MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trchek | 2025-04-07 03:02:51+00:00
Yes was talking about the grounds crew, no one was harvesting trees for money, it was my favorite job and would happily do it again if I didn’t have family obligations (I had mentioned this in the post).

That said the farm I worked I knew the farmer and his dad pretty well and I worked there year round for a couple of years with breaks in the summer. Harvest time was insane and not all the years were good, but the family were comfortable and most of the time the workload was reasonable. It maybe different now but I lived in farm states then and I personally knew several well to do farmers that were living very well with more assets than I currently have. So I’m not sure I’m fully on board with your view of farming. It depends a lot on time and place I’m sure though, I’ll fully admit that I’m no expert.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-07 03:03:01+00:00
There where many nice databases, some I remember:

* a USENET type dB

* News feeds

* classifieds

* a form of document routing with approval signatures

* many other cool databases

It was a whole new way of doing things, but IBM only pushed its email portion and eventually ruined the product.

V4 was good, but I liked v3 better. It never reached its potential :(
by iambavith | 2025-04-07 03:04:28+00:00
yes tool works. its weird your images didn’t show any reduction in size. would love to try fixing it.

we did thought it through based on our use case :) that is working on bulk image processing where a slight loss in quality for Higher reduction in size is appreciated :) mostly for wallpaper apps or any image related sites. but yeah we will improvise to offer even cleaner approach
by wat10000 | 2025-04-07 03:05:30+00:00
It doesn’t take much. Let’s say you want an assistant that can tell you about important emails and also take queries to search the web and tell you what it finds. Now you have a system where someone can send you an email and trick your assistant into sending them the contents of other emails.

Basically, an LLM can have the ability to access the web or it can have access to private information but it can’t have both and still be secure.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-07 03:05:35+00:00
I was just pondering this today, in terms of how much data and objects I create in a Google or Microsoft account, for example, and then they create a burden of cost and maintenance for me down the road. Especially deleting old emails and photos. That's arduous and sometimes poignant as I flush away my personal life story.

Cloud services make difficult and sometimes even byzantine processes for deleting stuff, and it's often impossible to operate en masse in order to clean up swaths of stuff quickly and efficiently. It's in their interest to retain everything at all costs, because more used storage can mean more profits. Cloud services also profit from unused storage, because if they're charging $20/year to 100,000 users who use 2% of their storage space, ka-ching!

It irks me to this day that standard or even advanced filesystems don't include "expiration dates" or "purge dates" on file objects. Wouldn't it be logical, if an organization has a "data-rentention policy" that mandates destruction after X date, that the filesystem simply purges it automatically? Why does this always get delegated to handmade userland cron jobs? Moreover, to my knowledge, nobody is really interested in devising a way to comb through backup media in order to [selectively] destroy data that shouldn't exist anymore. Not even the read-write media!

Google is now auto-deleting stuff like OTP SMS messages. I'd love it if auto-delete could be configurable account-wide, for more than just our web histories and Maps Timeline and stuff. Unfortunately, to "delete" cloud data means it still exists on backups anyway. But without deleting data in your cloud account, it becomes a juicier hacker target as it ages and accumulates personal stuff that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. Likewise for any business, it behooves them to delete and destroy data that shouldn't be stolen. At least move it offline so that only physical access can restore it?

I will say that modern encryption techniques can make it easy to "destroy" data, simply by destroying the encryption keys. You can quickly render entire SSDs unreadable in the firmware itself with such a command. Bonus: sometimes it's even done on purpose!

But even deleting data presents a maintenance cost. So if 90% of an org's data is indeed crap, then 90% or more of your processing resources are going to be wasted on sifting through it at some later date. Imagine when your file formats and storage devices are obsolete, and some grunt needs to retrieve some record that's 30 years old, and 90% of your data was always crap. That grunt is hopefully paid by the hour. We really had this happen at a few of my jobs, where we had old reel-to-reel backup tapes and it was difficult enough to load the data into a modern SunOS machine.

https://m.xkcd.com/1683/
by eadmund | 2025-04-07 03:06:04+00:00
> We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and drawings from cancelled projects, drafts of drafts of drafts, out of date, inaccurate and plain wrong information, and gigabytes and gigabytes of poorly written, meandering content.

Storing the files for Mr. McGovern’s website requires plastics, metals, power and physical space, yet I assume he believes that environmental effect is worthwhile. Who is he to decide for others that their choice to pay for the storage of data is not equally worthwhile to them?

That’s the beauty of a price system: each of us gets to decide what we will buy, and what we will not buy.

Now, perhaps his argument should be that the price of storing digital data does not adequately reflect the true cost. Perhaps there are unaccounted-for externalities. If so, then he should make that argument, perhaps arguing for a tax to align prices with costs.

