MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leoedin | 2025-04-28 10:10:42+00:00
We're talking about a carbon tax. By definition it is not on car fuel, but on carbon.

You don't need state surveillance or tracking purchases. You just need to get to the source of the problem. Hydrocarbons leaving the ground.

At the hydrocarbon level, it's much easier to track. Oil and gas is mostly extracted by very large corporations and transported by large infrastructure. You don't care what happens to it once you've produced it - but you do need to put a levy on the hydrocarbons before they're sold on. The people who use those hydrocarbons all have higher costs which pass on to customers.

The biggest problem is international borders. If another country isn't applying carbon tax, then you need to make an estimate of the embodied energy of a product at the point of import. Or encourage them to tax carbon. But neither of those require surveillance. Once the product has been imported, you don't care who buys or sells it because the tax is already paid.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-28 10:10:59+00:00
Melania Trump literally did spread racist lies on national TV. And when confronted with evidence that directly contradicted her racist lies that she could not refute, she justified her racist lies with her racist "feelings".

Melania Trump Supported Her Husband's Racist Birtherism Claims on TV:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/melania-trump-supported-her-...

>People need to stop talking about "freeing Melania."

>An old clip resurfaced on the internet over the weekend of Melania Trump supporting her husband Donald Trump's claims that former president Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

>On April 20, 2011, Melania appeared on the Joy Behar Show and backed up her husband's allegations that Obama wasn't born in the state of Hawaii like live birth records suggest.

>"It’s not only Donald who wants to see [Obama's birth certificate], it’s American people who voted for him and who didn’t vote for him. They want to see that," she argued. Behar then made the point that the birth certificate had already been on display and all over the internet. "We feel it’s different than birth certificate," Melania responded.

Melania Trump On Obama's Birth Certificate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6i0YlHriKk&t=98s

>Joy asks Melania Trump if Donald is really going to run for president or if it's a publicity stunt & why he's obsessed with President Obama's birth certificate.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-04-28 10:11:42+00:00
The thumbnail might do in case you don’t want to watch the YT video :

https://youtu.be/8LO0I8v8EvE?si=y6numFgiqCYd-eLe

The placard carried by the individual* said “bring back witch burning… JK”.

* I don’t see calling for such a thing as a typical female trait, but then again these protestors did also desecrate a Suffragette memorial, so I expect their ideas are a little confused.
by wunderlab | 2025-04-28 10:11:47+00:00
In: I opened Excel

Out:

Embarking on a Data Journey with Excel

Today, our team took a monumental step towards unlocking the power of data by bravely embarking on a journey with the mighty Excel! Together, we navigated through the vast sea of cells and formulas, conquering challenges and embracing opportunities along the way. This is not just an Excel file, this is a gateway to endless possibilities and insights! Let's continue to collaborate, innovate, and excel in all that we do! #DataJourney #TeamWork #EndlessPossibilities
by sReinwald | 2025-04-28 10:12:21+00:00
I really have to challenge the notion of AI "distilling information without cognitive bias.

First, AI systems absolutely embody cognitive biases - they're just different from human ones. These systems inherit biases from:

- Their training data (which reflects human biases and knowledge cutoffs) - Architectural decisions made by engineers - Optimization criteria and reinforcement learning objectives - The specific prompting and context provided by users

An AI doesn't independently evaluate source credibility or apply domain expertise - it synthesizes patterns from its training data according to its programming.

Second: You frame AI as a "power suit" for distilling information faster. While speed has its place, a core value of doing research isn't just arriving at a final summary. It's the process of engaging with a vast, often messy, diversity of information, facts, opinions, and even flawed arguments. Grappling with that breadth, identifying conflicting viewpoints, and synthesizing them _yourself_ is where deep understanding and critical thinking are truly built.

Skipping straight to the "distilled information," as useful as it might be for some tasks, feels like reading an incredibly abridged version of Lord of the Rings: A small man finds a powerful ring once owned by an evil God, makes some friends and ends up destroying the ring in a volcano. The end. You miss all the nuance, context, and struggle that creates real meaning and understanding.

Following on from that, you suggest that this AI-driven distillation then "allows for another level, experiments, surveys, etc to uncover things even further." I'd argue the opposite is more likely. These tools are bypassing the very cognitive effort that develops critical thinking in the first place. The essential practice for building those skills involves precisely the tasks these tools aim to automate: navigating contradictory information, assessing source reliability, weighing arguments, and constructing a reasoned conclusion yourself. By offloading this fundamental intellectual work, we remove the necessary exercise. We're unfortunately already seeing glimpses of this, with people resorting to shortcuts like asking "@Grok is this true???" on Twitter instead of engaging critically with the information presented to them.

