MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-28 15:47:29+00:00
I got this for my son years ago and we both loved it. I've wanted to take on larger projects since, but we've only made small items like coasters.

It's so gratifying. It hurt my fingers at first (maybe I'm doing something wrong) but as you build callus it gets easier. It's such a nice way to spend a weekend morning.

I bought various angled jigs for cutting with my chisels, but I realized in retrospect that I could have saved a lot of money by 3d printing jigs. If you have a printer and want to give this a shot, that could be a useful way to get going.

Lee Valley also sells a good book about this: https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/books-and-dvds/11...

I'm realizing now would be a great time to start making some projects as Christmas gifts. I should bring my tools on camping trips over summer, have some nice kumiko and coffee mornings, and get myself ahead for holiday gifts.
by Strilanc | 2025-04-28 15:47:55+00:00
Glad you liked it.

Note the 2013 paper wasn't making the same point. They weren't pointing out that Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly regardless of how well the quantum computer works when factoring small numbers. They proved the period-matching "precompilation" tricks experimentalists were doing at the time weren't okay, because those tricks could turn any factoring problem into a trivial two qubit circuit (and were equivalent to knowing the factors).
by tpoacher | 2025-04-28 15:48:04+00:00
There have been many studies since, which probably provide more evidence and detail. But this guy's current explanation at the time is provided in the link where it says "needs to be boiled" (https://www.oocities.org/iastr/eboil.htm)

Quoting from the linked page:

> WHAT IS THE REASON THAT WE MUST CONSUME BOILED BROCCOLI?

> Fresh broccoli (unboiled) contains some enzymes that must be deactivated. The simple way to deactivate these enzymes is to boil the broccoli in water for 5 minutes. After boiling for 5 minutes, the enzymes will become inactive. If these enzymes aren't deactivated, the broccoli cannot successfully treat those suffering from BPH, prostatitis, or general urinary tract infections.

> Broccoli contains very important compounds. These compounds can only treat those who are suffering from BPH or prostatitis when these enzymes are deactivated. If this is not done, the enzymes which broccoli contains start a different metabolic reaction so that the efficiency is reduced.
by dole | 2025-04-28 15:48:26+00:00
I'd never heard of Gorgon but had to've run across Nasir's name at least once during my gaming years... and wow, what a pedigree.

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

Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 15:48:36+00:00
Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle? What stops manufacturers from including speed limiters by default to make it easier to retrofit cars? Then what stops a switch from being flipped to enable it for all cars regardless of “criminal” status? Unlike breathalyzers, which had an economic barrier from reaching step 2, a software limiter has no economic barrier.

A user controllable software limiter is already in Tesla vehicles for example. It would not take much to go from it being user controllable to being controlled by state law. That brings us to an issue analogous to the issue opponents of backdoors in encryption want to avoid, which is that there is nothing stopping it from being used indiscriminately.

That said, this would likely start with adding devices to “criminal’s” vehicles because older vehicles do not support this, but it would end with these “device” being integrated into every vehicle from the factory, since the other safety equipment being included in vehicles makes it easy to deploy this in software. I find it odd that people who are opposed to encryption backdoors do not see this.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-28 15:48:58+00:00
>Why do electrons not fall into the nucleus?

It's always possible most of them already have done so :0

Seems to me the positive & negative charges would neutralize, and it would no longer be "matter" as we know it.

Not anti-matter, just not actual matter by any stretch of the imagination.

Which is what most of the universe actually consists of, not actual matter.

Matter itself is extremely rare, few, and far between.

Could be all there is left and can be perceived by those composed of it, are the things that can have a physical nature simply because their electrons haven't collapsed into the nucleii.

Yet.
by noor_z | 2025-04-28 15:49:01+00:00
Working on supporting MCP (model context protocol) in my LSP (language server protocol) proxy: https://github.com/noredeen/lspwatch.

I wrote this tool to make instrumenting language servers very easy. MCP (both protocol and architecture) seems heavily inspired by LSP which made me curious about what it would take to support it through my telemetry-capturing proxy.

Haven't thought too deeply about how useful an MCP proxy can be but I see it as potentially a general platform for monitoring or debugging MCP servers or clients.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-28 15:49:11+00:00
I got into 2 crashes in a couple of weeks once:

I was in the left lane, stopped, signaling to make a left turn, when someone rear ended me because they didn't notice me.