Someone else might argue that data is a liability as well as an asset. That’s another argument he could make.

But haranguing folks for spending their money in ways he doesn’t like doesn’t seem likely to produce the outcome he appears to wish.
by sargstuff | 2025-04-07 03:06:49+00:00
What might be nice is to add a prefix to key name that indicates 'this is a 'internal document reference', skip this unless quests to parser to not ignore. Would allow for describing encoding method(s) used. date format comments being very helpful. Technically, can do by just dropping by key name.

Why comment on a format vs. adding an associated "key""format" with format information. aka date : 25.02.04 date-fmt : YY.DD.MM
by cameron_b | 2025-04-07 03:07:26+00:00
I found details about a talk[0][1] given by the hardware team, their names are on the blurry side of the picture in the top link - Authors: GUATIERI, Francesco (Università degli Studi di Trento); MUENSTER, Markus (Student); BERGHOLD, Michael (NEPOMUC / FRM2)

The name OPHANIM seems to be the combination of "Optical Photons and Antimatter Imager" as written in the silkscreen below the exposed ground.

And a crude take at the further inscription - Ex Saxis Homo Fecit Oculos Per Artem Ingeniumque Nunc Monstrum Usum Est ad Universum Resiscendum

"Man made eyes from stones through art and ingenuity. Now the monster has been used to re-emerge from the universe."

I haven't found a recording of the authors giving that talk or any significantly different materials, but the references to 'Ophanim' seem to be associated with Ezekiel's apocalyptic writings, and angels with many eyes, so that seems to fit.

[0] https://indico.frm2.tum.de/event/484/contributions/5093/ [1] https://indico.mlz-garching.de/event/484/contributions/5093/...
by gpsx | 2025-04-07 03:08:04+00:00
I just tried. Claude did exactly what you said, and then figured it out:

Central Park in New York City is bigger than GoldenGate Park (which I think you might mean Golden Gate Park) in San Francisco.

Central Park covers approximately 843 acres (3.41 square kilometers), while Golden Gate Park spans about 1,017 acres (4.12 square kilometers). This means Golden Gate Park is actually about 20% larger than Central Park.

Both parks are iconic urban green spaces in major U.S. cities, but Golden Gate Park has the edge in terms of total area.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-04-07 03:08:14+00:00
> If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring.

I disagree. Lots of entities want to get information out, and they're all competing for attention. This includes a lot of manipulative information, but it's also true for important information. Say that I'm a government agency tasked with informing the public that a certain brand of car seat is unsafe, or just reminding people that wearing safety equipment is a good idea. I can't just publish it on the agency website, confident that everybody will routinely check it. People don't work like that. So, if I really want people to listen, I have to compete in the same way that ads do. And this of course explains why the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's online presence is batshit insane: https://bsky.app/profile/cpsc.gov . It needs to be. They need Sentinel Burrito to warn you that unattended cooking is the #1 cause of house fires because otherwise our stupid brains won't listen.
by wruza | 2025-04-07 03:08:39+00:00
Nice plot!

Usually you want multiple rolls, cause visual performance heavily varies with the seed. You roll at least 5 pics for each model to get the idea what it tends to draw.

Also, different models have different "languages", despite striving for naturalness. Which model/arch suits you the best cannot be answered with a uniform prompt, but that's probably out of scope of any straightforward benchmark.
by briHass | 2025-04-07 03:09:16+00:00
I'm a fan of CHIPS, but let's not pretend that doesn't have some geo-political externalities as well.

We're going to be paying a steep price for trying to shove the (outsourcing real manufacturing) genie back in the bottle. Either we put it all on the National Debt IoU or we cold turkey our cheap good addiction.
by Const-me | 2025-04-07 03:09:28+00:00
I’m confident from PoV of any judge, the waiter in question gets paid for serving meals.

Similarly, a man purchasing physical stuff is giving money in exchange for the goods as opposed to advertisement services. Classic contract of sale of physical goods, nothing even slightly ambiguous.

It’s the same with ordering a sign. “Exchanging money in order to promote a product” doesn’t happen because manufacturing the sign is not a promotion. To promote something using a sign, you would need to post the sign in a publicly visible place. Manufacturing a sign and giving it to your client in private doesn’t promote the product shown on the sign.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-07 03:10:06+00:00
I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).
by eadmund | 2025-04-07 03:10:15+00:00
> storage is so cheap that being wasteful with it isn't really disincentivized

I think another way of phrasing that is usage is correctly incentivised. In the example you give, the value to debugging is more than the cost of storage — and even if that’s not the case it’s so low-priority that it might not even be on your list of priorities anymore!

That literally means that it’s worth your limited, valuable time to do something else.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-07 03:10:24+00:00
To add on another pitfall: iterator invalidation. In C++ you generally aren't allowed to modify a container while you're iterating through it, because it may re-allocate the memory and leave dangling pointers in the iterator, but the compiler doesn't check this. Rust's lifetime analysis closes this particular issue.

