MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rainsford | 2025-04-30 22:42:15+00:00
I think there is way too much focus on the exact position of the helicopter and the article actually does a pretty good job providing additional details (which it then undermines by ending the article the way it did).

For me the most consequential factor is that the helicopter pilots (technically the instructor, but I assume both were in agreement) requested visual separation based on their obviously incorrect visual sighting of the landing aircraft, which the controller granted. While perfect adherence to the routes by both helicopter and airplane might have avoided a collision, the margin is so incredibly slim (75 ft) that it seems unlikely the intent was that it would serve as the primary way to separate traffic. Properly executed visual separation would have kept everyone safe, but it seems pretty likely that neither helicopter pilot actually has eyes on the jet, maybe at any point or maybe just prior to the crash.

I also think it's hasty to discount the controller's role. At least based on the article, it's not clear the controller provided enough information that the helicopter pilots could have determined if they had visually identified the right aircraft. Given how busy the airspace is, making sure the helicopter was tracking the right landing aircraft is pretty critical. And while it's the pilots' job, the controller can certainly give them every advantage.

I think the statement in the article about many things going wrong all at the same time is likely the right one, although of course we should wait for the final NTSB report to say for certain. I feel like people want the satisfaction of identifying one single primary cause, but most aircraft accidents don't really work like that. And we should want to understand all the factors to plug as many holes in the swiss cheese as we can going forward.
by pants2 | 2025-04-30 22:42:55+00:00
This is awesome for the future of autocomplete. Current models aren't fast enough to give useful suggestions at the speed that I type - but this certainly is.

That said, token-based models are currently fast enough for most real-time chat applications, so I wonder what other use-cases there will be where speed is greatly prioritized over smarts. Perhaps trading on Trump tweets?
by williamdclt | 2025-04-30 22:43:28+00:00
> why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled?

> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?

You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store
by agent281 | 2025-04-30 22:43:39+00:00
Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.

It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.

If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.
by marcyb5st | 2025-04-30 22:44:38+00:00
Thanks! That helps somewhat. However, it feels like that's just part of the story.

If I remember correctly hyperscalers put their green agendas in stasis now that LLMs are around and that makes me believe that there is a CO2 cost associated.

Still, any improvement is a good news and if diffusion models replace autoregressive models we can invest that surplus in energy in something else useful for the environment.
by aseipp | 2025-04-30 22:44:40+00:00
Haskell's "mixin modules" AKA backpack are I think the closest thing you're going to get outside of SML (they are a different trade off in the design space, it's not 1-to-1), but they have languished in the broader community due to a couple social factors. They are excellent for many of the same things you use modules for, though, and work just fine in my experience.

On the same note, the lack of some kind of module system along these lines (broadly all defined in terms of "holes" in a compilation unit which are "plugged up" later on at instantiation time), is one of my biggest complaints about Rust. The extensive usage of traits in the broader ecosystem results in this phenomenon (identical to Haskell) where global coherence requires your dependency tree gets tied up in the location of types and their trait impls. In other words, you cannot abstract over your dependencies in a truly modular way.

Global coherence requirements are fine (preferable even!) for many things but if it's the only hammer you have, well, you know the rest of the metaphor.

> Anyway I think there is a proposal for it so it'll probably work its way in eventually.

Modular implicits have been shelved indefinitely from what I understand, if that's what you're referring to.
by zaptrem | 2025-04-30 22:44:48+00:00
Fighting back against one set of AI opinions for everyone (which tended to be criticized as woke) to better reflect the “vibes” of the user is also part of what got the most recent 4o release to start enthusiastically agreeing with flat earthers. But if it’s not allowed to state opinions at all then you get really high refusal rates which annoys everyone.
by runako | 2025-04-30 22:45:19+00:00
I agree with you here. I also think that (allegedly) ignoring federal statutes while reorganizing the government is pretty clearly an official act. So everything we are discussing is an official act.

If the Executive isn’t bound to follow federal appropriations laws, there’s no principled reason why he should have to follow other federal laws. And as you show, the president has full criminal immunity as well.

What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
by XorNot | 2025-04-30 22:45:45+00:00
Direct exports from China to the US is 15% of their total. It's the largest fraction but not a majority.

The US has tarriffed the entire world, and every category - finished goods and raw materials.

I'm Australian: I'm shopping on Aliexpress in another window right now. I'm going to keep doing that.

China has far more options in this then the US.
by nullc | 2025-04-30 22:45:59+00:00
Consider the entropy of the distribution of token X in these examples:

"Four X"

and

"Four X and seven years ago".

