MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hedora | 2025-04-19 03:13:44+00:00
Container boats are ridiculously carbon efficient because they move unimaginable amounts of weight (amortizing any fixed costs like keeping the engine running) slowly (low drag) over a perfectly level surface (no loss from going up hill).

Almost any carbon reduction scheme that involves doing anything other than using them doesn’t work.

For instance, the embodied carbon of an apple that goes from China to the US, then is driven to a Walmart in a diesel train / semi is probably lower than the carbon footprint of one from the local farmers market (unless the farmer drives the apples to market in an EV and the local power grid is low carbon).
by sarchertech | 2025-04-19 03:13:53+00:00
Shipping the custom tools the developer built to make content for their game is relatively common.

Shipping 3rd party engine tooling is not. At all.

The equivalent to what valve did would be if Defold released some games made with Defold and then released the Defold engine, which is basically what happened.

There’s also nothing stopping from releasing your game, linking to Defold and saying use Defold to mod this game.
by rayiner | 2025-04-19 03:14:10+00:00
> race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.

That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.
by itsanaccount | 2025-04-19 03:14:19+00:00
Death.

New people who don't have built in patterns learn something better.

Locked in people stop doing the old thing because they're dead.

Eventually the new replaces the old. Its why its so important we don't let one of those startups "cure" aging or locked in feedback loops won't ever terminate. Also why events like COVID are so damaging, a whole tranche of new users learned maladaptive patterns.
by card_zero | 2025-04-19 03:14:22+00:00
Well nobody deserves blame for being a scrawny little weakling. However it's still technically possible to get stronger, which puts a hole in your assertion that it's impossible to improve one's own situation. It might very well be better if we help one another rather than trying exclusively to help ourselves (consider what Adam Smith had to say about the division of labor). But self-help and self-reliance still exist, when it comes down to it.
by ksec | 2025-04-19 03:15:44+00:00
Linux started before 2013? So did SQLite? And both are not even comparable as they were the dominant force already and not a new started project.

And in case you somehow thinks I am against you. I am merely pointing out what happened between 2013 - 2023. I believe you were also one of the only few on HN who fought against it.
by harimau777 | 2025-04-19 03:15:54+00:00
I think it's probably some of both. Certainly a lot of inequality is economic in a way that is independent of race. However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture. Therefore, I think that DEI is an important part of making our society more of a meritocracy.

In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-19 03:16:11+00:00
>That's a feature you see a lot of revolutionary technologies experience: even the earliest incarnations have enough "wow" factor to push people to using them and improving from the get-go.

ChatGPT alone had over 400 Million weekly active users in February (and seem to have hit 500M) and was the 6th most visited site in the world last month.

This is software that was introduced to the public in Nov of 2022. To put it frankly, it's the fastest growing software service ever.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were the only sites with more visits. It's close enough to Twitter that it may well overtake it this month.

It's not up for debate. LLMs absolutely have that "wow" factor.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/02/20/ope...

https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/viral-trend-drives-c...
by default-kramer | 2025-04-19 03:17:58+00:00
I highly recommend Dragon Quest Builders to anyone who enjoys (or might enjoy) Minecraft even a little bit. It can reliably make me feel like a kid with a new Lego set for hundreds of consecutive hours.

Killer Feature #1 is the room system, which can be a great source of inspiration if you don't know what you want to build. Killer Feature #2 is the overall charm you would expect from a modern Dragon Quest game, especially the NPCs. DQB1 has the better story mode (in my opinion), while DQB2 gives you much more freedom to build.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-19 03:18:11+00:00
> But you also have a similar thing for Carnival: Traditionally, it's the last feast before Lent (where Lent is also an expanded narrative of Easter!).

So Lent is not an "expanded narrative of Easter"; it's a period of preparation, prayer, self-denial and almsgiving; it represents the 40 years' wandering in the wilderness that the Jews endured, and the 40 days in the desert when Christ was tempted by Satan. So it's distinct from the Easter celebrations.

