MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-04-25 22:05:49+00:00
"But just now the novel of every century is in search of readers. For more than two centuries the leading literary genre, the novel at the moment seems to have a dim future. No other literary form engages so directly with human nature, none at its best rises above all other modes of thought in its engagement with humanity in all its variety, and none deals so deeply with the truths of the heart. The significance of its loss would be inestimable."

And get off my lawn.

There are plenty of new novels. Visit a bookstore. Most of them will be forgotten, but some will be read a century from now. Novels face more competition from other forms of entertainment than they used to. But they still sell in volume. It's not like books of poetry.

Young adult novels have become much better over the last decade or two. Teenagers are willing to read multiple volume novels now. That wasn't the case before Twilight and Harry Potter. Yes, there have been multiple volume young adult series for a century, such as "Nancy Drew and the ...". But they were pretty bad.

Knockoffs are a problem. About fifteen years ago, "Teen Paranormal Romance" filled six bookcases at Barnes and Noble. That didn't include the vampire content in Romance, Fantasy, and Best Sellers. I remarked to one of the store staff goths that if they shelved all the vampire books together, they'd be half the sales floor. She said the Hunger Games knockoffs were starting to come in and would be pushing out the Twilight knockoffs. She was right.
by manacit | 2025-04-25 22:05:55+00:00
I read this as the parent complaining about other car manufacturers selling you crappy default stereos so that you'll upgrade, not that Slate is excluding a stereo on this truck to upsell you.

In fact, I would be rather surprised if you could buy $4,000 worth of stereo equipment for this car, given their promo materials seem to include a $100 bluetooth speaker below an iPhone.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-25 22:06:17+00:00
That's an article apparently from a white nationalist, Jordan Lasker, a collaborator of Emil Kirkegaard's.

Do you have any comments about the article itself?

http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

Thanks! I read the introduction, and will add it to my weekend reading list.

The author objects to treating 'g' as a causal variable, because it doesn't help us understand how the mind works. He doesn't deny that 'g' is useful as a predictive variable.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-04-25 22:06:28+00:00
That's why this it's been a requirement for Australian government agencies for about 15 years.

In around 2011, the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate) went through and did an analysis of all of the intrusions they had assisted with over the previous few years. It turned out that app whitelisting, patching OS vulns, patching client applications (Office, Adobe Reader, browsers), and some basis permission management would have prevented something like 90% of them.

The "Top 4" was later expanded to the Essential Eight which includes additional elements such as backups, MFA, disabling Office macros and using hardened application configs.

https://www.cyber.gov.au/resources-business-and-government/e...
by zdragnar | 2025-04-25 22:06:35+00:00
You'd want to crush it much more finely for it to have a chance to actually capture anything while in the air, requiring more energy input and causing breathing hazards due to the fine particulates, not to mention staining everything it rains on with the fine basalt.

You could release it extremely high such that it stays suspended a bit longer, but then you'd waste even more energy getting it up there.
by aseligman | 2025-04-25 22:06:53+00:00
Some additional context: many real world agent use cases struggle to balance quality, cost, and performance. This technique can help avoid the tradeoffs that quantization techniques introduce, including unpredictable results while you try cost optimize an agent. In some cases the cost savings can be significant using dfloat11 as you squeeze into more affordable GPUs.

* I work with xmad.ai
by Teever | 2025-04-25 22:07:44+00:00
After Hinckley and especially after 9/11 I didn't think it would be possible for someone to successfully assassinate a US president with a firearm. I was shocked at how trivial it was for two people to almost pull that off last year with Trump. It was pure luck that it didn't happen, and I'm skeptical that the Secret Service has fundamentally changed how they protect people in a way that will permanently prevent even something as mundane as assassination by firearm let alone drones.

If they can't stop someone from killing the president with a gun how could they possible stop someone from using a swarm of these to do the same?[0]

And how can law enforcement protect themselves from something like this? Like honestly, what is a counter to this kind of attack that scales up to provide protection for the hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers in America?