(Basically, the 'newer' C++ features do help a little with memory safety, but it's still fairly easy to trip up even if you restrict your own code from 'dangerous' operations. It's not at all obvious that a useful memory-safe subset of C++ exists. Even if you were to re-write the standard library to correct previous mistakes, it seems likely you would still need something like the borrow checker once you step beyond the surface level).
by Marsymars | 2025-04-07 03:10:25+00:00
“Energy as work” is a very rough proxy if you’re not taking efficiency into account.

e.g. Half of the energy spent by homes is an heating/cooling, and with technology that exists today (heat pumps, better insulation, smarter home design and ventilation, etc.) you could probably reduce the total energy used there by close to an order of magnitude if it was applied everywhere.
by jay-barronville | 2025-04-07 03:10:48+00:00
> > npm install ai

> How is this allowed/possible in npm? Don't they have mandatory namespaces?

No, scopes (i.e., namespaces) aren’t mandatory for public packages on npm. If a name is available, it’s yours. Sometimes, some folks have published packages that are either empty or not used, so you can reach out to them to ask them to pass it on to you. At least a few times, I’ve had someone reach out to me asking for a package I had published years ago that I did nothing with and I passed it on to them.
by Arcorann | 2025-04-07 03:11:17+00:00
In a similar vein, there is Wikisource.[0] Wikisource has the advantage of allowing for extensive formatting to closely match the source works due to its wiki-based format, but doesn't have quite as robust processes. Its flexibility is unparalleled though -- it covers virtually any form of scanned print work and even some old movies, and contributors can focus on whatever niches they're interested in if they want.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
by chubot | 2025-04-07 03:11:20+00:00
??? This complaint seems more than 20 years too late

Arithmetic is built into POSIX shell, and it's universally implemented. The following works in basically every shell, and starts 0 new processes, not 2:

$ bash -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?' 0 $ zsh -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?' 0 $ busybox ash -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?' 0

YSH (part of https://oils.pub/ ) has a more familiar C- or JavaScript-like syntax:

$ ysh -c 'if (1 + 1 === 2) { echo hi }' hi

It also has structured data types like Python or JS:

$ echo '{"foo": 42}' > test.json $ ysh ysh-0.28$ json read < test.json ysh-0.28$ echo "next = $[_reply.foo + 1]" next = 43

and floats, etc.

$ echo "q = $[_reply.foo / 5]" q = 8.4

https://oils.pub/release/latest/doc/ysh-tour.html (It's probably more useful for scripting now, but it's also an interactive shell)
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 03:11:40+00:00
> Their staffers are in the discussions

I'm sure they are in some discussions, I'm sure both staffers and elected officials are in others, and I'm sure elected officials have some without their staff.

> A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?

There are those, of course; the incredulity you typed isn't evidence otherwise. But I was referring to top secret discussions that affect businesses; for example, the armed services committees have secret meetings about things that greatly affect companies in the defense industry.
by billforsternz | 2025-04-07 03:12:04+00:00
I asked Google "how many golf balls can fit in a Boeing 737 cabin" last week. The "AI" answer helpfully broke the solution into 4 stages; 1) A Boeing 737 cabin is about 3000 cubic metres [wrong, about 4x2x40 ~ 300 cubic metres] 2) A golf ball is about 0.000004 cubic metres [wrong, it's about 40cc = 0.00004 cubic metres] 3) 3000 / 0.000004 = 750,000 [wrong, it's 750,000,000] 4) We have to make an adjustment because seats etc. take up room, and we can't pack perfectly. So perhaps 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 golf balls final answer [wrong, you should have been reducing the number!]

So 1) 2) and 3) were out by 1,1 and 3 orders of magnitude respectively (the errors partially cancelled out) and 4) was nonsensical.

This little experiment made my skeptical about the state of the art of AI. I have seen much AI output which is extraordinary it's funny how one serious fail can impact my point of view so dramatically.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-04-07 03:12:11+00:00
Gotta disagree. The most disruptive up and comers seem to get there through word of mouth. I mean look at Figma. I haven't seen a single Figma ad since they began as a company (they probably exist somewhere) but they really rocketed off through word of mouth among the design community. Pretty sure slack was similar in this regard. Both disrupters.

I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
by fastball | 2025-04-07 03:13:46+00:00
I evaluated D1 for a project a few months ago, and found that global performance was pretty terrible. I don't know what exactly the issue with their architecture is, but if you look at the time-to-first-byte numbers here[1], you can see that even for the D1 demo database the numbers outside Europe are abysmal, and even within Europe having a TTFB of > 200ms isn't great.