Carnival is not a "Christian feast". Carnival is an umbrella term for various secular celebrations. But indeed, this has roots in Jewish traditions.

What the Jews will typically do in preparation for Pesach is to cleanse the home of all forbidden leavening and unkosher food: chametz. And this is sometimes done in a quite ritualistic fashion, and the children are involved, and it's like a scavenger hunt (and may have some cultural exchange with Easter Egg hunts) where the adults may challenge the kids to find every crumb of chametz and collect it and present it to the head of household. Then the chametz is destroyed, or sold or traded to a Gentile.

And so Carnival (folk etymology may consist of "farewell to meat [carne, vale]") is a festival where people are eating up the leftover meat that they've stored up. "Mardi Gras", "Fat Tuesday", and "Pancake Tuesday" is where they're using up the remaining fat to make pancakes. The Byzantines have elaborate fasting/abstinence rules which preclude the use of oils and butter and many things for certain periods. And this reflects prior Western traditions. Abstinence from meat used to stretch for all of Lent, not just Fridays. And so, Carnival was one of those cycles where you prepared for Lent (itself a preparation) because Lent was going to be the "lean months" before the springtime feasting.

And of course Carnival also took on the carousing and drinking and licentiousness of fertility rites; why not all that. If you were eating meat then you probably had some good wines or booze to go with it?

But Carnival has never been a Christian sort of religious or liturgical feast or season. Carnival coincides with Ordinary Time these days, or "Sundays after Epiphany" in the old General Roman Calendar of 1960. But Church authorities and Canon Law did not specify any particular methods for eating up our stores of flesh meat, or getting it on and flashing boobs on Bourbon Street.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 03:18:52+00:00
You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with.

Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
by harimau777 | 2025-04-19 03:19:18+00:00
I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates.

That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.
by rayiner | 2025-04-19 03:20:01+00:00
My wife’s family is from a nearly all white coastal oregon county whose median household income is about the same as the national average household income for black people. Between two individuals with that same income level, the historical reasons why they ended up in that position are irrelevant. Neither person experienced those historical circumstances themselves. And regardless of path dependency, the result of that they’re on the same rung of the economic ladder today. There is no legitimate basis to help one of those people over the other.

And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
by kumarski | 2025-04-19 03:20:07+00:00
Hydrogen buses limp at an EROI of 0.5 to 1.5.

Losses via Gibbs free energy (237 kJ/mol to split H2O) and compression (20% of H2’s 120 MJ/kg.)

Barely cash in on the H2-O2 reaction (ΔH = -285.8 kJ/mol).

Battery buses, powered by lithium-ion cells, hit EROI of 2 to 4.

Redox heavy lithium mining (150 MJ/kg) drags it all down.

Charge-discharge losses (90% Coulombic efficiency)+ 5-10% capacity fade after 1000 cycles.

All trails diesel’s 5-10 EROI and 46 MJ/kg density.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-19 03:20:19+00:00
I think the difference is between people who accept nondeterministic behavior from their computers and those who don’t. If you accept your computer being confidently wrong some unknowable percentage of the time, then LLMs are miraculous and game changing software. If you don’t, then the same LLMs are defective and unreliable toys, not suitable as serious tools.

People have different expectations out of computers, and that accounts for the wildly different views on current AI capabilities.
by bredren | 2025-04-19 03:21:30+00:00
> I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me

It could be that you’re falling into a complete solution fallacy. LLMs can already be great at working each of these problems. It helps to work on a small piece of these problems. It does take practice and any sufficiently complicated problem will require practice and multiple attempts.

But the more you practice with them, you start getting a feel for it and these things start to eat away at this 80% you’re describing.

It is not self driving, if anything, software engineering, automation is only accessible to those who nerd out at it, the same way using a PC used to be sending email or programming.

A lot of the attention is on being able to run increasingly capablemodels on machines with less resources. But there’s not much use to fuss over Gemini 2.5 Pro if you don’t already have a pretty good feel for deep interaction with sonnet or GPT 4o.

