MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsder | 2025-04-17 23:15:22+00:00
> It's pay. It's always pay.

Indeed.

I attended an injection molding conference and one of the panel discussions was about the poor state of hiring and retention. I stayed expecting to hear the standard complaints about the fact that injection molding was considered "obsolete" (really?), the pipeline was too weak so wages were out of hand and there was too much churn. I was interested in which companies were hiring off the people so much that it warranted a panel session.

Then I heard the complaints of what their primary competitor was: Amazon warehouses. They were losing injection molding workers to freakin' Amazon floor jobs!

I lost it and lit off on an absolute rant about how if a company couldn't keep their employees from joining one of the objectively worst employers in the country then they absolutely deserved to go bankrupt.

I, very suddenly, made both a bunch of friends and a bunch of enemies that day.
by rlpb | 2025-04-17 23:16:01+00:00
> Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation.

No it's not. Unless...

> Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.

...well then it is.

But it's not constructive to claim that proving your age to someone is by definition a privacy violation. If someone wants to prove their age to someone, then that's a private communication that they're entitled to choose to make.

It is true that if technology to achieve this becomes commonplace, then those not wishing to do so may find it impractical to maintain their privacy in this respect. But that doesn't give others the right to obstruct people who wish to communicate in this way.
by neilv | 2025-04-17 23:16:24+00:00
On a childhood trip, to visit family in sunny Hawaii, we mailed back this coconut from the family yard, by writing our rainy Portland address on the coconut in Sharpie.

(The coconut was one of the large, oblong ones, with a smooth surface. Not the small, spherical things in the grocery store. So there was plenty of room for a legible address.)

When we got home, we planted it in a large indoor planter, hanged a lamp over it, and grew a sizable palm tree in our living room.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-17 23:16:26+00:00
If the accusation is as simple as "you don't have a right to be in the country" what makes proving it different from a real trial?

> From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.

If there's only one place you could reasonably be deported to, and there's an order saying you can't be deported there, then you can't be deported and you effectively have legal residency.
by paulcole | 2025-04-17 23:17:06+00:00
> Google is silently winning the AI race.

It’s not clear to me what either the “race” or “winning” is.

I use ChatGPT for 99% of my personal and professional use. I’ve just gotten used to the interface and quirks. It’s a good consumer product that I like to pay $20/month for and use. My work doesn’t require much in the way of monthly tokens but I just pay for the OpenAI API and use that.

Is that winning? Becoming the de facto “AI” tool for consumers?

Or is the race to become what’s used by developers inside of apps and software?

The race isn’t to have the best model (I don’t think) because it seems like the 3rd best model is very very good for many people’s uses.
by Edmond | 2025-04-17 23:18:07+00:00
This video addresses that:

https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY

All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.

In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.
by Borealid | 2025-04-17 23:18:09+00:00
Are you familiar with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem?

If so, what do you think about the concept of a human "hear[ing] the steps" in a digital playback system using a sampling rate of 192kHz, a rate at which many high-resolution files are available for purchase?

How about the same question but at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, or the way a normal "red book" music CD is encoded?
by m463 | 2025-04-17 23:19:25+00:00
A humorous age verification quiz for the Leisure Suit Larry game.

My boss is a. a jerk. b. a total jerk. c. an absolute total jerk. d. responsible for my paycheck. Correct answer: d.

dated, and very politically incorrect...

https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

(scroll down past answers to questions and answers)
by hinkley | 2025-04-17 23:19:56+00:00
It uses different threads in order to make infrequent blocking calls look like they are asynchronous.

When we (or at least some quantity of “we”) want is infrequent native calls to be able to fail without taking the BEAM down.

The problem with doing it with threads though is that a bad thread can still vomit all over working memory, still causing a panic even if it itself doesn’t panic.
by AstroBen | 2025-04-17 23:20:07+00:00
> Isn’t just the ability to preform a task.

Right. In this case I'd say it's the ability to interpret data and use it to succeed at whatever goals it has

Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal

Rob miles has some really good videos on AI safety research which touches on how AGI would think. Thats shaped a lot of how I think about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo
by oaktrout | 2025-04-17 23:20:35+00:00
By age 50, around 80% of people have a degenerative disc on imaging... it's over 1/3rd by age 20.

