MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nom | 2025-04-17 12:10:35+00:00
What is more likely:

- a physics-breaking thermodynamic anomaly

- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption

200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.

Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.

Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.

Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.
by scp3125 | 2025-04-17 12:10:35+00:00
The formal term is irony, because what they are presenting is actually a "Reductio ad absurdum", but they don't understand why their argument is absurd.

If you want a case and point of this, imagine a comedian proposing this idea dripping with sarcasm and clever little jokes, sort of what John Oliver does. The overall absurdity would be obvious, and everyone would understand the suggestion is a bad idea, with a little bit of honey to go with the vinegar.

The people often presenting this sort of unintentionally ironic argument don't seem to recognize the idiocy or exclusivity of the thing they're suggesting. Lacking understanding of the absurdity of the situation is the definition of their ignorance, because the burden of understanding and proof are on the person presenting the argument, not the audience. (Everyone is ignorant in some way, and nobody is even close to knowing everything. You're being dramatic if you really think that way, even for a second.)
by mjburgess | 2025-04-17 12:10:43+00:00
Trump is very effective at selling people their grievances; at identifying problems, "with the right emotional tone", and so on. Obviously, he's completely unable to solve any of them -- and mostly lacks the interest in doing so.

Since I sympathised with the people who sympathised with him, I did not regard him as an inherently "evil" -- which seemed to be the left's take. And it's a pretty dangerous one. Because when people identify with trump, if you call him evil, so to them. And the left's habit of just opposing whatever he says renders their side seemingly at least as callous as him: which is why so many polls believe trump understands their problems better than the other side.

I think it's more accurate to say trump is a complex individual who could, with the right social environment, express quite different politics. What I hadn't anticipated is that his social environment has become so radicalised, professionalised, and totalitarian. (As someone else put it: the last trump was "Jared's" and this one is Don Jr's. Trump, I think, can be both. That's over now.)

In any case, I think it's a moot point. I was wrong. This latent rage of the right against their cultural marginalisation is now a smokescreen for the totalising of the presidency. It's a real problem.
by st3fan | 2025-04-17 12:11:26+00:00
"The location of the Fn and Control keys are swapped. And, of course, neither computer allows re-mapping the Fn key"

On MacOS: Settings -> Search for "Customize Modifier Keys"

The Fn key is what they call the "Globe" key now. You can map any of the five (including caps lock) keys to anything.
by watwut | 2025-04-17 12:11:47+00:00
> After a brief shutdown, many of Europe’s schools reopened in the spring, welcoming back millions of children

Conveniently ignoring long lockdowns all around the Europe. As it is, yet another lying article, trying to pretend America was stricter then the Europe overall. Nothing like that happened.

Oh, and ignoring populace obeying rules and isolating as much as possible way more even in places like Sweden.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-17 12:11:47+00:00
Yeah everyone's reckoning needs to go back to bush and sept 11 2001 frankly. The consolidation of executive power, the labeling of "enemies" and "terrorists" as inherently applying to some groups which therefore do not have the same rights of due process, the torture prisons it didn't quite all start there but it was a massive turning point.

The way the wars fed back into american policing, the justifications for the drone assassination program (but not here! not quite yet). A lot of what we're seeing now is the natural endpoint of processes that were started under bush "in reaction" to sept 11 and expanded under obama and later biden.

The main stream of the republican party has been, first quietly but then openly, fantasizing about authoritarian control for 25 years. And through that whole time the democrats have made it one of their biggest priorities to help them construct the apparatus needed to accomplish it. And our allies have been eager to get their hands on these same powers & systems to apply to their own citizens.

Honestly looking back the biggest mistake I made was that I thought the things that are happening now would happen in bush's second term. When they didn't I took seriously the possibility that I was wrong about the bloodlust of the american right, sincerely spent many years convincing myself they were in working in good faith towards what they understood was best for the world. I had it right the first time. For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves.
by hu3 | 2025-04-17 12:12:20+00:00
> We're using rustc v1.83, and despite having a 64-core machine with 128 threads, Rust barely puts any of them to work.

> That’s right — 1,106 crates! Sounds excessive? Maybe. But in the end this is what makes rustc much more effective.

> What used to take 30–45 minutes now compiles in under 3 minutes.

I wonder if this kind of trick can be implemented in rustc itself in a more automated fashion to benefit more projects.
by haswell | 2025-04-17 12:12:30+00:00
31.5% of eligible voters voted for the current administration. 49.8% of voters who voted were in favor of the current administration.

