MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toofy | 2025-04-20 12:53:34+00:00
> I am immediately asked if I have kids and whether I would support some random fascist book being shelved.

i see people often claim "the left" wants to ban fascist content, but reality just doesn't seem to back this up. im sure it happens sometimes, but i read this soooo often, that "the left" is running rampant to ban everything. this just doesn't seem to be based in any kind of reality--it seems like the exact opposite is true--maga governments around the country are feverishly, in reality, banning books as we speak. and a wild amount of these bans are because they're trying to suppress lgbtq, "woke", or poc content. deep red states are going to town banning books, the top 3 according to Pen [0] and pen's index of book bans which you can download here [1]:

- florida: 33 districts have banned 4561 books [1]

- iowa: 117 districts have banned 3671 books [1]

- texas: 12 districts have banned 538 books [1]

notorious liberal/left states don't seem to be attempting to ban content at all, and when they do, it seems like its in maga strongholds:

- california: 1 district has banned 2 books. this is escondido, the 11th most conservative city in *the country*. both banned books seem to be lgbtq. [1]

- washington: 0 book bans [1]

- illinois: 2 districts, 1 banned for lgbtq content, the other for racial justice content. [1]

- new york: the district that has banned books, clyde-savannah, voted overwhelmingly maga. [1]

- massachusetts: 1 district banned 1 book called "Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice". [1]

- hawaii: 0 [1]

- rhode island: 0 [1]

again, compare this to florida, iowa, and texas who have 1000s of banned books across the states.

over 10,000 instances last year of book bans and i didn't find mein kampf in this list at all--while The Color Purple is one of the most banned. yeah, the novel The Color Purple...

[0] https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/

[1] https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-b...
by curtisblaine | 2025-04-20 12:53:49+00:00
> But "plain" isn't a thing. There is no "plain" coffee.

In Italy, when you ask for an espresso without any other specifications they just give you a default coffee made from pre-chosen beans. It's not so hard to do, is it? Instead they don't do that because it's hard to justify a $10 cup of coffee without selling you a "lifestyle", whatever it means.
by threesevenths | 2025-04-20 12:54:31+00:00
The difficult part of running a ca is convincing others you’re trustworthy. You need to have your business processes audited but an independent third party and then wait for your root to be adopted and deployed in browsers.

The value in exiting providers is their reach; versign for example is deployed in practically every trusted root bundle. When GoDaddy wanted to enter the market, they bought Starfield who already had a root which was widely trusted and crossed that with their own.

The reason people will pay for you to compute a number based on a number they give you and your super secret number is that people trust what you’re doing with your super secret number. And that trust takes time.
by morsecodist | 2025-04-20 12:55:42+00:00
> It’s one where I use AI to write you a thing. Then you have your AI summarize it. Then you have your AI write back. And then my AI summarizes it. Why wasn’t it all just summarized in the first place?

Could not agree more. If you're going to use a prompt that's a few bullets to write me an email just send me the prompt.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-20 12:57:00+00:00
I would rather let a young person run free in a library or bookshop than on YouTube or TikTok.

The primary difference is that in a library or bookshop there are competing ideas right there in the same room. A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills. There are also curators who care about something other than making money - they're playing a long game, so will apply quality/safety filters.

This is opposite to the algorithms, which in the name of monetization needs to pull you down into a rabbit hole, an echo chamber void of contradiction, a spell of indoctrination and affirmation of your own Worldview.

Fiction, in particular, is a useful abstraction to grow emotional intelligence in hand with critical thinking. It allows - no, it demands - you develop a sense of empathy and live a life in someone else's shoes. You can then bring that experience back to your own idea of self and your place in the World.

There's a lot of money in putting ads next to content teaching a kid who feels sad that they should kill themselves. I have absolutely no doubt that the World would be a better place if people were inclined to read books instead of hang out on social media, even if those books did contain dangerous ideologies.

So, maybe it's time to revise your stance.
by evill33t | 2025-04-20 12:57:00+00:00
This is a script for reading, erasing and writing the AMD Am29F400B flash memory chips using an Arduino MEGA. These chips were used in many ECUs, TCUs and other kinds of control units in combination with the CR167 CPU from Siemens/Infineon.

ncluded is a simple PCB that adapts the 36 pin connector of the Arduino MEGA to the SO44 footprint. Use a 1206 1kΩ resistor to pull up the RY/BY# signal. (only needed for erasing and writing)

The gerber file is ready for ordering at JLCPCB.
by barry-cotter | 2025-04-20 12:57:23+00:00
> Because eventually you plateau without proper foundations, and that's not fun.