Tools like this might offer helpful starting points or quick summaries, but they can't replicate the cognitive and critical thinking benefits of the research journey itself. They aren't a substitute for the human mind actively wrestling with information to achieve genuine understanding, which is the foundation required before one can effectively design meaningful experiments or surveys.
by buran77 | 2025-04-28 10:12:31+00:00
A couple of years ago, inspired bu the Tonie box, I built a similar yet much simpler device for a toddler in my family but without such a lofty goal of the learning experience.

I wanted to retain the same "always offline" and "physical" aspects of the experience. I used NFC labels hidden under the cover art label on old (edit: not SD) CF cards because I had a bunch of old ones around and they were all standard size and not easy to swallow. An internal microSD that held all the files needed. Plugging the cartridge in the fake socket which was actually just a hidden power on switch would trigger the playing of a specific file. It's a tad more maintenance heavy but much quicker to pull of.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-28 10:12:38+00:00
So Britain is not a liberal democracy anymore? Are you sure you aren't falling for some propaganda here? This just seems very unlikely.

If this were actually true Britain would be violating basic premises of what is considered justice in a liberal democracy. Policing someone based on whether the targets of their threats are politically acceptable is obviously not are tactics used in autocratic regimes. Loyalists e.g. in Russia are free to threaten the opposition however they like at worst getting a slap on the wrist. At the same time much less serious threats against the regime are harshly punished.

If what you say were true and not just some propaganda operation, then the British political system has slid sharply towards authoritarianism. Obviously liberal democracy is more than equality before the law, but is one important pillar. This happening is incompatible with my view of the UK.
by jstanley | 2025-04-28 10:12:56+00:00
I'm working on a new open source CAD program for 3d printing based on Signed Distance Functions.

Benefits of SDFs over the standard Boundary Representation (used in Freecad and similar) are that you can do "pattern" operations with domain repetition, which means making N copies of a feature is O(1), vs O(N^2), you can deform objects with domain deformation, which means if you have a closed-form representation of how you want to deform space you can basically directly apply that to your object, procedural surface texturing is easy, CSG operations are easy.

The big drawback is that it is hard to provide any workflow based around "selecting" faces, edges, or vertices, because you don't naturally have any representation for these things, they are emergent from the model's SDF.

I have some blog posts on my progress: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sdf-thoughts.html and https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/frep-cad-building-blo...

I am solving the "selecting faces" problem by having the SDF propagate surface ids as well as distances. So the result of the evaluation is not just the distance to the nearest point on the surface, but the id of the specific surface that is nearest.

My next big frontier is reliably providing fillets and chamfers between arbitrary surfaces. I have a handful of partial solutions but nothing complete yet.

The most promising idea is one that o3 came up with called "masked clones", the idea is roughly to make a clone of the 2 surfaces you want to blend, mask them by intersecting with an object that is like a "pipe" along the intersection of the 2 surfaces, apply the blend within the pipe, and then add this "blend pipe" as another child of the lowest common ancestor of the 2 blended surfaces.

And after that I need to work on more standard CAD stuff like constraint solving in the 2d sketch editor.
by gwd | 2025-04-28 10:14:28+00:00
If I had to re-summarize your point, I'd put it this way:

1. Success is very little on the idea, almost entirely on the execution

2. Execution has both a technical side and a business side, and can fail from a poor execution either way.

How this applies to your target audience:

You have an idea for a business? Nice -- that's almost worthless (1). You can't influence execution on the technical side, so you need to bring execution from the business side (2).

I like the numbers -- "a waitlist of 1000 people or LOI from 20 businesses" gives a better idea what kind of execution a non-technical co-founder should be capable of.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-28 10:14:41+00:00
No offense but I hope this shit dies in a fire as soon as possible. I know so many people who got tricked into buying products due to fancy AI generated ads, in the end the product looked nothing like the real thing, and from your examples it is exactly what your site is generating

Also this is yet again another shitty LLM wrapper: https://medium.com/@creatorarvin/wait-chatgpt-makes-ad-creat...

Sorry for the blunt words but the web is flooded with half assed LLM wrappers that bring absolutely 0 values
by solatic | 2025-04-28 10:15:05+00:00
Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone, and replace traffic lights with traffic circles / roundabouts. If they really want to force cars to slow down, they could, in a way that doesn't take anyone's rights away and doesn't require any vehicle manufacturer to play ball.

Freedom isn't free. It's always cheaper to take away people's freedom instead of doing the hard work of building infrastructure to naturally promote traffic calming. Too bad America (left and right) doesn't believe in freedom anymore.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-04-28 10:15:07+00:00
> US citizens have freedom of speech

just a reminder that anti protest laws now allow people to be send to prision for speech. But I guess as long as hippie looking they/them who are pro palestine at uni go to jail instead of racist white people then the US does not have Orwellian laws.