Clearly the way people vote matters. But I bristle at the sentiment that protesting against it is “pointless”. Such protests are as much a signal to those who voted as it is to those who didn’t and those who hold power. It’s an ecosystem reacting in the way it should react when threatened.
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-17 12:12:35+00:00
Yes, in this theoretical world where stocks trend down over extended periods of time, I could see this being an issue.

In the fairy farts world of the US stock markets, we don't often see mega corps trend down. That's why every American pension is piled into SP500... Which is really driven by the growth of like 10 companies, tops.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-17 12:12:50+00:00
Shodan [1] is not the only place active vulnerabilities are stored up. Each nation have systems that track vulnerabilities and scripts can be stored up to mass exploit all these systems all at once. And that is just for internet facing crap. There are also systems designed to be weak. Anything with SSH default settings especially multiplexing and sudo with weakened lazy settings such as passwordless or passwordless with timeouts are easy targets for phishing and establishing a RAT without any additional software meaning no malware is required, no bugs are required and nothing would be detected, ever. The existing state of the internet was not designed to handle nation state level attacks and fixing that requires adding friction that people simply will not accept. It's a hackers paradise.

TL;DR The biggest weakness of the internet is human nature.

[1] - https://www.shodan.io/
by bergon | 2025-04-17 12:13:05+00:00
I've never tried NordVPN Meshnet, but just want to add an alternative I've fallen in love with: Tailscale. It's amazingly simple to set up and use. Today all my devices are connected to each other, and my jellyfin service is reachable through my chromecast, phone, computer and Ipad. As well as my filehost VPS.

I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days it's such a breeze.
by basisword | 2025-04-17 12:13:49+00:00
>> Better off just exercising and eating as clean as you can!

I'm sure the morbidly obese are unaware of this.

For what it's worth, I'm an ex-smoker and quitting smoking was easy compared to trying to deny myself unhealthy amounts of food. The vast majority of obese people hate it and don't want to be that way - but they're addicted to food. GLP-1's pretty much stop their cravings. Using them to get to a healthy weight and then trying to manage cravings when they are healthier and happier seems like a good solution. Especially given the side-effects of extreme obesity are severe and well known - better to worry about that than 'unintended side effects' that are at this point hypothetical.
by brainwad | 2025-04-17 12:13:54+00:00
Well, the problem is obvious in hindsight, and perhaps even in foresight. Giving out free money attracts these scammers, who crowd real students out of not only the aid money, but also the actual class. So the net effect is to make it harder to access community college, not easier.

Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to avoid the scammers if they limited first time students to in-person classes.
by paulcole | 2025-04-17 12:14:37+00:00
People can still work as graphic artists, there will likely just be fewer of them.

Same as how Pentiums ended up reducing the number of some jobs and increasing the number of other jobs. Newspaper related jobs went down by a lot while computer programmer jobs went up by a lot.

There’s always competition coming from somewhere — and there’s always opportunity to be found.

What’s in your head (call that education if you like) remains the differentiator.
by znpy | 2025-04-17 12:15:12+00:00
> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :)

qemu needs to be studied a bit, UTM is fairly intuitive.

I recently decided to learn how to create VMs with bare qemu (using the command-line).

As I have an arm macbook for work, UTM helped me a ton with aarch64 virtual machines because I could enable debug log and see what qemu options/flags/switches would UTM use.

Unrelated: I have some ideas about writing a tool that aims at being a "spiritual successor" to vagrant (from hashicorp), but focused on targeting qemu rather than virtual box.

Anyone interested? Please let me know (upvote or comment)
by crazygringo | 2025-04-17 12:15:49+00:00
We've been in a post-truth era for all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherer told a lie to take advantage of someone else.

Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors. They're not perfect, but they're pretty decent.

The answer around what is real and not is the same as it ever was -- does information come from a respected, generally trustworthy source or not? Does it come from a source that might have an agenda, or not? Is it written in a way that seems to gather a lot of evidence in all directions and then explain its conclusion in a plausible way, or is it clearly one-sided?

Bullshit detection, fraud detection, scam detection -- these have always been necessary skills in the world. Sure the scale of misinformation grows, but so do the tools we have to combat it. Email spam was a huge problem, then Gmail filtered it out.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Show HN: C++ library for embedded and IoT projects (ESP32)
by dshil | 2025-04-17 12:17:05+00:00
Hi everyone.

I've recently released control-components, a C++ library I've been using for most of my embedded projects. It is written in C++17 (with some features from C++20) and uses STL and FreeRTOS under the hood. It contains a lot of building blocks that is commonly used in embedded and IoT projects: finite state machines (FSM), various counters, synchronisation primitives, system loops, sensors, schedulers, HTTP, WiFi, Web GUI, and much more. It also provides GitHub CI workflows for build automation (ccache, various checks).