This post helps understand some basic DB pitfalls for frontend developers, but I wouldn't use D1 regardless. If you can figure out how to use D1 as a frontend dev, you can use a hosted Postgres solution and get much more power and performance.

[1] https://speedvitals.com/ttfb-test?url=https://northwind.d1sq...
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-07 03:13:48+00:00
I mentioned it because it's the best example. One example is enough to disprove the "not capable of". There are other examples too.

>I think AstroBen was pointing out that LLMs, despite having the ability to solve some very impressive mathematics and programming tasks, don't seem to generalize their reasoning abilities to a domain like chess. That's surprising, isn't it?

Not really. The LLMs play chess like they have no clue what the rules of the game are, not like poor reasoners. Trying to predict and failing is how they learn anything. If you want them to learn a game like chess then how you get them to learn it - by trying to predict chess moves. Chess books during training only teach them how to converse about chess.
by epidemian | 2025-04-07 03:14:00+00:00
I really can't believe that someone who frequents Hacker News can ask this question.

If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-07 03:15:34+00:00
> The "Full self driving" system is causing accidents (and deaths)

Well yeah, and so is every other driver on the road. That is not the relevant metric. The real question is whether or not it is safer than the average driver. Or safer than great aunt Marge who doesn't have the best eyesight or hearing, but somehow still has a drivers license.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-07 03:16:33+00:00
I dunno, there's not much about my previous experience that would indicate much one way or the other. I have found, though, that I tend to prefer slightly denser, heterogeneous code and syntax than average. Low-syntax languages like Haskell and Lisps make my head hurt because the code is so formless it becomes hard for me to parse, while languages with more syntax and symbols are easier (though, there is a limit, APL,k, etc, are a little far I find)
by smt88 | 2025-04-07 03:16:44+00:00
> In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort

This has never been true for this administration, which A) already had a previous term to show us how incompetent its leaders are, and B) is working from a decades-old playbook of making government more dysfunctional so that people lose faith in it and want to eliminate it.
by reaperman | 2025-04-07 03:17:16+00:00
TSA (more accurately - CBP, more generally - DHS) contract out the hard engineering to Cellebrite and NSO Group. Those companies develop a dumb-proof box. The CBP agents at the border take the phones, plug them to the box, press a few buttons, and that’s it.

No one in the TSA/CBP/ICE/DHS needs to be smart for this, that’s the job of private engineering firms/contractors.
by sanswork | 2025-04-07 03:17:23+00:00
Directories would be advertising. All your proposing is a world where first comer world by default have a stranglehold on the market. It's a dystopia.

Outside I can agree with and prefer Billboard free areas but you choose it online. You choose to use services that are funded by advertising. They are all optional so why don't you choose not to use them?
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-07 03:19:04+00:00
DOGE did take DOD's AutoRIF which was meant to assist with RIF calculations and modify it. It was also required to be reviewed by a human before initiating any actual separations with it, though DOGE probably went the efficient route and did a "lgtm" rubber stamp on it without looking. However it was just meant to do calculations based on RIF requirement (years in service, veterans preference stuff, and the like) not make any unsupervised decisions based on it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-07 03:19:06+00:00
20 years doesn't even get you back to the last century, it's more like 48 years since 1977 when Bourne wrote sh. As one of the authors of the Unix Haters Handbook, published relatively recently in 1994, and someone who's used many versions of Unix since the 1980's, of course I'm fully aware that those problems are hell of a lot more than 20 years old, and that's the whole point: we're still suffering from their "vestigial historic baggage", arcane syntax and semantics originally intended to fork processes and pipe text to solve trivial tasks instead of using shared libraries and machine instructions to perform simple math operations, and people are still trying to justify all that claptrap as the "Unix Philosophy".

Care to explain to me how all the problems of X-Windows have been solved so it's no longer valid to criticize the fallout from its legacy vestigial historic baggage we still suffer from even today? How many decades ago did they first promise the Year of the Linux Desktop?

The X-Windows Disaster: This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

Why it took THREE processes and a shitload of context switches and punctuation that we are still stuck with to simply test if 1 + 1 = 2 in classic Unix [TM]:

[ "$(expr 1 + 1)" -eq 2 ]

Breakdown:

expr 1 + 1

An external program used to perform arithmetic.

$(...) (Command substitution)

Runs expr in a subshell to capture its output.

[ ... ]

In early shells, [ (aka test) was also an external binary.

It took THREE separate processes because:

Unix lacked built-in arithmetic.

The shell couldn't do math.

Even conditionals ([) were external.

Everything was glued together with fragile text and subprocesses.

All of this just to evaluate a single arithmetic expression by ping-ponging in and out of user and kernel space so many times -- despite the CPU being able to do it in a single cycle.

That’s exactly the kind of historical inefficiency the "Unix Philosophy" retroactively romanticizes.