Please never actually read the book or else you might need to stop using it as a adjective because doublethink is what you are actively doing right now
by apexalpha | 2025-04-28 10:15:35+00:00
I don't know if Americans are grasping how much the attitude is changing outside of the US.

My mom has booked a multithousand dollar vacation on a cruise set to depart from Florida. They would only be there for a few days.

They are still asking the company to just fly to the first non-US stop and then board. And crazy enough the company might actually accomodate this since hundreds of people have inquired according the agent she talked to.

People really distrust the US government now.

As we Dutch say: trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.
by disintegrator | 2025-04-28 10:16:27+00:00
The most amusing thing I found about Go is that they built a presentation framework similar alongside the language. It's got some additional syntax on top of markdown but the documentation to use it can readily fit in an LLM's context window. I'd say it's good enough for many simple presentations.

https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/present
by testing22321 | 2025-04-28 10:16:55+00:00
> Hooters could still exist if the waitresses were paid a salary or an hourly rate. Tipping isn’t the problem.

There are two problems. Requiring an employee to wear extremely skimpy clothing, and tipping.

> I think you might also be confusing tipped minimum wage with actual minimum wage, and I think the article did no one any favors there.*

I am not, I understand the difference perfectly.
by silver_silver | 2025-04-28 10:16:55+00:00
Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, its sequel, and to a lesser degree her Wayfarer series are very hopeful. Not exactly hard sci-fi so maybe not to HN’s taste but they check a lot of good tech boxes. A plot device in the former is their world’s version of a smartphone, a scrib, which is designed to last a lifetime and genuinely serve the user
Ask HN: How to track inputs from other people
by helloworlddd | 2025-04-28 10:16:59+00:00
If you're working on something that requires inputs from other people, how do you keep track of their input. If I'm waiting for something for longer than a day, I'm prone to just forgetting about it. It seems strange putting it on my todo list if it's something I don't actually need to do.
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-28 10:17:05+00:00
>Once we start punishing people for free speech, whatever their ideology or party affiliation may be, the same tactics can be used against us when the political tides turn.

This is with the underlying ideal that neither side has the right answers. Which was true back in the era of sane politics.

Except this doesn't really apply anymore, as we know that one side is objectively stupid, and with the modern age, there is zero to none fact checking or social responsibility.

In the same way that there are restrictions to free speech in yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, there absolutely should be restrictions on anything having to do with the popular right talking points, with appropriate jail time, as those fall into the same category now, with people taking Ivermectin for Covid and dying because Joe Rogan told them so.

And if the laws are in place, and the wrong party ever takes charge again and uses those laws against you, that should be a motivator to not let that party take hold in the first place.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 10:17:29+00:00
Hate speech laws are a very convenient tool for an authoritarian regime as their application is totally subjective. You could argue that saying "death to terfs" would mean only to end an ideology, but "death to Islam" would send you in prison as you are threatening muslims. In general, it's the same thing, but depending on the prevailing ideology, Police and courts can apply it selectively.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-04-28 10:17:30+00:00
Previous technologies did lessen us in some way: agricultural and industrial revolution did lower the physical requirements to do most jobs. Writing tech lower the human memory requirements for knowledge acquisition. While we increased our output as a result of these technologies we have afforded ourselves the privilege of being physically weaker and having shorter memories as outsource that to the new technology of the day.

Fast forward to 202x, and the thing being outsourced to LLMs is our ability to think (to a certain extent). We should expect on average to see a decline in the ability to think critically by your average citizen.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-28 10:17:33+00:00
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.

Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?

AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as the Swiss or Scandinavians, are mostly fairly free long-term.

They could be conquered by much stronger external foes such as the Nazis, but the theory that those guns would be a boon to a would-be internal tyrant does not seem to be borne out.
by michelsedgh | 2025-04-28 10:17:50+00:00
It just feels like old web has died, only things left are Youtube, Amazon, here, X,and… I guess thats it. Its boring to be online now it feels like. Facebook, Insta, snap, reddit, google search, netflix, hbo they all feel like they’re dying sometimes a heartbeat comes from the, here and then, but you know there’s no hope for them long term.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-28 10:17:51+00:00
I'm not going to say whether it's good or not, but if you're operating a computer that's providing bomb-making instructions to UK residents that's quite a serious criminal offence.

(obviously the concept of "criminal offence" doesn't apply to CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies, but it's possible that the papers might get upset. Especially after the first such bomb.)
by lupusreal | 2025-04-28 10:18:12+00:00
> If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again

No. Most people who drive significantly faster than the limit are disregarding the limit and are driving at the speed they feel to be safe. They aren't considering the limit and blindly choosing to drive X over it, such that they'd drive X even faster even if the posted limit were raised by X.