In general, it's a good starting point for an ESP32 project. It is still low-level, so it can be easily integrated into the existing project. See my another project, https://github.com/open-control-systems/bonsai-firmware - an agro-tech toolkit, for how control-components can be used.

If you find it useful, please let me know!
by _bc2z | 2025-04-17 12:17:08+00:00
I've also tried tesseract in the past with handwritten notes, which didn't provide very accurate results. Then I started looking into some commercial solutions and stumbled upon many different tools, but the only one that could handle my handwriting was Klippa DocHorizon: https://www.klippa.com/en/ocr/ It uses machine learning and OCR instead of just plain OCR like tesseract does, so it might be an option to look into. You could also test it out at https://www.klippa.com/en/ocr/tools/

I've been using it for a while and would highly recommend it. hopefully it can work out for your use case
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-17 12:17:12+00:00
I'm mixed. If we lived in a utopian world where money isn't real, I'd agree. Reality is California has major budget issues. Offering the classes for free is already enough in the current climate.

Working while going to school is not uncommon or isolated to California. Full time work while going to school is excessive - but that is also a California COL issue that the state needs to actually tackle. But it gets worse the more they don't address their deficits. Debt begets debt and it always drives up COL.
by rayiner | 2025-04-17 12:17:17+00:00
The Supreme Court has held that the government can use its control over funds to condition speech in ways it couldn’t directly: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-a...

The Supreme Court has also held that the government can revoke tax exempt status of a private organization where it furthers a compelling government policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United...

Control over federal funding is also the hook for Title VI’s application of non-discrimination laws to private universities.

The government also has the trump card up its sleeve that Harvard is almost certainly violating Title VI through extensive programs of race consciousness. It’s well established that the civil rights laws apply equally to whites as to non-whites. Harvard has many programs for non-whites where, if those programs were for whites instead, that would be a Title VI violation that would jeopardize Harvard’s federal funding. E.g. Harvard had various racially segregated graduation parties last year: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-university-to-of.... If you can’t have a “White Celebration” then you can’t have a “Black Celebration” either. If Harvard doesn’t settle they’ll get hit with a Title VI lawsuit and they’re going to lose it.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-17 12:17:28+00:00
Well, if the above paper is correct there is something you need to know. Epigenetic changes are caused my the methylation of DNA. So if there are epigentic chnages that are causing you to gain weight, what needs to be done is to Demethylate the DNA. This is done through Demethylase enzymes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase

some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].

So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry
by zamadatix | 2025-04-17 12:17:38+00:00
The custom CUDA kernel for 4-in-8 seems to have come out better than a naive approach (such as just treating each as an fp8/int8) + it lowers memory bandwidth. Custom hardware would certainly make that improvement even better but I don't think that's what's limiting training to 2-8 billion parameters as much as something like research convenience while the groundwork for this type of model is still being figured out.
by RandomBacon | 2025-04-17 12:17:49+00:00
That's probably exactly what the other "side" is thinking.

For example:

They think that allowing people with penises to to change in women's locker rooms just because they identify as women is wicked, so they aren't being silent about it.

> the locker room situation with Thomas, who although she has transitioned to being female hormonally and identified as a woman, still has male body parts https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/lia-thomas-teamma...

The pendulum eventually swings to the other side.

(I'm somewhere in the middle with I suspect a majority of people - it's the extremists that are the loudest.)
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-17 12:17:59+00:00
I understand this happens and I agree but there's two options.

1. Avoid talking about politics

2. Learn to control your emotions when discussing politics even if you have a strong view.

I think 2 is a better solution otherwise the worse things get the more people will avoid talking about it.

It's worth the effort because, based on your example, if you really cared about the people of Gaza you need to stand up and defend them, not avoid the topic due to how uncomfortable it makes you feel
by patapong | 2025-04-17 12:18:39+00:00
I want AIs that clean my apartment while I watch rugby, not AIs that watch rugby while I clean the apartment. ;)

In seriousness, this is a cool project and show how sophisticated analysis LLMs can do in a plug and play manner. They may not always be the best solution but a fantastic baseline that can be deployed and adapted to a usecase in less than an hour.
by tomrod | 2025-04-17 12:18:57+00:00
Their point is at a higher level than a single artist's inclusion. What you're advocating is for artists to give up their rights (whether primarily or indirectly negotiated). "Just do what the lawyers say."

