MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psychoslave | 2025-04-28 15:30:07+00:00
>Thought experiments arent science.

By that standard we should have drop many of the cutting edge theory that was ever produced in science. It took like a century between some of Einstein’s thought experiments and any possibility to challenge them experimentally.

And while Lucretius’ idea of atom was very different than the one we kept with standard model, it actually has put the concept on the table several thousand years before they could be falsified experimentally.

It looks like you should seriously consider to expand your epistemological knowledge if you want to contribute more relevantly on the topic.

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/einstein-is-right-ag...
by eftychis | 2025-04-28 15:30:15+00:00
I think allowing 2 wheel is not a good idea in those cases. In fact you should be even better to be allowed for 2 by I digress. You can still kill pedestrians and passers by.

The other issue is that in a lot of countries speed limits are arbitrary: either too low or too high for the area. Speed limits are not dynamic and usually are actually set so that a percentage of traffic violates them. Or are set once and never adjusted.

States in the US are culprits of all above issues. Plus the lack of alternative transportation. So this whole topic is a Pandora's box that doesn't take easy solutions.
by bogdansolga | 2025-04-28 15:30:23+00:00
I have just created an account and tried to use the app; either I am dumb (at this hour), or the app has a very not intuitive UI :-)

I (think I) managed to create an expression, but: 1. it takes forever, I don't know what it's doing and it's still not done 2. I have no idea how to use it, onward 3. does not seem that I will be actually able to use it, as the app requires to be subscribed to use it...

Looking forward for a how to use manual / page + a real trial period. If the app requires a subscription with this UX experience, I will be gone :-)
by stearns | 2025-04-28 15:30:32+00:00
>Which I found very much not plausible.

Yeah. I'm not a fraud expert, but "impaired judgement" is a common effect of alcohol, and "desperation" is a common effect of drug addiction, so it seems weird to assume that people using drugs are committing fraud at a lower rate than the overall population rate.

As a side note, I grew up in Norwich so it's funny to see it mentioned in that report as "remote" because there isn't really anything remote in Norwich. Wilderness Rd, despite its name, does a ring around Mohegan Park, which is an urban-ish park with some trees and a rose garden. You can walk to the rose garden from the high school, which I sometimes did. Anyway.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2025-04-28 15:30:42+00:00
I have small solo project that I am slowly expanding on. It started as an old-fashioned text sentiment analysis more for my amusement more than anything else ( no real insights were gleamed so original version was used as a foundation for what came next ). I don't think I will ever put it out there publicly, but it keeps me occupied when I need a distraction.
by efromvt | 2025-04-28 15:30:43+00:00
A open-source Looker/Data Studio alternative, supporting Bigquery/Snowflake/DuckDB. Has a custom SQL dialect with embedded semantic layer to make reusable and interactive visuals easier. Can be self-hosted, but a public version is available. Still very WIP!

https://trilogydata.dev/trilogy-studio-core/
by fhd2 | 2025-04-28 15:30:45+00:00
I've tried to vibe code small stuff a few times, but there's not one success story. After about 2-4 hours, I'd hit a wall, and ultimately threw it away, because it wasn't worth the manual programming effort it would have required (which is why I tried vibe coding it in the first place).

I think vibe coding might be more successful for people doing things an experienced developer can do in their sleep with a few lines of code in Django or something. Something a non programmer might have previously done with some no code tool.
by Jolter | 2025-04-28 15:31:23+00:00
That’s pretty eye-catching. My French is a bit rusty, did he get 40 days imprisonment?

Normally in European countries, an insult, slander or libel would render a fine only.

I’m not sure it follows from this case that the US has better protections for speech, though. It certainly used to, but the argument being made here is that the Trump administration has reduced free speech protections lately.
by sriacha | 2025-04-28 15:31:32+00:00
Any tips for setting up a smartphone with a macropad as mentioned? I like this idea but worry it introduces a lot of complexity for the non-smartphone literate population.

Regarding the cassette player, in the US the 'National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled' has a player with an excellent simple interface, using cartridges for each book: https://blog.library.in.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/isl-t...
by fortran77 | 2025-04-28 15:31:53+00:00
I'm always amazed that people are allowed to drive again. I had a friend who was killed by an impaired driver. The driver got a 3 year sentence, no jail time.

I followed the case closely, all the public records on the hearings, etc.

A few months after the incident, while still on probabation, she got her driving privileges back. The judge agreed it would have been an undue hardship on her not to drive.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-28 15:31:54+00:00
> In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punishment should be that you're banned from operating 4 wheel vehicles,

This sounds good if you imagine perfect enforcement, but reckless driving can be a very subjective charge depending on the location.

Driving scooters to work is impossible in many places due to distance or weather. Making everyone’s livelihood hinge upon one officer on a power trip giving them a reckless driving ticket is not a good idea.
by ajross | 2025-04-28 15:31:54+00:00
> I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn.

The clear contention in the linked article is that it's neither. It's just plain old group think fed by an echo chamber. You take a genuine-but-isolated affront or conflict[1], tie it to one or two other less important side issues[2], and then just line everyone up on the "good" or "bad" side of a line. Before you know it our community is cheering the return of a regime that literally tried to stage a coup and making tortuous excuses for why we need to be deporting four year old citizens with cancer.

