MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wredcoll | 2025-04-18 23:10:06+00:00
So the chart says:

> Acceptance rates for students with slightly higher and slightly lower than average GPAs and test scores are displayed in the other columns. In other words, the table above displays acceptance rates by race/ethnicity for students applying to US medical schools with average academic credentials, and just slightly above and slightly below average academic credentials.

So, uh, what? The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares.
by ccleve | 2025-04-18 23:11:12+00:00
The issue in this case is being tested in other cases. It's about the "third party doctrine", the theory that the fourth amendment does not cover our information if it is in the possession of a third party.

https://nclalegal.org/press_release/ncla-asks-supreme-court-...

I blogged about this some time ago: https://ccleve.com/p/a-privacy-amendment
by throwup238 | 2025-04-18 23:11:19+00:00
How do these bacteria compare to hydrozoans like the man o' war? Is the similarity just superficial or do they exhibit some form of differentiation?

> In the new study, scientists have revealed even more complexity in the relationships between MMB cells. First, contrary to long-held assumptions, individual cells within MMB consortia are not genetically identical, they differ slightly in their genetic blueprint. Further, cells within a consortium exhibit different and complementary behavior in terms of their metabolism.

Does that mean there's mutation when they multiply or do these MMBs exhibit some crude form of sexual reproduction - two MMBs with separate genetics merging? What's their life cycle look like when they reproduce?

Have you guys managed to identify any genetic clocks that can help estimate when they broke off from their closest relative? The MMB sounds so much like a hydrazoan (~540 MYa) that I'm curious if there's an evolutionary connection there.
by MostlyStable | 2025-04-18 23:13:18+00:00
For me, it is how much faster I find the results I want than I was with Google. The results are enough better that, at the rate I value my time, I'm more than making up the subscription cost every month.

And then the gravy on top is that I fundamentally think that direct payment is a "better" (both from a consumer perspective and from a societal perspective) model than an ad-supported model, so I'm also supporting a company that aligns with that larger philosophical viewpoint.
by wrs | 2025-04-18 23:13:58+00:00
It might. As I say, it’s up for debate. A judge might look at the 1kB of hyperparameters versus the 1TB of training data, and the 10 person-years of human effort versus 100,000 GPU-years of computer effort, and conclude differently.

Does Google have copyright of their search index? Never tested, as far as I know.
by namaria | 2025-04-18 23:14:17+00:00
The interpretation this paper offers is very questionable.

It observes a so-called "replacement model" as a stand-in because it has a different architecture than the common LLMs, and lends itself to observing some "activation" patterns.

Then it liberally labels patterns observed in the "replacement model" with words borrowed from psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science. It's all very fanciful and clearly directed at being pointed at as evidence of something deeper or more complex than what LLMs plainly do: statistical modelling of languages.

Calling LLMs "next token predictor" is a bit of a cynical take, because that would be like calling a gaming engine a "pixel color processor". It's simplistic, yeah. But the polar opposite of spraying the explanation with convoluted inductive reasoning is just as bereft of substance.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-18 23:16:15+00:00
I have argued elsewhere that Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone. However, the civil Rights act does prevent discrimination based on race if they do.

The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.

Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.

Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
by creatonez | 2025-04-18 23:16:19+00:00
For anyone baffled by this: This works because HTTP/0.9 (just called "HTTP" at the time) worked in an extremely simple way, and browsers mostly retained compatibility for this.

HTTP/0.9 web browser sends:

GET /

Netcat sends:

<!doctype html> ...

Nowadays a browser will send `GET / HTTP/1.1` and then a bunch of headers, which a true HTTP/0.9 server may be able to filter out and ignore, but of course this script will just send the document and the browser will still assume it's a legacy server.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-18 23:16:42+00:00
> My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is.

Drag (fluid mechanics generally) is... ludicrously complicated. For the typical shapes of ships, I believe you are correct that the main factor is cross sectional area perpendicular to the direction of travel, but that’s not universally true. i think that for a floating raft of panels, it would be proportional to the panel area, similar to how for winged aicraft its the wing area and not the cross section perpendicular to direction of travel.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-18 23:17:48+00:00
What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”.

I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.

My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.

I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.

No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
by derf_ | 2025-04-18 23:19:15+00:00
> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...

One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.

But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.

That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
by hollerith | 2025-04-18 23:19:43+00:00
You are mistaken. If the work is distributed under a license, then you have no right to use the work except under the terms of the license. The license acts like a contract.