It is already impressive and can seriously accelerate software engineering.
by sarchertech | 2025-04-19 03:21:50+00:00
Maybe, but this isn’t remotely common with existing open source game engines.

Modding a game engine’s editing tools to the point where they are user friendly enough for your players is almost always a bigger challenge than building basic editing tools using the engine.

This entire argument is insane to me. Someone is releasing something for free with the caveat that you can’t use it for this one specific very uncommon thing. Then people are up in arms “what if one day I want to do this one specific thing? Do you? No but what if I did?” Don’t use Defold.
by mindslight | 2025-04-19 03:22:33+00:00
Please stop calling them "conservatives". The term is a dishonest cover that they shouldn't have been able to continue hiding behind after they openly put themselves at odds with our society's institutions during the first Trump term. As a libertarian who didn't particularly love the status quo, I held my nose and voted actually conservative in 2024 - that was Harris/Walz. The new radical Republican party is free to come up with a new label that accurately describes the goals of their movement. Until then I propose we just use maggots, fascists, or destructionists, which capture the only consistent values I've been able to discern.
by sidrag22 | 2025-04-19 03:22:36+00:00
when dial up was initially the new thing you could also take that away and the world would keep chugging, same for phone lines, same for electricity. but you take away something the world has had time to become dependent on and suddenly the world has a harder time.

The worlds dependency on LLM tools just hasnt had time to develop and that doesnt mean it wont. most people here are likely on the bleeding edge of utilizing them. most people not paying attention will just use it like they use google or not at all, until tools are built and they dont even realize they are using an LLM, or using a service that is dependent on an LLM.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-19 03:23:41+00:00
the actual helpful link, instead of the login page without one iota of context https://www.icosic.com/#:~:text=Reduce%20MMTR%20by%206x

The CEO commented on the previous submission, which was Datadog-only at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940624
by freejazz | 2025-04-19 03:24:19+00:00
>By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.

What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.

>It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.

No, that's just a defense which might not cut against the inference at all.

>Do you speak for all jurors?

No, you seem to be confused about the evidence a court allows a jury to rely on when it makes a state-of-mind determination in civil suits. My reading of your post was that you suggested it required an express claim regarding intent. That is not the case, legally. Maybe you didn't realize that and were just posting layman stuff, which is understandable. It's not just a reflection of legal reality.

I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision. This occurs prior to trial at the summary judgment stage and after evidence is presented at trial. So there is often a legal boundary as to what evidence a jury can consider when it comes to any fact question (i.e. did this party have intent? did this party do the thing? etc)
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-19 03:26:26+00:00
I do not have a static IP address; it is dynamic but does not change very often. Also, that does not improve the security that much especially if the IP address is later reused for something else (or if you later need to do something which involves changing the IP address, in which case it cannot be accessed at all).

I do not have a cell phone either and I do not want one.
by harimau777 | 2025-04-19 03:28:48+00:00
While many regulations exist due to regulatory capture, many also exist for good reasons. Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.

I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-19 03:28:52+00:00
I think everybody who has thought much about it has similar concerns. I'd propose we start soon, start small, ramp up slowly, and be thorough about the data collection.

As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.
by doginasuit | 2025-04-19 03:29:25+00:00
It is an interesting comparison. Databases are objectively the more important technology, if we somehow lost AI the world would be equal parts disappointed and relieved. If we somehow lost database technology we'd be facing a dystopian nightmare.

If we cure all disease in the next 10-15 years, databases will be just as important as AI to that outcome. Databases supported a technology renaissance that reshaped the world on a level that is difficult to comprehend. But because most of the world doesn't interact directly with databases, as a technology it is not the focus of enthusiastic rhetoric.