It's 4chan. It's just 4chan all over again.

[1] Ex: the anti-elite current within the lefty political sphere that has never really loved the idea of making common cause with SV billionaires.

[2] Middle aged dudes, demographically, tend to be a little squicked out by trans rights and pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, think paper straws are dumb as fuck, and really hated seeing stuff burned down in protets.
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-04-28 15:32:04+00:00
Opinions vary on citation styles, my point was that it seems reasonable for a publication to standardise on one citation style, i.e. to require its use. I'm not sure it's what dynm meant by very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look. That article by DJB mentions that every author really ought to be using a citation-management solution like BibTeX, so that regardless of your preferences, it's easy to change your whole paper to a different citation style.

There's a slight (but only slight) irony in your use of the HackerNews convention for handling multiple links without breaking up the body of the main text. In this short-form medium it works great. I see someone made this same point in the thread you linked, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673426
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-28 15:32:32+00:00
>Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up.

You don't know what you are saying. Virginia already has the strongest speeding laws in the entire United States. Doing 20 over is a criminal act, and entire law practices exist due to Virginia' speed laws.

https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title46.2/chapter8/secti...
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-28 15:33:58+00:00
I'm actually really interested to see how other people are coding with LLMs. I guess this sort of thing is already happening on youtube and I could have searched it out but I did not. Will checkout your channel.

I am particularly interested in seeing how you handle the transition from LLMs doing great at one-shot prompts but then struggling as the scope of everything expands and you have to get smarter about breaking down problems.
by kazinator | 2025-04-28 15:33:59+00:00
> distribution have to figure out why ./configure is not supporting --host cause someone decided on writing their own thing ...

1. Most of the time ./configure won't properly support --host isn't because someone wrote their own thing, but because it's Autoconf.

2. --host is only for compilers and compiler-like tools, or programs which build their own compiler or code generation tools for their own build purposes, which have to run on the build machine rather than the target (or in some cases both). Most programs don't need any indications related to cross compiling because their build systems only build for the target. If a program that needs to build for the build machine has its own conventions for specifying the build machine and target machine toolchains, and those conventions work, that is laudable. Deviating from the conventions dictated by a pile of crap that we should stop using isn't the same thing as "does not work".
by dingnuts | 2025-04-28 15:34:37+00:00
> it proves nothing about reason, which LLMs have clearly shown needs to be distinguished from consciousness.

Uh, they have? Are you saying they know how to reason? Because if so, why is it that when I give a state of the art model documentation lacking examples for a new library and ask it to write something, it cannot even begin to do that, even if the documentation is in the training data? A model that can reason should be able to understand the documentation and create novel examples. It cannot.

This happened to me just the other day. If the model can reason, examples of the language, which it has, and the expository documentation should have been sufficient.

Instead, the model repeatedly inserted bullshitted code in the style of the language I wanted, but with library calls and names based on a version of the library for another language.

This is evidence of reasoning ability? Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Gemini Pro both exhibited this behavior last week.

I think this technology is fundamentally the same as it has been since GPT2
by shkkmo | 2025-04-28 15:34:41+00:00
That isn't really the same situation. The 1981 "version" is a stealth game that is pretty much completely unrelated to the 1992 game except through name, inspiration and theme.

The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.

Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise
by parpfish | 2025-04-28 15:35:12+00:00
for the last few month i've been trying to figure out what sort of game people are playing with the ragebait stories on advicecolumn-esque subs (AITAH, AIO, etc).

if you read one story in isolation, it seems fine. you'll think that it's a wild story (which is why it was worth sharing) that probably has a bit of dramatic license, but fine. but if you binge through the top posts, you'll start to notice all sorts of common tropes and patterns and they all seem fake and formulaic. the stories are highly effective and hooking people in, so much so that there's a whole genre of cross-platform slop posts where somebody screenshots reddit threads into facebook for driving engagement.

but the posts dont feel bot/LLM-made, but it does feels a lot like some group of people are mixing-and-matching different scenarios to do... something. and i want to know what the something is.

- is it purely an engagement farm (if so, what's the value in accruing non-transferrable reddit karma?)

- is it some sociological experiment that's trying to understand the reddit psyche?

- or is it that lots of different individuals genuinely just enjoy a creative writing challenge?
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-28 15:35:20+00:00
This sounds like high anxiety nonsense to mommy the rest of us.

Our highways are not lawless. They are among the most regulated areas of daily human life in the US after accounting for both criminal and civil penalties. Whether people abide by those regulations is a different matter, but to say its lawless is a wild fantasy of people who probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place.
by artofpongfu | 2025-04-28 15:35:27+00:00
I'm working on a human-like AI opponent for VR table tennis. It's something I really want myself, love playing table tennis in VR, but with online play you get the latency issues, people that have adopted a playing style which basically hacks the game physics or other aspects, or people who are just plain rude. Playing against the AI is much nicer, but it's not varied or realistic enough such that when you actually play against real people you are ill prepared.