The only thing I can see scale to that level is reform of behaviour. If people respond to abuse of authority with these kinds of tools then the only viable method of prevention is to stop abusing authority.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEwD7wppkJw
by DangitBobby | 2025-04-25 22:07:58+00:00
Right, but it needs to be competitive with ICE cars that travel several hundred miles per tank and fill up in minutes. Literally 0 of my friends have been willing to transition to electric due primarily to range anxiety, and that's for vehicles that achieve over 200 miles per charge. I drive an EV and even I would simply never, ever consider this vehicle based on the range.
by kebokyo | 2025-04-25 22:08:01+00:00
I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.

Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.

My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
by smj-edison | 2025-04-25 22:09:54+00:00
For sure! The interface is the most important part these days when practically everything can be emulated.

In my design, I wouldn't say the state is hidden though—that's the point of having an indicator light with every parameter. The LED becomes the state visualization. So, write-wise, yes, it's overloaded, but read-wise it's not.

I'm just now realizing I didn't explain that well in the OP, lol. And really this is more of a budget-friendly approach, rather than a user-friendly approach. I'm trying to meet those half way...
by endofreach | 2025-04-25 22:09:58+00:00
Imagine, this was actually the consequence— against all odds. The true power of AI is about to be discovered... through this silly experiment... and you are the one... all you gotta do— is do it. And imagine you don't do it, because you think it can't lead to such a serious result... and if we miss this great leap forward... go, throw your life away and do this. now. the universe is waiting on you, my friend.
by latchkey | 2025-04-25 22:11:26+00:00
Fantastic unsolicited feedback, I'm definitely taking this to heart!

Website is intended to be more like documentation instead of a pitch deck or useless splash with a contact us form. I dislike sites like Oxide, I scroll past and don't read or ingest any of the fancy parts. Of course, you're right, this probably needs to be less about me. =)

Friction definitely needs to be improved. That part is being worked on right now. Our intention is to be fully self-service, so that you don't have to talk to us at all, unless you want to. Credit card and go.

We recently lowered our prices to be competitive with the rest of the market vs. focusing on people who care more about what we offer. We weren't trying to be cheaper than everyone else, we were trying to offer a better service. Lesson learned and pricing adjusted. Streisand effect, I don't like to mention the other players much.

Again, thanks!
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-25 22:11:34+00:00
I mean this stuff is so easy to do though. An extremist doesn’t even need to make a bomb, he/she already drives a car that can kill many people. In the US it’s easy to get a firearm that could do the same. If capacity + randomness were a sufficient model for human behavior, we’d never gather in crowds, since a solid minority would be rammed, shot up, bombed etc. People don’t want to do that stuff; that’s our security. We can prevent some of the most egregious examples with censorship and banning, but what actually works is the fuzzy shit, give people opportunities, social connections, etc. so they don’t fall into extremism.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-25 22:11:34+00:00
Relational would be to not repeat yourself — written by jiggawatts on Hacker News, 2025 May.

It causes write amplification and slow queries. — written by jiggawatts on Hacker News, 2025 May.

Some would argue that it’s too hard to solve, but those same people are ingesting a petabyte of logs per hour, which is a bigger problem if you ask me. — written by jiggawatts on Hacker News, 2025 May.
by porphyra | 2025-04-25 22:11:55+00:00
It's not about "inflating" it. It's more that the energy needed to move your car a certain distance is quadratically related to the speed, due to aerodynamic drag.

Efficient vehicles spend less energy on other stuff besides moving the car (e.g. by having heat pumps, induction motors that can be turned off without any drag, etc), so tests conducted at a lower speed will appear to have a better range than tests at a higher speed. Meanwhile, less efficient vehicles that waste energy at low speeds will appear to have more similar range at both low and high speeds.
by Teever | 2025-04-25 22:12:26+00:00
I've been wondering for a while now about the viability of asteroid/lunar mining that involves returning the payload of rare earth minerals or titanium in flying wing shaped return vehicles that are wrapped in some sort of mineral that ablates in the atmosphere while absorbing CO2 like this stuff does.