This is a completely alien perspective to most people. Most people never even really try to be good at anything. That you think this quirk of your own psychology is the norm shows a deep disconnect with the mass of mediocre people who don’t care about being competitive because they’re not trying to get highs up on some leaderboard. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
by sarchertech | 2025-04-20 12:57:38+00:00
We have more than lab studies, we have real world observations that show the percentage of resistant strains dropping when we reduce the use of a specific antibiotic.

We may not be able to produce new antibiotics fast enough to get to the point where we have enough to cycle them effectively. That’s entirely possible.

But we have very good evidence that there is a point at which we would have enough. I mean at the limit there is a maximum amount of information bacteria can store in their genes, so there certainly exists some maximum number of resistances they can retain.

My point isn’t that we’re going to have enough to do this in x years. My point is that while we don’t know how many different antibiotics we need, we are almost certain that that number isn’t infinite.
by tempodox | 2025-04-20 12:57:39+00:00
> I’m burning out

The constant barrage of excrement makes critical thinking ever harder, which is by design (it has been proven that pumping out BS en masse is way easier than debunking it). Stop using your brain already and just buy what they tell you. Thinking is done by machines now. As is pumping out BS about how good machines are at thinking.
by viraptor | 2025-04-20 12:58:45+00:00
And when you want to run a public one, you should learn at least everything that cacert did. They tried hard and still never got included. https://www.cacert.org/ That effort seems to be dying and it's been years since anyone asked me to authenticate them.

Some history here. http://wiki.cacert.org/InclusionStatus And that's before root stores had to deal with Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates.
by metalman | 2025-04-20 12:59:15+00:00
no, it's just a minor modification of what we are actualy doing, and it's a suggestion that we accept humanity as it is, and stop trying to export our contradictions the statistics are clear, we have lost our way, life span is falling, inequity is becoming stark, etc the question is ,can actualy comunicate about what is happening? or not I know the answer is, no, we cant comunicate and that there is a widespead notion that bieng exposed to anything that even makes ....some... uncomfortable....must be banned.,,..or something like that....more permanent.....and secure.... to which, I wish good luck with that.....
by Rexxar | 2025-04-20 12:59:51+00:00
It does not help that both reciprocal and inverse come from French, and that their common meanings are reversed in English. I'm not sure whether the meaning of both words has remained constant over time in these two languages, as they both roughly mean "the opposite" and if you want to avoid ambiguity, you simply add context. For example, if you say "inverse function" or "multiplicative inverse" it's not ambiguous.

Inverse function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_function / https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijection_r%C3%A9ciproque

Reciprocal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicative_inverse / https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse

Wikipedia seems to have chosen "multiplicative inverse" over "reciprocal" for title, even though they are clearly indicated as synonymous.
by credit_guy | 2025-04-20 13:00:30+00:00
A lot of people hope there is a magical way of making learning fun. The argument generally goes "young kids love exploring nature, experimenting, etc, so we are all inborn scientists. If only school did not extinguish the fire from us".

A huge problem is that giants of education such as Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert make a strong case for this. Unfortunately they generalized their own experience as kids to all others. They did not understand that they were exceptional cases, and what applies to them does not necessarily apply to 99.999% of the rest of the world.

But their message was so cool, somewhat similar to "we can all love each others", or "world peace", that it was embraced with abandon.

I was fortunate to have a great math educator in college (i.e. a guy who was teaching us, math majors, how to tech moth to kids). He told us bluntly "math is hard".

I think education would progress if one simply accepted this truth "math is hard". Stop the delusion that there is a way to make all math fun.

Still, once you accept that math is hard, you realize that the mission is the same: try to find ways so that learning math is less hard and more fun. But accept that the default state is that math is hard. There is no "royal road" to math. Aristotle was onto something.

And by the way, the fact that "math is hard" is not all bad news. The goal in school is not only to learn math, but also to learn how to work hard. There are kids for whom math feels like swimming for a dolphin. Up to a point. There will inevitably be a point where they will hit the phase of "math is hard". And it's going to come as a rude shock. It's better for this realization to come a bit early in life and a bit less shocking.
by jasode | 2025-04-20 13:03:02+00:00
>“Joy” is not found in a day. People enjoy doing things they are good at.

There's got to be more to it than your simplified breakdown.

My first exposure to computer programming was fun and instantly addictive. There was no struggle to learn coding. Same childhood experience for guitar. Nobody was around to push me. There was no need for "discipline to practice". It was simply practice-was-natural-thing-to-do because I enjoyed it. I wasn't a child prodigy. I was finding early joy in programming and guitar -- even though I was very bad at it.