I was stopped at a red light. The octogenarian behind me revved his engine, dropped into drive, and peeled out to rear end me a second time, because he “had places to be”. When I asked for his insurance, he drove off and I had to file a hit-and-run report with the police.

Just saying, sometimes you can be minding your own business and get really unlucky.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-04-28 15:49:12+00:00
People don't like the government telling you you can't leave the room you're in but if you break the law you go to jail. This is no different. As usual, anti-government people tend to miss the point completely and jump to extreme non-related situations. Having people who repeatedly break the speed limit have their cars adjusted so they can't do that but can still travel freely and drive anywhere they want is the topic here and you're talking about limits on free speech and government surveillance of our emails. This is not an authoritarian policy. If you break the law, you face consequences.
by fsiefken | 2025-04-28 15:49:54+00:00
That's great, like the ai ryzen max 395, apple silicon chips are also more energy efficient for llm (or gaming) then nvidia.

For 4 bit deepseek-r1-distill-llama-70b on a Macbook Pro M4 Max with the MLX version on LM Studio: 10.2 tok/sec on power and 4.2 tok/sec on battery / low power

For 4 bit gemma-3-27b-it-qat I get: 26.37 tok/sec on power and on battery low power 9.7

It'd be nice to know all the possible power tweaks to get the value higher and get additional insight on how llm's work and interact with the cpu and memory.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-28 15:49:58+00:00
> The bottom line problem at Tesla is its vanishing bottom line. A deeper look at its first quarter report shows it’s now losing money on what should be its ostensible reason for existence – selling cars.

> It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.

This last part should be alarming to Tesla "fans". In every Tesla post here, there are those who tout the "Tesla is making huge profits, they have nothing to worry about".
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-28 15:50:12+00:00
The Chinese Room is a mirror that reflects people’s hidden (well, often not very, but still) biases about whether the universe is mechanical or whether understanding involves dualistic metaphysical woo back at them as conclusions.

That's not why it was presented, of course, Searle aimed at proving something, but his use of it just illustrates which side of that divide he was on.
by toss1 | 2025-04-28 15:50:39+00:00
Automated license-plate readers are a completely different topic

And yes, I oppose those also, in large part because they are 1) a general dragnet against every traveler, 2) have zero specificity to any particular individual, and 3) have no judicial check or due process on their use.

Adding an individual device to an individual's car after repeated breaking of laws (and perhaps more importantly, repeated failures to keep it discreet enough to not be repeatedly caught) has zero of those properties. It is for a specific individual, for a specific time, after due judicial process. As long as it stays confined to those parameters, it seems more acceptable than many alternatives.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-28 15:51:13+00:00
> The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself,is WAFL[8],the file system used internally by Network Appliance’s NFS server appliances.

That was unnecessary, but that does not betray even the slightest risk of violating NetApp's patents. It just brings attention.

Also, it's not true! The BSD 4.4 log-structured filesystem is such a close analog to ZFS that I think it's clear that it "has come closest to our design principles". I guess Bonwick et. al. were not really aware of LFS. Sad.

LFS had:

- "write anywhere" - "inode file" - copy on write

LFS did not have:

- checksumming - snapshots and cloning - volume management

And the free space management story on LFS was incomplete.

So ZFS can be seen as adding to LFS these things:

- checksumming - birth transaction IDs - snapshots, cloning, and later dedup - proper free space management - volume management, vdevs, raidz

I'm not familiar enough with WAFL to say how much overlap there is with WAFL, but I know that LFS long predates WAFL and ZFS. LFS was prior art! Plus there was lots of literature on copy-on-write b-trees and such in the 80s, so there was lots of prior art in that space.

Even content-addressed storage (CAS) (which ZFS isn't quite) had prior art.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-04-28 15:51:42+00:00
Also, anyone who lives in an area where there are deer (or, kangaroos in australia) will tell you - strange sounding single car crashes late at night or early in the morning.. aren't that strange, that's when the deer (or kangaroos) are out and about. Where I grew up if someone had hit a kangaroo 3 times in a year it would be strange sounding for sure, but not that strange.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-04-28 15:51:48+00:00
YES! Another MUD programmer! I started writing one in Meteor about eleven years ago. I don't even know if Meteor's still a thing anymore... I've had a few projects in Rust that were mixtures of roguelike and MUD models, conceptually. I usually got aggravated with the models I created, though.