LLMs are further along tech-chain and they might be an important part of world-changing human achievements, we won't know until we get there. In contrast, we can be certain databases were important. I imagine the people who were influential in their advancement understood how important the tech would be, even if they didn't breathlessly go on about it.
by Izkata | 2025-04-19 03:29:39+00:00
I never said unqualified. I used relative terms like less skilled, for example the 5% in your example that wouldn't have been hired without quotas.

The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.
by tptacek | 2025-04-19 03:30:15+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about. You cited a source upthread that included the Richard Lynn data --- very prominently! --- alongside an online survey site where people sign up, claim a country of origin, and fill out an online survey.

And no, your logic about how any diagnostic can be "ranked" obviously does not hold; it doesn't even make sense. But we've reached the point on the thread where you're trying to axiomatically derive your own psychometrics, so we can probably wrap it up here.
by hedora | 2025-04-19 03:30:39+00:00
> Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor

Not really. They’re 1.6% of global emissions if I multiplied the numbers on this page out right. The table says they’re 20% of shipping emissions, and the intro says shipping is 8% of global emissions (excluding ports and warehouses).

This result seems surprising until you realize that semi trucks produce 100x more CO2 per kg-mile of cargo.

https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-19 03:30:55+00:00
When Zack burst on the YouTube scene I said, "Who is this rock star we don't deserve?"

Trying to keep up with the digs and jokes he delivers in his rapid-fire narrative is one of the ways he is so entertaining.

His crappy robot, Christopher the Quagsire, was a fave: https://youtu.be/BCNxHGKFiQ0

I have 3D printed a number of the "Gridfinity" storage units that began (and other's have run with). My crafting desk is much more organized now.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-04-19 03:31:08+00:00
Lots of busses are split shift. i.e. they drive from ~6:30am to ~9:30am and ~4pm to 7pm. This means that a significant portion of your bus fleet will be able to charge during the middle of the day when energy demand is relatively low and there's a ton of solar power.

As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
by ksec | 2025-04-19 03:31:27+00:00
My exact thinking. It is the wrong end to measure it. As with nearly all tech benchmarks. They measure success rate, if LLM is 95% accurate it is good enough as human on average only get about 97%. What we dont measure is the difference between the 5% and 3% of failure rate. Some of the error in 5% error couldn't have happened to any human or are basically non-human error. Vs say 3% of human error that are different type.

I still haven't found a term for this. And I have been saying it since Apple's Keyboard butterfly fiasco. When Apple supporters keep saying the key press has 99.99% success rate so the problem with the keyboard were amplified. What they dont realise was the old scissors keyboard has infinitely close to 100%, or 99.99999999999999999% success rate so to speak. A normal consumer comparing intuitively will felt the butterfly keyboard is 0.01 / 0.000000000000001 many times worst because the error doesn't happen before with previous keyboard.

Since I dont see anyone online doing this I am going to call it Ksec's Law.
by alganet | 2025-04-19 03:32:04+00:00
If the hype materializes, it can still change course.

Learned some classical ASP to join the web dev hype? Well, tough luck. The hype was good but materialized in another vessel. If you learned enough fundamentals, you could still jump ship.

But what are the fundamentals for LLM? Hype rarely reveals them right away.

For LLMs, tough luck. You can't learn fundamentals with your toy PC yet. You need to be rich and have server grade hardware. Also, you cannot buy server grade hardware because it is out of stock.

But that's ok, few people will learn it and I will look from the sidelines until an acessible opportunity reveals itself.

If it doesn't get acessible, well, it probably will be some niche tech like COBOL. Pays awesomelly, but not my jam. That is winning for some people.

So many possible scenarios. You or someone else will try to expand and deflect on a single one, won't you? I know you will. No crystal ball, just intuition.

So, I will fucking learn what I can learn, what I like to learn, and I will hope I can survive on what it pays. That is winning in my books (at least on such narrow economic definition of it).

I like LLMs, but the good part is in training. Just using it is kind of... being an user. I can do that without faking as if it were truly learning it.

You are presenting an economic angle. I won't ignore it, but there is more to it for me.

Premise, reality, etc. So maleable.