On the other hand, I'm very skilled at cooking and Microsoft Excel. But I do not enjoy making any meals or fiddling with spreadsheets. Likewise, there are a lot of kids out there that hate farming but are actually very good at milking cows and running the tractor because their parents made them do the chores every day. Some kids then grow up to move to the city and leave behind the farm life for good. On the hand, some siblings will cherish farming and happily take over from the parents.

That said, I'm aware of the "No True Scotsman" argument about "joy" : If you _truly_ were skilled at cooking and MS Excel and farming, you'd actually enjoy it.

ok... so the meta question is ..... how does one tell the difference between "skill precedes joy" vs "The beatings will continue until morale improves!" ?

There was a popular "Tiger Mother" book where Amy Chua's daughter has a meltdown in public and didn't want to be forced to play the violin anymore. That finally convinced the mom to stop. On the other hand, the older sister seemed ok with piano lessons. Maybe children are just different.

TLDR of anecdotes above is any theories of optimal child-development has to account for _counterexamples_ to the skill-vs-joy connection : Kids can find joy in things they are bad at. Kids can hate doing things they are good at.
by GianFabien | 2025-04-20 13:04:32+00:00
Your wife is a gem, putting up with your chasing opportunities with poor market fit.

The essence of business is delivering something that people want so much that they are willing to pay for it.

It appears that with Quadregal (I assume it is the consulting biz you mentioned) you have over 500 successes. Based on the information you have shared it appears to be a successful business.

If you were to stop thinking the grass is greener elsewhere, you might realize that the grass under your feet is already green and with more watering and care it would be the greenest.

Wouldn't you be making even more money than by taking a job if you were to focus your talents and energies upon the business that is already supporting you and your family? Taking agency income to prop-up a capital intensive idea is not honoring your responsibility to your family and your patient wife.

You only need to quit doing what doesn't work and do more of what does.
by NalNezumi | 2025-04-20 13:04:49+00:00
A counter argument is simply the observation that some stuff, it takes time (and effort) before you find the joy in it. Following your recepie, unless (as you say yourself) lucky teacher or wealthy parents, anything that doesn't incite immediate reward will be of low interest. A kid will probably pick up that general pattern too:

if joy can not be found in <T time, don't bother. And kids are not particularly known to be good at long horizon credit assignments, so that T is often hours, day, or maybe a week.

My brother (now an professional artist) told me at teenage years "some stuff you just won't understand the beauty and the joy until you've at least put 100 hours in it". And that's true in so many things in life.

I'm happy that one of my parent forced me to do some stuff (sports, music, language) even when I complained about it. Only 10 years later did I understand how valuable being able to speak another language fluently with minimal accent is, and how some of my fellow second generation migrants lost that ability, and regret it. (having to go to school on Saturday sucked as a kid)
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-04-20 13:04:54+00:00
> if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

This goes to show that you, along with many other commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it’s so different from your experience.

Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.

They are not functionaries like police, they actually share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive and well.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-04-20 13:05:27+00:00
I know this is reductive, but at their core, LLMs really are just very fancy autocomplete. The process they go through bears no resemblance to reasoning.

Grab the best model you’ve got access to (o4, Gemini Pro 2.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, etc) and try playing chess with it. The results are astonishingly bad.

It’s not just that LLMs make poorly thought out moves. They regularly make completely illegal moves (making a knight move like a pawn, for example), hallucinate new pieces into existence, change pieces from one color to another, etc.

More words have probably been written about Chess than any other game. You can literally buy a book that’s just about chess openings. There has to be a staggering amount of text about chess in the training data set. And yet, even the best models are far worse at chess than I was in 3rd grade (and I’m not great).

They do pretty well for the first few moves, often playing well known chess openings. But once they get to the part where you need to reason, they fall apart in the most outrageous ways. I suspect this reveals something about how they deal with other logic-based tasks. I’ve wondered for a while now if they basically code through using a vast amount of training data from Stack Overflow, which is why they’re so good at helping with common error codes, and so useless when doing something novel.

These new chess experiments have been eye-opening about how incapable the best models are of basic reasoning. Unless something about that changes drastically, I think LLMs have pretty much plateaued. There will undoubtedly be some advancements, but LLMs are never going to reach AGI without reasoning, nor will they be able to do most jobs.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-20 13:06:25+00:00
> you lose nothing but your own time when things don't go well and you have to reset

Crucially, you lose money with a lot of these models when they output the wrong thing, because you pay by token whether the tokens coming out are what you want or not.

It's a bit like a slot machine. You write your prompt, insert some money, and pull the lever. Sometimes it saves you a lot of time! Sometimes, not so much. Sometimes it gets 80% of the way and you think oh, let me just put in another coin and tweak my prompt and pull the lever, this time it will get me 100%

Listening to people justify pulling the lever over and over again is a little bit like listening to an addict excusing their behavior.