If the law did not work that way, then the GNU GPL would not be enforceable.

The GPL for example required that if I distribute a derivative of a GPLed work in binary form, then I must also distribute the same derivative as source code or at least provide the source code to any distributee who asks for it. This requirement of the GPL has been enforced by courts (e.g., in a lawsuit against Tivo) even though none of the defendants in these court cases signed a contract regarding the use of the software.
by nailer | 2025-04-18 23:19:49+00:00
> seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. The notion that there is a single cause of autism is, to put it mildly, not at all backed up by the decades of research on this highly complex diagnosis.

But RFK didn’t say that autism had a single cause. Mother Jones said it was like RFKs speech was designed to set him up as the person that found this cause, and Mother Jones is only arguing with Mother Jones in saying this is incorrect.

Irrespective of one’s opinion of RFK, this is a textbook example of a straw man argument.
by RickS | 2025-04-18 23:21:48+00:00
I started out very interested. I tried the particle photon when it first came out years ago, and this feels like a spiritual successor, somewhat. Good demo video.

Various thoughts:

1. Consider defining best practices for solar and selling harder around that. I've got enough use for the board in hardwired environments, and can otherwise solve outdoor power issues, but having a recommended solution that I can trust to be solid would go a long way. "Using panel of X strength and battery of X capacity, get performance Y in Z conditions", etc.

2. I would probably preorder some of these, except the pricing is omitted. I have no idea how much these would cost. If they're 5 bucks, I buy a bucket. If they're 30, I buy a handful. If they're 100, I probably skip it. Etc. Withholding the price is a red flag, and I wouldn't share my email with an org that saw fit to withhold this info as the opening act. (edit: looks like the S1 is $55, so presumably this is more)

3. The LLM/agent aspect has no appeal. Assuming those costs are passed on to me / baked into every unit, the inclusion of AI is strictly downside.

4. It's not clear whether there are ongoing SaaS/storage/subscription costs associated with this, or what they would be. The FAQ suggests that forwarding data outside of the cloud will be restricted to enterprise-scale customers. This is also a red flag.

I think this can be successful in spite of all that. Particle definitely leaned away from hobbyists and into the larger ag-IOT market early on, presumably following money and stability. Totally understandable.

I guess my overall feedback is this: be upfront about the pricing and restrictions in a way that lets guys like me filter ourselves out upfront, instead of getting our hopes up. I've got a maker-tier budget, value data freedom, and am subscription-averse. It took me quite a bit of time and digging to uncover all the details in this comment, and I wish I hadn't spent the time. There are a ton of customers who are going to be totally cool with a $60+ board and a *0,000/mo contract for data forwarding. Court them directly.

Of course, I'd love to be wrong. If this is a $30 board with nearly-at-cost cloud storage and no REST data forwarding but yes bulk JSON download, then whoa, fuck yeah. Shout that from the rooftops too.

Either way, disambiguation would help.
by subpixel | 2025-04-18 23:21:50+00:00
> the suburbs start holding more appeal.

Suburbs don't need to be car-dependent. The suburban appeal in fact has nothing to do with cars.

In Germany as just one example, there was (when I lived there) excellent, reliable bus service in and between suburbs. And connecting the suburbs to light rail, which connected to the city center.

The big complaint I had in my 20s was that the light rail stopped running before midnight.
by alganet | 2025-04-18 23:21:57+00:00
Do you feel good about your mental health? No need to answer, just consider that such issues could be the cause for the anxiety about the future. In that case, therapy is recommended.

My take on the whole thing is quite different than yours. I can't relate, therefore I cannot give heartfelt advice.

Also, take a break. HN is full of noise.
by muzani | 2025-04-18 23:21:59+00:00
We ask this question in interviews too. One purpose is we want people who disagree and can handle this maturely. Everyone has negative experiences. People who don't have likely never tried anything difficult. But you have to be diplomatic about this.

Practice it. Write the answer. Go over it for 20 hours. Treat it like a presentation because it is. I go so far as to make an AI "interviewer" in Vapi so I can voice it out, and you can mod the tone to be supportive, indifferent, sarcastic, etc.

If you're disappointed with yourself, say that. Humans make mistakes. Someone out there started smoking or drinking once. Someone had an affair. You don't know which of your interviewers did which, but you can assume that everyone has done something they knew was a bad idea.