Everyone is going to get a bad back at some point if they don't take care of themselves.

"Eat right and exercise " is very generic advice, but it's cheaper than an MRI and will prevent more disease.
by strangecasts | 2025-04-17 23:21:23+00:00
The problem is that it is much easier to implement such a check in a way which lets the verification service link the site to the user, with no discernable difference to the end user

e: I get the same feeling as I do reading about key escrow schemes in the Clipper chip vein, where nobody claimed it was theoretically impossible to have a "spare key" only accessible by warrant, but the resulting complexity and new threat classes [1] just was not worth it

[1] https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GM8F2W
by pmags | 2025-04-17 23:22:48+00:00
Thanks for the details about the Muon G-2 move. Are there aspects of the G-2 that made it more modular / easier to disassemble than the shuttle?

The quote in the article cited by Ars (http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-041025a-space-shuttle-...) seems to come from the former "director of NASA's transition and retirement program".

> Partially disassembling Discovery is also not an option. Removing the wings would result in destroying many of the thermal blankets and tiles that protected the space shuttle as it returned to Earth, and you would still be left with segments too large to enter normal traffic, explained Jenkins.
by bingdig | 2025-04-17 23:23:50+00:00
It appears that this impacted gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 somehow? grounding with google search no longer works.

I had a workflow running that would pull news articles from the past 24 hours. It now refuses to believe the current date is 2025-04-17. Even with search turned on and I ask it what the date is it and it always replies sometime in July 2024.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-17 23:23:56+00:00
You have no contract with Google though. You're literally siphoning on what is a really low-barrier, dare I say free service.

They didn't screw you over. You chose to use them. You didn't pay them, they're paying you.

If you don't like that arrangement, feel free to join a partner agency that can buy and sell ads for you on the ad exchange or go to a different ad network.

Then, if they do something you don't like, you actually have very real power to compel them to do something.

Remember, you get what you pay for.
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-17 23:24:04+00:00
People have asked me this. I don’t know what to say other than I just make the connections I need to in my head. sometimes it’s visual but it’s usually pretty abstract and I’m not really very conscious of it. From the outside it probably looks like intuition. I write a lot of things out and sketch things.

i have a math heavy degree so pretty sure im not disabled in any kind of way. sometimes I struggle to explain my thought process but not usually. it is equally perplexing to me that people seem to think that verbalization of thoughts is needed to think.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-17 23:24:27+00:00
Could also be FOPPs, or both combined! (Fuel Overpressure Protection) https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/23701/what-caus...

Some do it at certain airspeeds, others don't. Depends on their shape, and can be mitigated/eliminated, which is sometimes done, other times none.
by rglover | 2025-04-17 23:24:43+00:00
Really enjoyed this post.

> Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist.

I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do:

1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at coding). This could be a temporary fluke, or, an inherent reality of how LLMs work (where I tend to land).

2. Humans will plateau. First, humans themselves will see their skills atrophy as they defer more and more to AI than struggling to solve problems (and by extension, learn new things). Second, humans will be disincentivized to create new forms of programming and write about them, so eventually the inputs to the LLM become stale.

Short-term, this won't appear to be true, but long-term (on the author's 10+ year scale), it will be frightening. Doubly so when systems that were primarily or entirely "vibe coded" start to break in ways that the few remaining humans responsible for maintaining them don't understand (and can't prompt their way out of).

And that's where I think the future work will be: in fixing or replacing systems unintentionally being broken by the use of AI. So, you'll either be an "AI mess fixer" or more entrepreneurial doing "artisan, hand-crafted software."

Either of those I expect to be fairly lucrative.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-17 23:24:54+00:00
I agree with everything you said. I think it's also important to let them know that you wouldn't be having that conversation with them if you didn't trust them to learn from the experience. I don't support or promote chewing out, berating, or being abusive to someone in any context. I think that's what the parent commenter misunderstood.

The main thing I learned from this thread is to avoid making a person feel bad in the sense that they are alone in it or somehow they are incompetent and irresponsible. A lot of times, I lead with one of my great screw-ups just so they know I'm not talking down to them. it's more of a "screw ups happen, I've screwed up. and now so have you, we can't make mistakes like this, it was really bad" type of a discussion.
by a1371 | 2025-04-17 23:25:09+00:00
I have a degree in building science, so maybe I can chime in. Note of caution: you will find yourself breathing heavily after reading this. It's normal.