The idea is that we could both eliminate the Earth based pollution associated with mining while sequestering co2 previously emitted by terrestrial mining at the same time.
by godelski | 2025-04-25 22:12:46+00:00
It is also critical in how we define justice. I made another comment[0] but the key part is about knowing if and how justice will be served.

I think people are conflating deportation and extradition. Deporting is the act of sending them somewhere else. Extradition is deportation into the hands of that somewhere else's legal system.

I think it is critical to recognize the distinction. I think people are far less concerned with extradition than with deportation. Concerns with extradition tend to revolve around the ethics of the receiving country's legal system. "There is still blood on your hands" as one might say. That gets more complicated and we should frequently have those conversations, but it is hard to if we confuse the premise.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43798954
by flanked-evergl | 2025-04-25 22:13:55+00:00
Your contention would have been more believable if Bowie actually believed the star man he sang about was real. He did not. He did not believe that there was a starman waiting in the sky who told us not to blow it 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile. Bowie did not believe it's all worthwhile.

(quoted) Once in the world’s history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar Khayyam makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. “Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.” So he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. “Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.”
by gus_massa | 2025-04-25 22:14:10+00:00
It converts CO2 and H2O into ethane and ethylene, oversimplifying the output is natural gas. What do you do with the natural gas?

You can put it in pipes and send it to a central location, but you need pumps and the pipes are a nightmare.

You can store it in a local tank but you need a pump again, and burn it but it release the CO2 again. Using a solar panel and a battery is easier and more efficient.

(Do they need also some water pipes?)

For a distributed production, solar panels are much better.

Pipes and pumps may work in a centralized setup, but I'm still not convinced it's better that biodiesel or ethanol.

Photosynthesis is very inefficient, so there is a lot of room for improvement. But plants are like self building robots and they store the output in grains that are easy to transport.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-04-25 22:14:40+00:00
You would probably have no idea what the requirement actually said or where it ultimately came from.

It would've gone from the insurer to the legal team, to the GRC team, to the enterprise security team, to the IT engineering team, to the IT support team, and then to the user.

Steps #1 to #4 can (and do) introduce their own requirements, or interpret other requirements in novel ways, and you'd be #5 in the chain.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-25 22:14:50+00:00
> Integration into existing systems.

Integration alone isn't enough. Organizations let their data go stale, because keeping it updated is a political task instead of a technical one. Feeding an AI stale data effectively renders it useless, because it doesn't have the presence of mind to ask for assistance when it encounters an issue, or to ask colleagues if this process is still correct even though the expected data doesn't "fit".

Automations - including AI - require clean, up-to-date data in order to function effectively. Orgs who slap in a chatbot and call it a day don't understand the assignment.
by MegaButts | 2025-04-25 22:15:06+00:00
Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.

Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-25 22:15:59+00:00
We seriously live in the world of Anathem now where apparently most people need a specialized expert to cut through plausible generated misinformation as a whole.

This is a second similar study I've seen today on HN that seems in part generated by AI, and fails rigorous methodology, while making conclusions that are unbased to seemingly fuel a narrative.

The study fails to account for a number of elements which nullify the conclusions as a whole.

AI Chatbot tasks by their nature are communication tasks involving a third-party (the customer). When the Chatbot fails to direct, or loops coercively, and this is a task computer's really can't do well; customers get enraged because it results in crazy-making/inducing behavior. The Chatbot in such cases imposes time-cost, with all the necessary elements suitable to call it torture. Those elements being isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with perceived/real loss, lack of agency. There is little if any differentiation between the tasks measured. Emotions Kill [1].

This results in outcomes where there is no change, or higher demand for workers, just to calm that person down and this is true regardless of occupation. In other words the punching bag of verbal hostility, which is the role of CSR receiving calls or communications from irrationally enraged customers after AI has had their first chance to wind them up.