It's also reasonable to assume that an applicant is leaving for reasons. Bored? Wants more money? That's a pretty bad reason. Unhappy? That's a much better reason. What's the catch? Why is this property on the market for cheap? A trick is to imply what people want to hear - you're looking to work with smarter people, better processes, get your shit together, etc.
by floxy | 2025-04-18 23:22:01+00:00
Why do lithium battery prices keep going down? Because the Chinese are subsidizing everything for us? Or that battery production is getting more efficient over time? I guess my spidey sense gets a little tingly when sourcing data from papers published in 2021 and 2022. A.) Covid, B.) 4 year old papers are based on data that is even older, and it seems like things are changing fast with respect to batteries. Not to say that battery-electric planes are coming anytime soon.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteri...
by jasonfarnon | 2025-04-18 23:22:29+00:00
I agree, the ship sailed a long time ago. I have been archiving my emails since the 90s. Sometime around 2010 all the remotely loading emails came along, and since then I've several times gone back to look at an invite or announcement and find nothing but an html tag. I guess an archiver that would need print all my emails to a pdf or image file to preserve it, like the emails that show up in litigation. The tools I was using, gmvault or google's takeout, aren't made for this path we're on.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-04-18 23:23:20+00:00
I agree that planes are not likely to be electrified in the near future with current tech. Not sure about marine though.

Ships benefit from the square/cube law: square the hull area -> the volume is cubed.

E.g. if you double the size of a ship, the drag increases 4x but it can carry 8x the weight.

So larger ships are more efficient than smaller ones (at carrying containers/bulk/etc at scale).

Here in northern Europe, we already have electrified car carrying ferries etc.

Ocean going vessels will take longer though.
by milesrout | 2025-04-18 23:23:27+00:00
You did misunderstand it. Applying the law of the land as it has stood and been applied for hundreds of years isn't fascist. If anyone thought the Alien Enemies Act were fascist they could have repealed it at any time since the 18th century.

Nobody is being "disappeared". The word you are looking for is "deported". Deportation isn't a new idea or a new thing.

>The country has been sliding, this whole time. Reagan arguably started the ball rolling.

No it hasn't. The US became freer under all of those presidents, except George W. Bush and his surveillance programmes. None of them are fascists. In no case did the country end up closer to fascism after they were in.

The US is nowhere near fascism. The fact anyone thinks it is near it is just more evidence of how uneducated Americans are about the rest of the world.

Trump hasn't damaged or broken down any "democratic norms".

Yeah he claimed his election loss was illegitimate. So did Hilary Clinton! (It was all just a Russian hoax remember? Trump is a Russian agent--all the debunked Russiagate claims). It isn't like he started a civil war over it, unless you're one of those people that believes the absurd propaganda that claims he instigated an attempted coup by giving a speech where he didn't tell anyone to do anything, suggest anyone do anything, or or in any other way encourage or instigate anything.

I'm sorry your preferred candidate lost. I get it. It happens to us all. It isn't the end of the world. Presidents are allowed to act in accordance with the law--including their own stretched interpretations of it until they get kicked back by the courts--and that includes all the things Trump is being accused of.
by metalman | 2025-04-18 23:25:06+00:00
the thing with all of that obvious engineering detail, is that it is old, very old, and liquid fueled heat engines have very little room for improvement, while, electricity storage mediums, have vast potential for improvement. Solid state batteries are already bieng investigated for use as structural components, and super capacitors have the potential to weigh very little, and are only waiting for a technology that allows for higher and higher internal surface area, something that many other technologys can make use of, and is bieng sought after by many research teams. Jet A will remain Jet A, and hot section components in jet engines are more or less stuck where they are ,and the best theoretical improvements, are not large. So there is a certain inevitability about how this plays out.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-18 23:25:30+00:00
Yes, but it’s not about web page load times, it’s about entirely new usecases being unlocked.

Right now I have to keep my 8K raw video footage on a NAS. With 10 Gbps internet, I could keep it on cloud storage and still be able to edit it live.

There are many more like this just waiting to be unlocked, especially home robotics with the AI model running in a data. This needs high an uncompressed stereo video feed, which is currently impractical. With 10 Gbps it’s entirely possible.
Ask HN: Should I sue my ex-employer?
by throwaway28692 | 2025-04-18 23:25:52+00:00
Like many startup employees these days, I'm stuck waiting for my ex-employer to IPO, which in this era could be pretty much forever. Employee friendly companies include ex-employees in tender offers but mine does not.

