ANSI C89 incantations that trigger the optimization, e.g. `#define ROL(x, n) (((x) << (n)) | ((x) >> (64 - (n))))`. That way we can have clean portable code with less #ifdef hell along with assurances it'll go fast when -O is passed.

Well they don’t commit to that happening, so they want to provide you with an alternative.
by pvg | 2025-04-19 02:17:38+00:00
What do you find not right about it? In time of political turmoil, people start posting regular news stories to HN because there's a glut of big, activating political stories. They're still mostly offtopic so other people flag them. They seem like straightforward consequences of each other and the outlier cause driving it is the political climate itself not some particular weirdness of HN.
by benoau | 2025-04-19 02:18:28+00:00
Really what it means is there is one entity entitled to monetize the project, so it will probably just die if their monetization ideas or execution are lacking or their enthusiasm wanes. GitHub is full of dead projects like this because monetizing software is hard, building important software is hard, and doing both is even harder. Open source should be funded, but this isn't an efficient way to do it.

Mullenweg, approximate net worth $400 million, should have thought long and hard 20 years ago if "a rising tide lifts all boats" allows for others to have boats, or just his. There should be a $billions ecosystem around WP even if Mullenweg doesn't get that money.
by fzeroracer | 2025-04-19 02:18:46+00:00
Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.

There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.

So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
by schiffern | 2025-04-19 02:20:50+00:00
> I cannot logic that out as a metaphor.

A trip that took a week now takes a day. A voice that was far is now near.

As I said, if you want to be more precise you would say that's a manipulation of our relationship with time/space, but (as flowery metaphorical language goes) this is hardly the first time someone has spoken like this about major technological change. Methinks you're being too literally-minded in your reading abilities.

> 2 extremely generous interpretations

With generosity like this, who needs malice? :-p
by wredcoll | 2025-04-19 02:23:02+00:00
So, like, those programs exist. People are trying to help others break out of poverty. But we happen to live in a nation where a specific group of people were denied advantages most/everyone else got, for a very long time, explicitly based on skin color.

Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".

This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.

There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".

There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.

Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-19 02:23:17+00:00
It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work.

Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious.

When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement.

Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?
by Trasmatta | 2025-04-19 02:24:29+00:00
There's a meme in the FromSoft communities about how "Dark Souls cured my depression" that I think gets unfairly clowned on. So many people have posted anecdotes like that and been made fun of, but I think there is actually something there. Overcoming difficult challenges in a video game can, I'm convinced, help when your brain is stuck in a learned helplessness mode.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-19 02:24:59+00:00
LLMs are at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust.

But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sign of a revolutionary technology, that's a sign of hype. If you want to convince me otherwise, point to how good they are right now.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-19 02:25:23+00:00
Aside from the Toolbox answer, even within the Toolbox it was previously two separate actual installations of PyCharm (community and professional) but starting in 2025 they're now just one install, and it switches behavior based on your authentication https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/#:~:text=PyCharm%...