It is a stochastic environment, and very few conclusions can actually be supported because they seem to follow reasoning along a null hypothesis.

The surveys use Denmark as an example (being part of the EU), but its unclear if they properly take into account company policies about not submitting certain private data for tasks to a US-based LLM given the risks related to GDPR. They say the surveys were sent to workers directly who are already employed, but it makes no measure of displaced workers, nor overall job reductions, which historically is how the changes in integration are adopted, misleading the non-domain expert reader.

The paper does not appear to be sound, and given it relies solely on a DiD approach without specifying alternatives, it may be pushing a pre-fabricated narrative that AI won't disrupt the workforce when the study doesn't actually support that in any meaningful rational way.

This isn't how you do good science. Overgeneralizing is a fallacy, and while some computation is being done to limit that it doesn't touch on what you don't know, because what you don't know hasn't been quantified (i.e. the streetlight effect)[1].

To understand this, the layman and expert alike must always pay attention to what you don't know. The video below touches on some of the issues without requiring technical expertise. [1]

[1][Talk] Survival Heuristics: My Favorite Techniques for Avoiding Intelligence Traps - SANS CTI Summit 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-25 22:16:13+00:00
I've heard various claims that Android is not independently buildable, though existence of alternate Android builds suggests otherwise.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788459>

You're continuing to argue fact as if you're arguing law, which again, greatly weakens your overall argument, in addition to being needlessly confrontational and aggressive.
by aidenn0 | 2025-04-25 22:16:33+00:00
Which the inferencer probably can't do because of how dynamic standard-class can be. Also, if we want to get pedantic, method-dispatch does not dispatch on types in Common Lisp, but rather via EQL or the class of the argument. Since sub-classes can be made (and methods added or even removed) after a method invocation is compiled, there is no feasible way in a typical lisp implementation[1] to do compile-time dispatch of any type that is a subtype of standard-object.

Now none of this prevents you from extending lisp in such a way that lets you freeze the method dispatch (see e.g. https://github.com/alex-gutev/static-dispatch), but "a modern compiler will jmp past the type checks" is false for all of the CLOS implementations I'm familiar with.

1: SICL is a research implementation that has first-class global environments. If you save the global-environment of a method invocation, you can re-compile the invocation whenever a method is defined (or removed) and get static-dispatch. There's a paper somewhere (probably on metamodular?) that discusses this possibility.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-25 22:17:04+00:00
> Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest.

Perhaps you’re a lawyer with greater insight into this issue than I have. The actions described in the article satisfy the plain reading of the terms “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection.”

The intuitive reading seems to be further corroborated by the case law:

> The word "harbor" […] means to lodge or to aid or to care for one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law. The word "conceal" […] means to hide or to secrete or to keep out of sight or to aid in preventing the discovery of one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law.

> *The statute proscribes acts calculated to obstruct the efforts of the authorities to effect arrest of the fugitive,* but it does not impose a duty on one who may be aware of the whereabouts of the fugitive, although having played no part in his flight, to reveal this information on pain of criminal prosecution.

Emphasis mine.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
by resters | 2025-04-25 22:17:10+00:00
This is extremely refreshing. I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even. Cars and trucks are so over-engineered and come with tons of low value options intended to drive up the price.

For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.

Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.

As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-25 22:17:10+00:00
Rule of law and its "equal, impartial, consistent enforcement" is totally a discretionary thing and very much by democratic support. The federal government has stopped enforcing low-level marijuana possession pretty much whole-sale, unless of course you show up at the wrong protests (see Timothy Teagan). Most people seem to think this is just dandy.

I would say you would actually destroy "democracy" if you enforced the rule of law.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-04-25 22:17:16+00:00
Millions of people have lived lives they have found very fulfilling within 20km of where they were born. It's great you're finding a joy in travelling the world, but not everyone wants that.

Many people work until they die and still have friends and family that they love and spend time with. Many even have none and still lead a life they're happy with.