I realize there are flat rate plans like Kagi offers, but the API offerings and IDE integrations all feature the slot machine and sunk cost effects that I describe.
by bitwize | 2025-04-20 13:07:34+00:00
Discord provides the feature set people are used to. Therefore, it gets used.

Today's programmers got into it through Minecraft modding or similar. IRC, mailing lists, and forums just don't cut it for them. By contrast, the retrocomputing scene -- full of aging Xers -- often conducts its activities through Web 1.0 style forums.
by mapkkk | 2025-04-20 13:07:42+00:00
Removing triglycerides from blood would technically work, however lipids in blood, including triglycerides typically travel attached to task-specific proteins. So, you'd have to remove the entire protein-lipid complex, and that might have additional ramifications complicating the process.

Bear in mind, dialysis does work, however it certainly does not work as well as we hope it should. Dialysis, in all of its different forms, takes a huge toll on the body, and dialysis itself significantly increases mortality; it is also an invasive intervention.

All that being said, we certainly should be doing more research on this.
by WindowsDev | 2025-04-20 13:08:04+00:00
Congrats, you sewed enough paranoia that you got the submission taken down just suspicion alone. Strange though, on a community of developers, no one is able to show specifically how/and where it malicious.

The extension contains no active network communications, no runtime use of webRequest or declarativeNetRequest, no dynamic code loading, and no modifications to HTTP response headers or CSP directives. References to the domain sdmextension.com[now removed anyway] exist solely as unused string constants, entirely inert and functionally irrelevant. The extension’s declared purpose is consistent with its implementation. Accordingly, any assertion that this extension constitutes or facilitates malicious activity is currently unsupported by any evidence.
by sshine | 2025-04-20 13:08:43+00:00
Now my recommendation is: VSCodium, the telemetry-free (and apparently ad-free) version of VSCode. I’ve used this for two years, downloading extensions from Open-VSX.

I switched from Vim to Emacs in 2012 because Emacs had superior language support for Erlang and Haskell. The LSP support in VSCode challenged that. To this day, Emacs LSP isn’t great, and it does matter to me.

I tried setting up Doom Emacs last year, and after 4 hours of configuring, I have to admit it’s still a big investment of one’s time, hardly plug and play beyond the basics.

Since I still use Vim daily for small edits, I’ve decided to try and set up Neovim as an LSP-powered IDE using the nix-community/nixvim flake, which makes plugins easy once you’re deeply invested in Nix.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-20 13:08:51+00:00
As an outsider (UKian), looking in, it's been obvious to me for a while that what the far right accuses the radical left of doing, is rarely actually done by the radical left, and ironically, the thing that they themselves are up to.

Book banning and other "free speech" impediments? You've covered that. Vote rigging? The data on 2024 is wild... [0] Tight control of opinion through the media? The right trust Fox and few other places, the left tend to look for more varied input [1].

Basically if Trump is saying somebody is attacking him/the right on something, chances are that the right is doing to the left far bigger, far harder, and far further away from media scrutiny...

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comments/1iei2...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/political-...
by willquack | 2025-04-20 13:09:14+00:00
I completed a take-home project for a company I was interviewing with, and the interviewer remarked at how it was obvious my README.md was AI generated. It wasn't.

Everyone's gotten so tired of low-effort AI generated content now that text which looks vaugely AI generated is now dismissed or looked down on. I've begun purposefully introducing minor spelling / grammar errors into text I write and avoiding LLM smells like using 3 examples in a sentence lol

Does anyone have a guide or other suggestions to help make your text look more human?
by duncanfwalker | 2025-04-20 13:09:58+00:00
There's a few different things in there that I think have different answers. I'd draw a distinction between banning and curating to cover the quality points.

I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world but I'd say in the UK there's a clear consensus that people shouldn't be able to incite violence - and that covers books.

Suicide and self-harm is a bit more tricky, there are books that deal with those topics that might be important to include in a curation depending on the context - e.g. the readers age and how vulnerable they are.
by slashdev | 2025-04-20 13:10:09+00:00
That's a fair point, but the thing about regulation is it only works for one country at a time. For whaling we could make a law and apply it to the whole world, and most countries complied only because there were no whales left and no money to be made in it anymore. That's the real reason whaling ended.

With climate change, I don't think it's possible, and the current track record seems to back me up. When Europe enacts green legislation, the fossil fuels are just consumed elsewhere. It hasn't reduced consumption, just moved it. So, no, I don't see how we can regulate a way out of this problem. I think the only viable option is to innovate.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but that's the way I see the situation.