I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-17 12:19:12+00:00
The data actually implies UK citizens have been consistently moving out of London. The absolute white British population in 1971 was 6,500,000 but was only 3,239,281 in 2021 [1].

Of course not all UK citizens are white British, and the negative fertility rate would've applied downward pressure, and it's conceivable that white Londoners emigrated to Australia etc at a higher rate than other parts of the UK. But none of these factors can really explain a 50% decline in population in the same way that internal migration can. It certainly becomes very difficult to reconcile the numbers if any signifiant number of people from predominantly white areas had been moving into London.

I agree with you that most of the change in average UK house prices is driven by London. In a zero immigration scenario it seems likely that London prices would be radically lower with the rest of the country having much less, if any, change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-17 12:19:12+00:00
> Water Yes. I can easily fast for 4-5 days once a month with no problem. Water, I've only done it a 3-4 times in my life, just to see how I react on it. I 'imagine' (not really) the scenarion of being in some country that is frequently earthquake-struck and being without access to water because of damaged infrastructure, etc. Again, the purpose is to know one's limits and _not_ to harm oneself.

How many people live in such zones where strong earthquake are frequent, and they have the real/possible risk of being trapped under some rubble for 1-2-3 days without access to food or water? Knowing your limits and not panicking helps.

>50kg What if you got a kid and you new to carry it for some distance? What if you have to kill an animal and bring it back to chop it and eat it? Again, the purpose is to do it a couple of times in your life to know what you can and cannot do. Not ruin your spine aimlessly.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-17 12:19:48+00:00
That is an interesting perspective. I actually think that a gradual shift to an emulated brain would keep you more “you” than replacing neurons in place with non-biological neurons. The reason is the emulation and is why I used the watch analogy, which was not about duplication vs transferring, but was about how emulation of physical objects and the connections between them is the same, for all intents and purposes, as the “real” version.

In your 3 neuron brain analogy, the emulated neuron would not be receiving external signals. It’s physical properties would be emulated in software so the neuron would function i.e. behave the same way, as the original. Much the same way that an emulated mechanical watch mainspring will tension when you “wind” it and release that energy to “power” the watch the same as the watch it was emulating. Of course the winding, tension, etc. aren’t really happening. They are software running in a computer, but the key is they are behaving in the same way as a real watch component.

Back to our emulated third neuron, it would not really be going through the electrochemical process of changing its action potential based on the chemical signal received from one of the other two neurons. What it would be doing is emulating that process in software in the same way as the biological one it replaced. It is not “receiving external signals” in that it is not a computer serving as a neuron, or like plugging your brain into a computer so you can directly interface with it. It is a computer running software and that software is running a physics engine of a neuron and the only external signals transmitted to that neuron running in software is an emulated duplicate of the signal sent from one of the other two neurons. However the neuron responds based on the rules of the physics engine, which again is built so that the neuron will behave the same as its biological model, would be converted to a real signal sent back to the other two neurons. So, nothing would fundamentally change for the other neurons to adapt to.

Now, lets look at the non-biological silicon (or whatever material) brain. A silicon neuron would not behave the same as a biological one because it is made of totally different materials, likely chosen to act faster, more efficiently, more accurately, etc. In that case, the new neuron would not respond in the same as the biological one it replaced. I would say that would alter the functioning of the brain much more drastically.
by ikatson | 2025-04-17 12:20:12+00:00
> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone

Afaik UTM uses Qemu under the hood, but provides a nice UI on top for the basic use cases. It also has a library of prepared images, so that your VM is a few clicks away from intention to have one.

It can also modify the VM, resize storage after creation etc.

Of course all of it can be done with QEMU alone, but this makes it easier to deal with than remembering tons of QEMU command line arguments.
by roxolotl | 2025-04-17 12:20:18+00:00
This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is “normal” and that it will be transformative is a radical statement in today’s discussions about AI.

Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies: steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those are surrounded by an initial burst of enthusiasm and pessimism and follow a hype cycle.

The reason this piece is compelling is because during the initial hype phase taking a nuanced middle of the road viewpoint is difficult. Maybe AI really is some “next step” but it is significantly more likely that belief is propped up by science fiction and it’s important to keep expectations inline historically.
by AsmaraHolding | 2025-04-17 12:21:02+00:00
Isn’t that simply the inherent risk associated with business ventures? Not every investment will yield a profit. I recall reading about Ward Parkinson, one of the founders of Micron Technology. During his tenure at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company paid for his Master’s degree at Stanford. However, upon graduating, he promptly left to work for Reticon.