If a long flat and straight country road in good condition has a posted limit of 30 and most people instead do 60 (this is common in many parts of the country), they wouldn't start doing 120 if the limit were raised to 60 because "do double the posted limit" was not their objective in the first place. Their objective was "drive at the speed which is safe for this road" and the condition of the road didn't change, so that speed doesn't change.

(The reason I know this to be true is because the proportion of drivers who speed on any given road varies wildly with the road. On some roads, 95% do substantially faster than the limit while on other roads that ratio is flipped around the other way. This demonstrates that speeds are being chosen by the condition and nature of the road, not derived in some way from the posted limits.)
by thorin | 2025-04-28 10:18:45+00:00
As below, Physics and Maths degrees tend to have high entry requirements, large amounts of hands on (classroom or labs) hours, lots of highly focussed students. I observed this while studying Electronic Engineering, which I would say is similar but more practical and with lower entrance requirements. I'm not sure where computer science would fit into this as it's a newer discipline with less stringent core requirements. Other IT courses may be less rigorous and include people that are less focussed on their education relatively.

As above I would say that the physics students I know are often the ones going furthest in their careers either in research, computing (know a few at google), consulting e.g. PWC etc
by pingou | 2025-04-28 10:19:38+00:00
A simple LLM client, for the simple reason that the one I bought stopped being supported and I could not find any replacement. It's free, right now only for Mac (Windows coming soon when Microsoft finally decides to approve my account). You just need an api key from your favorite LLM provider (right now it supports Gemini, OpenAI, Deepseek, and Anthropic). https://elleelleaime.org
by icoder | 2025-04-28 10:20:09+00:00
The IDFV already supports tracking user across apps, as long as they are from the same vendor. It resets when apps from a vendor are removed from a device. Not sure if the user can reset it by themselves, but the vendor could then always tie things together using another self-generated identifier stored on the device, as long as any of its apps are on it, which boils down to the same.

I think the approach you describe allows roughly the same, except perhaps doing so without (or with different) permissions, and allowing to do this between vendors (that must agree upon this upfront).
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-28 10:20:45+00:00
"Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone"

There are some cobblestone streets in Prague and cars driving through them, even slowly, generate a lot of unnecessary noise.

Count me out, I don't want to suffer from extra noise just because it would slow some people down. I lived in one such street for years and even with sporadic traffic, I had to open my windows at night. I hated that.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-04-28 10:20:45+00:00
One idea I have had for years is that it would be great if file system would support structured data.

This would combine well with your idea.

So let's say that I change python source code, the "file system" would understand the syntax of python source. Your tool could then use this to derive the sematics of my change, i.e. "added a function foo() with the following signature and body"
by beowulfey | 2025-04-28 10:22:06+00:00
It is challenging and expensive to get a driver's license in Germany, and the repercussions for screwing up are high. Also driving isn't as necessary--the excellent public transit means there are alternate means of traveling, so not having one is less of a detriment. So while the Autobahn might be considered the Platonic ideal of high-speed driving, it isn't always feasible or likely and I don't think it should be considered as such. As much as I wish we could have that in the US!
by modo_mario | 2025-04-28 10:22:09+00:00
>But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

I've found across industries that the technical guys typically have more domain expertise given equal time spent in that industry with way too many examples to throw in here down to entire factories being known better from just about every angle (bar the nuts and bolts) by a single senior tech guy than the actual owners and sub domain mangers. Just because he and many other technical guys in the other examples had to understand the problems in depth to develop for them and abstract them away for the managers, accountants, ppl running the machines, etc

The sales skills can matter a lot especially for b2b but it's not a given that these (along other people skills) aren't possessed by the dev. I tagged along trough a ton of the studies of my girlfriend as she studied international business management... and as far as practically useful stuff goes it honestly didn't go that far beyond what we got taught in our company management course when studying compsci.(other than things like statistics with spss and the like which they seemed to almost collectively suck at.) All it gave me was a sense of wonder at the amount of buzzwords and cargoculting in that sphere outside of the usefull stuff.

Don't get me wrong. There's technical guys that are bad at these 'people skills' and/or have no sense of popular aesthetics that makes their ads entirely ineffective or can't manage themselves so even your mentioned "management skills" would be usefull in a 2 people team, etc.

But if a technical guy is somewhat naturally competent on these fronts... or where they're lacking they could have a technical cofounder that completes them and they both keep eachother accountable... Well then i'd put my money on them rather than a technical/mba cofounder couple.