I really like your multiplayer idea. That sounds really clean and flexible.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-28 15:52:15+00:00
Totally agree. To be honest, I think a 10% offer here would kind of lead to the worst of all worlds: too high for the person to be considered an employee, but too low for the person to really be considered a partner.

I've seen a case where a company was started by a very small, relatively inexperienced team, and then had 2 much more experienced "business people" join later. These 2 business people were actually given "founder" credit and equal equity stakes, because it was clear these folks would be integral to the success of the business (and, indeed, in retrospect, they were, and the business became quite successful). I point this out because it's an example were the addition of some later stage business people does deserve large equity stakes. But given the original commenters history (e.g a previous large exit), it doesn't appear that's the case here, so it doesn't look like he needs a partner to begin with.
by roughly | 2025-04-28 15:52:19+00:00
Yeah, this is the turkey’s dilemma - life on a farm is a lot better than life in the wild for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.

The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.
by canadaduane | 2025-04-28 15:52:41+00:00
The critical difference is that (natural) language itself is in the domain of statistical probabilities. The nature of the domain is that multiple outputs can all be correct, with some more correct than others, and variations producing novelty and creative outputs.

This differs from closed-form calculations where a calculator is normally constrained to operate--there is one correct answer. In other words "a random calculation mistake" would be undesirable in a domain of functions (same input yields same output), but would be acceptable and even desirable in a domain of uncertainty.

We are surprised and delighted that LLMs can produce code, but they are more akin to natural language outputs than code outputs--and we're disappointed when they create syntax errors, or worse, intention errors.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-28 15:53:09+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

Yes, you can try to hold the country hostage for your salary by going on strike, but that's the sort of thing that results in very energetic union-busting.

Actually sabotaging the infrastructure would result in terrorism charges, or at the very least the JSO treatment.
by kragen | 2025-04-28 15:53:10+00:00
In case anyone else is looking for the references, they're in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43808719, a comment that is currently unfortunately [dead], probably because it's rude. You have to log in and turn on "showdead" in your profile. The links are https://californiaglobe.com/fl/new-seiu-funded-report-admits... and https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qwllx1iv8q1ecudz6z59v/BRG_Imp....
by ddahlen | 2025-04-28 15:53:15+00:00
I am about to begin a PhD in astronomy. Until last month I was working at Caltech for 3 years on code which calculates orbits of asteroids to high precision. This code is being used on several NASA telescopes now to predict when they will image known asteroids (NEO Surveyor, SphereX, maybe Roman eventually). I was allowed to open source it and I am planning on making it the basis of my PhD research:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

It can predict the location of the entire catalog of known asteroids to generally within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the orbits. Its core is written in rust, with a python frontend.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-28 15:53:25+00:00
A wire spiral brush[1] and/or a vacuum with a narrow implement and bristles[2]

[1] https://www.feltonbrushes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/F23...

[2] https://media.diy.com/is/image/KingfisherDigital/spares2go-2...
by ryandv | 2025-04-28 15:53:30+00:00
> The Chinese Room argument is a great thought experiment for understanding why the computational model is an inadequate explanation of consciousness and qualia.

To be as accurate as possible with respect to the primary source [0], the Chinese room thought experiment was devised as a refutation of "strong AI," or the position that

the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states.

Searle's position?

Rather, whatever purely formal principles you put into the computer, they will not be sufficient for understanding, since a human will be able to follow the formal principles without understanding anything. [...] I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

[0] https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.mind...
by astura | 2025-04-28 15:53:46+00:00
Looks like she got three years in jail and a 10 year suspension of her license.

https://fox59.com/news/indycrime/indy-woman-to-serve-3-years...

>Anderson received the maximum sentence by Judge Charles Miller of three years, laid out in the plea agreement.

>Under the plea agreement, Anderson’s license will be suspended for six years, the maximum under a Level 5 felony, and she will also be named a habitual traffic offender, which will suspend her license for 10 years. The license suspensions will run concurrently.
by truetaurus | 2025-04-28 15:53:55+00:00
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by hedgehog | 2025-04-28 15:54:29+00:00
I'm a little skeptical, it would be interesting to add odometer data, time of day, and distance from home. My driving is on low end of the collision risk spectrum because I don't drive much, mostly day time, and mostly routes that I've driven hundreds or thousands of times and where know the lines of sight and cadence of traffic. On the other hand I would expect more risk for someone who worked night shifts, did taxi or delivery type driving where they're often in unfamiliar areas, or just plain put in more miles. I would expect these effects to create a wide collision frequency spread even holding constant skill and good intentions.
by myself248 | 2025-04-28 15:54:43+00:00
Old-school PSTN folks looked at XKCD 705 and chuckled. Late to the party, pal.