We do a terrible job at ventilating our indoor spaces. As a cave-dwelling species our brains are quite comfortable with tuning out bad smells and tolerating stale air -- but the effect of it on our mode and well-being is almost immediate. You don't notice the effect, but it is there.

That's why they tell you if the airplane's cabin depressurizes, put on your own mask first. People who don't manage to that quickly enough their eyes stay open, they don't even feel anything is wrong, but they are physically unable to put on their masks until they pass out.

If not eating proper food kills you in 3 weeks, not breathing proper air kills you in 3 minutes. Yet, people spend thousands of dollars on a new diet, but have no idea what kind of stuff are going into their lungs.

The situation is not life and death. It's feeling nice versus feeling low. People end up with indoor air that is often stale and full of volatile compounds. We often make it worse by using essential oil diffusers and not using the vent hood when cooking.

When you do a breathing exercise, all of a sudden you are giving your starving brain a dose of what it could be like. When you have a walk in the nature, you do the same.

So yes, breathing exercises are great, but it's even better if we fix our indoor environments to feel great at all times.
by Taniwha | 2025-04-17 23:25:45+00:00
Had a minor stroke a couple of months ago - scans show two holes in my brain, one was in my right arm's motor control (I realised what was happening when I kept missing the keys on my laptop) which came right within hours. The other is a mystery, it's hard to think of things that are gone, I'm hoping it was something I don't need anymore from a long time ago like COBOL or Fortran
by cmsj | 2025-04-17 23:26:17+00:00
Just to put some numbers on "extremely highly connected" - there are about 90 billion neurons in a human brain, but the connections between them number in the range of 100 trillion.

That is one hell of a network, and it can all operate fully in parallel while continuously training itself. Computers have gotten pretty good at doing things in parallel, but not that good.
by felipeccastro | 2025-04-17 23:26:18+00:00
I’ve been having a different experience. Asking Claude to fix the bug again and again is annoying, so I’m still working on “pull pieces at a time, understanding each” so I do fix the bug myself when it’s faster to do so. In fact, the majority of times I’ve been using the LLM to build tiny libraries for me to avoid the need for the LLM in the running app. Kind of like StackOverflow on steroids. I don’t feel as the glue, but only having a superior tooling to get info I need fast.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-17 23:27:07+00:00
That link gives a great description of how to pack trits more efficiently, thanks. Encoding in "base 3" was obvious to me, but I didn't realise that 5 trits fit quite tightly into a byte, or that it's possible to "space the values apart" so that they can be extracted using just multiplications and bitwise ops (no division or remainder).
by Retr0id | 2025-04-17 23:28:02+00:00
I'm in the UK and discord has asked me to complete this check (but I haven't, yet). I can still use discord just fine, it just won't let me view any media it considers "adult".

I am an adult but refuse to let them scan my face as a matter of principle, so I've considered using https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam to "deepfake" myself and perform the verification while wearing a fake face. If it works, I'll write about it.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-17 23:28:27+00:00
it's relative isn't it? it may not even be code per-se. I'm implying for the sake of this discussion that for the people concerned, this is equivalent to making a mistake that made a nuclear power-plant go critical. A business-killer bug is like that for those involved. People get laid off, families lose their source of income, people commit suicide, divorce,etc.. as a result. I'm usually less concerned about financial loss than the human impact surrounding our mistakes.

I've screwed up, but I hope I never screw up so badly it starts messing with people's lives and well being.
by gxonatano | 2025-04-17 23:28:28+00:00
If you read indiscriminately from lots of different news sources, bad ones and good ones alike, and you have an iPhone and you do most of your reading on it, this might be useful. But I rarely read news stories which appear in 100 different news outlets, to begin with—they're usually articles which are only on the New York Times: book reviews, commentaries, original data analysis, investigative reporting. The stories that do appear in a few different places are usually syndicated, anyway, from AP or Reuters, so they're virtually identical. Particle appears to be sorting news article groups according to how many different times an event is being reported on, in different news outlets, which to me is the opposite way I want my news sorted. Besides that, I'm fairly picky about where I get my news: I subscribe to certain papers because they've developed good reputations for journalistic integrity, they've won Pulitzer Prizes, and they employ fact checkers. I avoid news sources that don't meet these criteria. Particle seems to lump them all together. Rather than de-noising news, "by using AI to help people understand more, faster," it appears to be introducing noise where there need not be any.
by dmwilcox | 2025-04-17 23:30:23+00:00
It's not about the random numbers it's about the tree of possibilities having to be defined up front (in software or hardware). That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible.