In the first case X could be pretty much anything, but in the second case we both know the only likely completion.

So it seems like there would be a huge advantage in not having to run autogressively. But in practice it's less significant then you might imagine because the AR model can internally model the probability of X conditioned on the stuff it hasn't output yet, and in fact because without reinforcement the training causes it converge on the target probability of the whole output, the AR model must do some form of lookahead internally.

(That said RLHF seems to break this product of the probabilities property pretty badly, so maybe it will be the case that diffusion will suffer less intelligence loss ::shrugs::).
by qubitcoder | 2025-04-30 22:46:05+00:00
I used Spacemacs for years and recommend it to others. It was fantastic in the early days, but the stability seems to have diminished. I encountered more bugs over time that I'd have to troubleshoot and fix myself.

I switched to Doom Emacs a couple of years ago. It's well-maintained with regular updates, fantastic language support, and lightning fast. The CLI tooling is also nice (i.e., you can run 'doom upgrade' to update everything, or 'doom doctor' if you encounter an issue).

It's the closest equivalent to VS Code in terms of working out of the box. Not to mention the advantages of Emacs with Vim keybindings. There is a learning curve, but the GitHub documentation is excellent.

Adding support for Ruby on Rails development, for example, is as simple as uncommenting '(ruby +rails +lsp)' line in the '~/.config/init.el' file, and then running 'doom sync'. There's a long list of supported languages and tooling [0].

[0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/in...
by stephnass | 2025-04-30 22:46:20+00:00
Hey OpenVC founder here! Thanks for trying the Fundability test :)

The test is not out of 100 points. The idea is to place you against other companies raising at the same time. If you have no revenue and everyone else has revenue, you will rank lower because at the end of the day, it's a competition.

As a general rule, investors invest if (a) you have track record or (b) you have traction i.e. users and/or revenue. If you have neither, look at grants, accelerators, and family and friends instead. And your own money, ofc.

I know it's counter-intuitive for many. Aren't VCs supposed to take risks and put the first check in?

That's not how VCs think. They will see 5,000 decks a year and invest in 5, so they just pick the strongest projects at a given point in time.

Not denying your efforts and potential, but there's just another project that looks better on paper: more proven team, more traction. It's all relative.

On that topic, check out these 2 graphs that apply to your case: https://x.com/StephNass/status/1859447351187787826

For a longer read with some maths, this post by Jonah Probell is eye opening: https://www.openvc.app/blog/seed-stage-is-about-picking-winn...
by shawn_w | 2025-04-30 22:46:39+00:00
Ah, the joys of trusting a LLM for story IDs...

This one actually exists (a rarity in my experience), and the plot largely matches the description up to the last sentence (though the speed isn't exactly reduced; it's made a constant)

>Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.

That doesn't happen in the story. It ends with the aliens disabling the device (the drive of a derelict starship) generating the field that caused experiments to suggest the speed of light is constant, and then leaving, destroying "the whole basis of their physics, but that is just a fantasy anyways."
by zoky | 2025-04-30 22:46:47+00:00
> FTP is not secure.

FTP can be as secure as any other protocol. Enabling encryption on the server side is generally as simple as installing a certificate and turning on an option. And most FTP clients will default to using encryption if it is available; for the clients that don’t do that, it’s just another server option to require clients to use encryption.

> And when companies say they use FTP to exchange data, they don't tend to mean SFTP. They really do mean FTP.

Because SFTP is a different and entirely unrelated protocol. The encrypted version of FTP is sometimes known as FTPS, but it’s really just a variant of FTP. So it would be inaccurate to call it SFTP, but referring to it as simply FTP doesn’t imply a lack of security.
by howard941 | 2025-04-30 22:46:49+00:00
Let's refresh recollections. TFA: "Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby. One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” [...] "Visual separation approved,” the controller replied."

There's no ambiguity here.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-30 22:47:15+00:00
> model S and Y

Sure, but that was after years (a decade?) of lying. In every earnings call (including this year) or interview, you hear his guys on the ground saying 'might' and 'hope' when talking about features and time lines and then Musk pushing 'will WILL' like an angry toddler. He simply knows he cannot deliver until <unknown time> as his people tell him, so he lies. I have sympathy for a startup founder, or a ceo behind closed doors, making things more shiny than they are, but this is the richest guy on earth who became and remains that because he just makes stuff up with confidence for his shareholders. Sometimes he makes a model S and Y or spacex, but other times he makes the largest nazi newspaper ever and a cyber truck. Overall it is good he existed: since the politics weirdness, I wonder if we can expect anything else like his earlier successes. I don't think the fables in earnings calls should be allowed though,
by climb_stealth | 2025-04-30 22:48:04+00:00
It's funny/sad how even firefox is making it worse now. I tend to browse youtube in firefox because the youtube app is such a pain, and doesn't have tabs and other niceties. And then only view individual videos in the app because the player works better and it's nicer to interact with comments.