The telephone network was designed from the ground up to be completely independent of _everything_ except fuel deliveries. If grid power is up, that's convenient, but it's totally not required.

In many places, that's because telegraph and telephone lines got there before the power grid did. Lines running along railroads connected communities that had no centralized power generation. Delco-light plants at individual farms might be the only electric power for miles, aside from the communications lines themselves. Even if the only phone was at the rail depot, it still had to power itself somehow. As those communities sprouted their own telephone offices and subscriber lines branching throughout town, the office had its own batteries for primary power, and eventually generators to recharge them. (Telegraph networks largely ran from just batteries, recharged chemically rather than with generators, for years.)

Fast-forward a century and there was just never a need to depend on anything else. As long as the diesel bowser can get down the driveway, the office can run indefinitely.

Among old AT&T/Bell/WECo hands, the devotion to reliable service goes far beyond fanatical. Many offices built during the cold-war have showers in the basement and a room of shelf-stable food, though these are no longer maintained. The expectation was that whoever was in the office when the bombs dropped, would keep things running as long as they could. And when they couldn't anymore, well, there was probably nobody left to call anyway.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 15:54:49+00:00
There is no difference between applying this to only criminals and applying it to everyone else. Vehicles are already being made with software speed limiters that users can control (e.g. Tesla vehicles). Once the state controls these, there is no technical barrier preventing it from only being applied to criminals.

The only real difference is that old vehicles need to be retrofitted, while the hardware and software needed to do this is largely already present in new vehicles (or soon will be in the remaining exceptions on the market).
by jillyboel | 2025-04-28 15:55:12+00:00
> Well, now I asked for yours, and I'm also still waiting.

I asked first and I don't want to influence your response. So, go ahead. You first.

If your only answer is that plagiarism is bad then I agree with that (in certain settings, such as education), but it's clearly no longer considered to be illegal (if it ever was?) or immoral. Just look at all the bigtech LLMs doing so while raising billions without getting into legal trouble. So apparently society has recently decided that this is fine.
by dskhatri | 2025-04-28 15:55:18+00:00
A children's book about creative problem solving and entrepreneurship.

The book is written in the Choose Your Own Adventure style. Readers get to join the protagonist Daphne on a fun, week-long adventure launching her own mini-businesses. Readers help her make smart decisions, solve fun challenges, and learn about money and problem-solving in the process.

The book has been a fun endeavor in both writing the manuscript and code! On the latter, I wrote an exporter for Twinery to Org Mode and an Emacs Org export backend to do the reverse.

The book is currently open to beta readers - Happy to let a few more in through the sign up page here: https://tendollaradventure.com/#get-notified
by fluorinerocket | 2025-04-28 15:55:20+00:00
Makes me think of LabVIEW FPGA, where you could run LabVIEW code directly on FPGA, more like generate vhdl or verilog from LabVIEW, and do very high loop rate deterministic control systems. Very cool. Except with that you were locked down to the national instruments ecosystem and no one really used it.

I
by mlsu | 2025-04-28 15:55:23+00:00
Oh that is fascinating.

So if you have a smarter solar panel, or a smart battery, you can stabilize the grid. I’m assuming that all of the traditional software complexity things in distributed systems apply here: you want something a little bit smart, to gain efficiency benefits, but not too smart, to gain robustness benefits.

My intuition is that bringing the market into it at small timescales probably greatly increases the efficiency significantly but at the cost of robustness (California learned this “the hard way” with Enron)

> Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat

If the electronic controller is “ahead of” (leading) the grid, then that heat would come from the solar plant; if it is “behind” (following) then that heat comes from the grid. Is that right? And likely, solar plants opted for the simplest thing, which is to always follow, that way they never need to worry about managing the heat or stability or any of it.

I wonder if the simplest thing would be for large solar plants to just have a gigantic flywheel on site that could be brought up via diesel generators at night…
by kenjackson | 2025-04-28 15:55:34+00:00
> After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.

The fundamental difference is that conservative viewpoints support the majority (or plurality), whereas the liberal viewpoints support the minority view. Backlash against the majority view is much harder to come by. And being in the majority and supporting minority perspectives is more uncomfortable, and frankly much easier to opt-out of if there is sufficient discomfort.