This makes computers incredibly good at what people are not good at -- predictably doing math correctly, following a procedure, etc.

But because all of the possibilities of the computer had to be written up as circuitry or software beforehand, it's variability of outputs is constrained to what we put into it in the first place (whether that's a seed for randomness or model weights).

You can get random numbers and feed it into the computer but we call that "fuzzing" which is a search for crashes indicating unhandled input cases and possible bugs or security issues.
by dmckeon | 2025-04-17 23:31:00+00:00
Various live animals, queen bees and up to 8 attendant bees by air, but bee hives by ground only. Fair warning: the recipient of mailed bee hives may get a phone call at any time of day or night to "please come get them ASAP".

https://about.usps.com/posters/pos138/pos138__v04_revision_0... https://pe.usps.com/PUB52_Archive/NHTML/PUB52_Archive_202204...
by pmags | 2025-04-17 23:31:33+00:00
Carr is proposing to punish Comcast / NBC over failing to toe the line with regard to Trump Administration propaganda:

> In his post yesterday, Carr alleged that "Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that Abrego Garcia was merely a law abiding US citizen, just a regular 'Maryland man.'" Carr wrote that "Abrego Garcia came to America illegally from El Salvador, was validated as a member of the violent MS-13 gang—a transnational criminal organization—and was denied bond by an immigration court for failure to show he would not pose a danger to others."

NBC had the gall to disagree with "dear leader" according to the man who wears a huge lapel pin with a giant profile image of Trump on it [0][1]

•[0] Viewable in Carr's own post on Twitter here: https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1907881926922481815

•[1] Discussed here: https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/trump-is-now-mandating-h... (TRIGGER WARNING: likely to upset loyalists; see above)
by mooreds | 2025-04-17 23:31:43+00:00
Reminds me of these stories (the Asimov one I've posted before):

- "Profession", by Isaac Asimov: http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...

- "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi (the story of that title)
by derbOac | 2025-04-17 23:31:58+00:00
These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.

Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.

It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.

I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.

We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.

I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.
by ctrlp | 2025-04-17 23:33:15+00:00
The dishwashers in my various homes these past 25 years have served as extra plate storage with only occasional running to keep them in working order. Otherwise, we just wash our dishes by hand. I don't see the point of letting your dirty dishes accumulate in the dishwasher or the sink for that matter, when it is a simple and pleasant task to just clean them, dry them, and put them away. The alternative is pretty disgusting. As you cook, simply use spare moments to clean pots and pans as you go. Those can't go in the dishwasher anyway, so nothing gained there. Moreover, you have to clean the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher in any case so that the dishwasher can actually get them clean. Dishwashers feel like a double-taxation chore. You're already scraping off food, running the plates under water, and giving them a brief scrub even if you're using a dishwasher. And then you have to wait for the thing to finish while that dish or utensil is unavailable. Plus the little soap packets or pills or whatever are another hassle.

Just do your dishes by hand. If you have a big family with lots of dishes, what a great opportunity to teach kids some good habits.
by dumbledoren | 2025-04-17 23:33:32+00:00
Hard to understand - why North Koreans being in open source a problem while Americans not? It wasnt North Korea who killed 1 million in Iraq. Its not North Korea who is protecting and arming Israel as it commits genocide.

If its because of 'authoritarianism', why do we not also designate the US as 'authoritarian' because, regardless of who the Americans vote for, the US keeps committing genocides?

(and no - being able to insult your leaders means nothing if whatever you do cant change the policy)
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-17 23:34:39+00:00
The shuttle wingspan is 78 feet, and the narrowest section of the Intracoastal Waterway is >100 feet. You simply wouldn’t have to disassemble the shuttle to make it work.

There are existing rules for wide loads. They’d just use them.

That’s the extent of my knowledge. I think that everyone they’ve talked to doesn’t want it to happen, and that is coloring their view of whether it can happen. But I could be wrong.