But for a while now firefox has been asking every single goddamn time whether I want to open this page in the app instead. With the only extra option to always in open in app. What about no? What about never?

shakes fist at sky
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-04-30 22:49:06+00:00
I was trying to write some documentation for a back-propagation function for something instructional I'm working on.

I sent the documentation to Gemini, who completely tore it apart on pedantism for being slightly off on a few key parts, and at the same time not being great for any audience due to the trade-offs.

Claude and Grok had similar feedback.

ChatGPT gave it a 10/10 with emojis on 2 of 3 categories and an 8.5/10 on accuracy.

Said it was "truly fantastic" in italics, too.
by 9dev | 2025-04-30 22:49:20+00:00
I think it’s really a fragment of LLMs developed in the USA, on mostly English source data, and this being ingrained with US culture. Flattery and candidness is very bewildering when you’re from a more direct culture, and chatting with an LLM always felt like having to put up with a particularly onerous American. It’s maddening.
by chillingeffect | 2025-04-30 22:50:05+00:00
It most certainly is. This crew would rather be kings of a ruined plantation of a country than to have a middle class with any economic or political power. And that goes double for their attitude toward non-whites.

Every lower middle class person, can "command" about 100 other 1/100ths of a person to supplant their life with food, fuel, vehicle, staples, etc. But billionaires have the labor of 1000s or more people at their fingertips. It doesnt matter if the 1000 are destitute, undernourished, sick, weak, dumb, or unhappy, as long as they're subservient enough to maintain or increase class division.
by mortar | 2025-04-30 22:50:55+00:00
For me, my shoes are predominately thongs (also referred to as flip flops in others parts of the world), and they’re directly next to my bed. They provide arch support which would otherwise leave me aching walking around the house presumably onto the flooring with little to no underlay.

I wear them non-stop until I hit the shower - I only have one pair but my wife has exponentially more and cycles through her pairs constantly, with a ritual cleanse in the shower for each used pair at least once a week.
by cle | 2025-04-30 22:51:27+00:00
> They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI

Disagree, I keep trying Jetbrains once in a while and keep walking away disappointed (used to be a hardcore user). I use VS Code bc it is seamlessly polyglot. Jetbrains wants me to launch a whole separate IDE for different use cases, which is just horrible UX for me. Why would I pay hundreds for a worse UX?
by platevoltage | 2025-04-30 22:51:32+00:00
I made a new TikTok account out of curiosity after Trump "saved" the platform. No exaggeration, half of the "For You" content was from "Team Trump" or Charlie Kirk. They are actively pushing propaganda, but I've seen no signs that it's Chinese propaganda, unless you assume that Bytedance is bowing to Trump, and that Bytedance is controlled by the Chinese Government, which just raises more questions.

Youtube Premium is the only "streaming service" I actually pay money for, and I use it quite a bit. Rarely ever does something off the wall get pushed to me. I do consume politics on YT, and occasionally something right wing shows up, but it's rare. I have no doubt that this stuff would be prioritized on a new account though.
by simoncion | 2025-04-30 22:52:43+00:00
> It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback' UI mode...

Right now, on my 32" 2160p screen, when I either maximize my browser window or put it into "fullscreen" mode, YouTube shows me a centered section with useful information (wide enough to display four videos when visiting the "/videos" endpoint), and empty space to either side of that section that's wide enough to convert this single centered-column layout into a three-column layout... tripling the amount of data on screen.

Both this and whatever "leanback" thing YouTube is testing are both pretty godawful. I do prefer the wasted space, so I know I can rearrange my windows to make use of the space. You never know whether or not a thumb-centric UI will shrink itself down when the viewport's size is reduced.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-30 22:53:10+00:00
Android already has many alternative app store. I believe there is nothing currently for paid app (beside OEM store like galaxy store or Huawei) but if there is a need it's absolutely possible to do.