What I'm wondering is, has the legality of founders taking money off the table while not extending the same opportunity to all shareholders ever been tested? It seems like a clear case of making decisions that personally benefit controlling shareholders at the expense of minority shareholders.

I don't really want to get involved in legal action but I think the current state of affairs is really toxic and industry leaders need to do something about it. In a world where companies can stay private indefinitely, employees should not need to rely on the charity of their (possibly ex) employer to get access to liquidity. Posting this on HN because if anyone is well positioned to create the norms here, it's YC leadership.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-18 23:26:53+00:00
TL;DW: The apparent tone shift is a result of interference from a bounce-path echo (from the ground) to the listener of the white noise emission of the aircraft, rather than expected doppler effect. This can be experimentally verified several ways, e.g., changing the bounce length (by moving closer or further from the ground) or by monitoring similar noises of known origin near an acoustically-reflective surface.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-18 23:28:00+00:00
NB. "The reader" is a figure of speech refering to the reader who is reading the comment, whomever that may be. The point of the comment is that "repetition" is probably not an adequate explanation for flagging. Unless readers are informed who is flaggging and for what purpose, then all anyone can do is guess. No one knows why stories are flagged except the people who flag them.

Whether some HN practice has always been the case or whether it will remain so for all time is irrelevant. What's relevant is that aggressive flagging is happening now. Commenters share their thoughts about it. Some disagree. Some agree. Discussion continues.
by ajross | 2025-04-18 23:28:10+00:00
TECO was just a DEC line editor, not entirely unlike ed/ex. The idea of TECO managing a display terminal (i.e. the environment in which emacs was written as a bunch of macros) came much later, and really only existed at MIT.

Glass TTY terminals were very new in the early 70's. TECO was primarily written to the "Knight TV" system, which was a fancy MMIO framebuffer array hooked up to a PDP-10 that would multiplex a bunch of displays and keyboards. There really was no "terminal" device per se, it was all software. There were other such devices (the MIT one was actually inspired by a similar system at Stanford), but nothing compatible enough to target an editor.

So basically if you were at MIT you'd understand TECO as the pinnacle of editting . But no one else could use it.

By the time Joy started writing vi, the idea of a "terminal" being a serial-connected device speaking a byte protocol with a handful of reasonable operations (position cursor, clear screen, etc...) had solidified. So a portable editor that would work with multiple devices was feasible. Emacs wouldn't get that for a few years yet.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-04-18 23:28:15+00:00
> Why do you say that? Very often the vulnerabilities are not in the mathematics but in the implementation.

I recommend this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Pma5Bdvoo This gives you a good example how practical attacks and intentional weakening of crypto works.

And especially for common cryptos like AES and RAS you can easily compare the outputs of different implementations. If one is different, that one is suspect. And especially for open source crypto like OP, the implementation can easily be verified.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-18 23:28:41+00:00
It took my wife and I actually buying an electric car and running it for a few months to actually convince family members that electric cars are a worthwhile technology.

They were fervently against us buying one, so much so that we had to avoid conversation about it and outright lie to them about our intentions.

"You can't take it on a driving holiday."

Yeah, we'll manage with one of our other two existing cars for that, like we have when we've taken one of our previous once every couple of years driving holidays.

"You can't tow with it."

Thank fuck, I hate towing and I can't remember towing anything in the last 15 years.

The electric car, a Nissan Leaf, is perfect for 99% of our use cases. The whole family love it. It's our "first in best dressed" car.

Even smart people are fucking stupid about plenty of things.
by czk | 2025-04-18 23:28:53+00:00
will be interesting to see how they tighten the reward signal / ground outputs in some verifiable context. don't reward it for sounding right (rlhf), reward it for being right. but you'd probably need some sort of system to backprop a fact-checked score, and i imagine that would slow down training quite a bit. if the verifier finds a false claim it should reward the model for saying "i dont know"
by lmpdev | 2025-04-18 23:28:57+00:00
There is an inverse to this though

I sell 12-24V fridges with adjustable temperatures on them

More than a handful of times I’ve had customer returns because the fridge is “broken” and when I inquire further they refuse to use a fridge which deviates from the set temperature for any amount of time (even by one or two degrees)

By giving users the affordance of knowing the exact temperature - they’re appalled to realise it’s not a magic black box, and that the compressor kicks in to bring it back to temperature, and kicks out when it reaches it

They no doubt have no issue with their domestic fridge, which does not afford them the ability to see the exact temperature, despite functioning the same under the hood