Apple side on the other hand, good luck with that. Even in Europe they made the rules so strict the third party app store are basically dead.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-30 22:53:26+00:00
For me, ChatGPT (the free version, GPT-4o mini I believe?) gets it right, choosing option 2 because the coffee will cool faster due to the larger temperature difference.

Unless there's a gotcha somewhere in your prompt that I'm missing, like what if the temperature of the room is hotter than the coffee, or so cold that the coffee becomes colder than the milk, or something?

I would be suprised if any models get it wrong, since I assume it shows up in training data a bunch?
by colechristensen | 2025-04-30 22:53:48+00:00
> I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store

As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong, call them out publicly, or at least avoid their products. In no way is it reasonable that someone should want to stay anonymous while selling me something (or profiting off of it in one way or another). I really don't see a reason to make an exception for people who have free+offline+etc apps.

You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.
by rainsford | 2025-04-30 22:53:57+00:00
> Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor.

Even if they were out of the helicopter airway, based at least on radio transmissions the instructor thought they had the landing aircraft in sight and presumably thought they could stay separated from it visually. I would agree with you if staying at the exact right altitude and position was being thought of as the primary factor keeping them separated from traffic they couldn't see, but it seems different when they were operating under visual separation and thought they could see the aircraft.

That said, I fly Skyhawks not Blackhawks (or any kind of helicopter), so maybe the expectations are different in the rotary wing world. But my experience is that a 100ft altitude deviation is not an "instructors takes the controls" situation in an airplane unless you're about to run into something. Of course they were in this case, but it's not obvious the instructor knew that.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-30 22:55:19+00:00
>. Hence, the Br atoms kept the molecules on track, likely because their interaction with the surface substantially contributed to the barrier for molecular rotation

Yeah that's a reason people prefer AFM (but then they won't be able to do manipulation)?

[Br- is a "good leaving group", not so much at 7K maybe. You are also right in that, above all, they don't want their molecule sticking (irreversibly) to the (tungsten) tip ]
by mynameisash | 2025-04-30 22:55:58+00:00
I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
by bcye | 2025-04-30 22:56:05+00:00
- email address is just the one associated with the Google account, it sucks if you started the application on your personal google account, but you can still change it

- you need a payment profile to pay the account fee + verify your identity, the last part is probably very important for anti-spam

- I can understand that legal name + country can be considered doxxing, but I think it's highly relevant information for users

Of course these requirements could be relaxed for low-risk applications (i.e. no INTERNET permission), but I think it's understandable there is so few of them nowadays that it is not a priority.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-30 22:57:12+00:00
> the EU makes changes like this

The actual change is not by the EU, but by Google who interprets a EU directive and decides how to apply it to its platform.

This is a big difference, in that the EU requires a verified _contact_ address for _traders_ operating on a marketplace.

From there Google deciding to blanket require onerous verification on anyone publishing any app is Google's call and they should get the blame for it.

For comparison you get a different application of the same rules on the AppStore, and none of that for F-Droid.
by jenny91 | 2025-04-30 22:57:23+00:00
They just renamed "system" to "developer" for some reason. Their API doesn't care which one you use, it'll translate to the right one. From the page you linked:

> "developer": from the application developer (possibly OpenAI), formerly "system"

(That said, I guess what you said about "platform" being above "system"/"developer" still holds.)
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-30 22:57:32+00:00
Yeah, unfortunately, they have to jump on the AI bandwagon because they are forced to by other editors, providing free AI, but they simply do not have the skills to integrate the AI properly. It's a shame, and unfortunately removing negative reviews will not help as people will simply migrate to a different product. You can have three 5 star reviews, but that doesn't help if nobody else is using it.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-30 22:58:57+00:00
Both of these are bad options though, reflecting the "vibes" of the user is worse than ChatGPT having it's own crappy opinions, because at least you're exposed to something different. But it's not even about the opinion, it's not enough for Chat GPT to say "Some people believe in free markets and others would like a more centrally controlled economy" it's the diverse aesthetics or patina that are important.
by Bostonian | 2025-04-30 22:59:03+00:00
The author's first paragraph says

'NOAA has quietly reported that they will soon decommission 14 datasets, products, and catalogs related to earthquakes and marine, coastal, and estuary science. According to the list, these data sources will be “decommissioned and will no longer be available” by early- to mid-May.'

but if you click on the first link she provides, you see that duplicative access points are being removed and that the data will still be available.

'Type of change: The duplicative access point will be decommissioned for nClimGrid-Daily. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) will be terminated.

Description: The NCEI Data Access Branch will be decommissioning a duplicative access point for nClimGrid-Daily'