At a very early prototyping phase, but having a ton of fun. https://x.com/artofpongfu
by Aurornis | 2025-04-28 15:35:27+00:00
As a parent, these comments are always so weird to read. Kids play outside, including unsupervised still. Kids getting hit by drivers is statistically very rare (though no less tragic)

Suggesting that “many” of the kids who “try” to play outside get killed by cars is the kind of conclusion you can only arrive at by living life through hyperbolic headlines or the dramatic evening news.
by kube-system | 2025-04-28 15:35:31+00:00
Those things keeps the middle class from using it (outside of a couple of cities) or from voting for more public transit -- but it isn't the reason that poor people are driving without license/insurance -- which was what I was commenting on. Many of the poor in this country live in places that aren't well served by public transit, and probably won't be well served by any marginal investment in public transit. Most places in the US are generations behind in the investment that would need to be made both in terms of transit infrastructure and the housing infrastructure that would be necessary for viable public transit for the poor. Suburban sprawl is a huge challenge.
by worldsayshi | 2025-04-28 15:35:36+00:00
I think we can't see past because we rely on it for how we live today. But if that reliance went away we would drop it in a heartbeat.

Like imagine if we suddenly got access to replicator technology. Why would we need to care about the stock market? No more factories or shipping, just throw in your old bike and get a new back. Not saying that this is a likely scenario, but there's a sliding scale of far-fetchedness between having replicators and having no difference from today that Sci-fi can explore.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-04-28 15:35:53+00:00
Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia.

Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%

Nuclear: 11.5%

Co-generation: 5%

Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
by pjc50 | 2025-04-28 15:36:19+00:00
Mike_hearn's comment was grey but was correct: phase following is indeed done through software in the inverter. Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat.

Currently the main driver of battery deployments is not so much energy price time arbitrage as "fast frequency fresponse": you can get paid for providing battery stabilization to the grid.

(for the UK not Spain: https://www.axle.energy/blog/frequency )
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-28 15:36:29+00:00
>Sorry, this is an extraordinarily blinkered view. Why must they be evaluated purely on money terms?

Its a business. How could you expect it to exist without being profitable?

Maybe they could transition to charities.

Furthermore, I'm NOT evaluating them only on money terms. I was very clear that they provide value and I want them to continue to exist.
by eru | 2025-04-28 15:36:50+00:00
I'm working on running sequences of heap operations (insert and delete-min) in linear time instead of O(n log n) total time. It's a silly little project in theoretical computer science I have.

Crucially, to make this bound work, you only learn the final state of the heap, not which element got deleted when.

I'm also building a simpler soft heap.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-04-28 15:37:00+00:00
Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia.

Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%

Nuclear: 11.5%

Co-generation: 5%

Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
by nunez | 2025-04-28 15:37:14+00:00
Doctorow is an expert at stirring the pot. However, I disagree with the overall premise of his piece.

He frames most of his thesis on how FAANG companies tightened the screws since their "college campus" era during their scrappier days.

While he isn't wrong about these workplaces having become less surreal over the years, these actions are a consequence of going public and becoming huge megacorps. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM and many others went through the exact same thing. Tale as old as time.

Furthermore, SWEs are, by and large, still paid multiples over the median _before_ considering hours worked, and they still get excellent benefits that other professions that leverage "vocational awe" wouldn't even dream of providing. Heck, SWEs/SREs have the benefit of (theoretically) being able to choose whether to work fully remote or not and have a high chance of getting highly paid either way.

To wit, there was a thread on Blind the other day wherein someone at a non-FAANG was asking if chasing money meant anything anymore after clearing their first million USD. This is _despite_ bigwigs like Benioff boasting about freezing all software engineering hires now that generative AI is "good enough" (which I don't think they actually did?).

There is NO OTHER INDUSTRY wherein "normies" that didn't go to highly-regarded school for years and years on end have a realistic shot at this kind of compensation.

Software is still a high-skilled, highly-niche profession. Generative AI "simplifies" writing software, but that's only 20-40% of the job, IMO. As long as that remains true, and as long as margins on software remain astronomical, demand will remain high and SWE/SWE-adjacent professionals will continue to be paid well.
by redbackthomson | 2025-04-28 15:38:11+00:00
Working on a browser extension to make it easier to find content on YouTube that fits your interests.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos and have found it very annoying that YouTube latches onto one or two topics that you've watched and only recommends that type of content over and over again. Even if you use their "Not Interested" tool, not a whole lot changes in your recommendations.

At the end of last year I launched Relevant - a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".

Although I've had good feedback on the website, engagement has been relatively low and I think that's because it's a big ask to have someone navigate to the website to find the content. This year I decided that I'd bring the content to them by making a Chrome extension that lets users interact with Relevant directly from within YouTube.

It's still a work in progress but I'd love to get a first version out within a month or so to start spreading the idea and gathering feedback. If this is of any interest to the people here on HN then please let me know what you'd like to see most on your feeds.

https://relevant.watch/
by Ajedi32 | 2025-04-28 15:40:15+00:00
They actively amplified any content that got high engagement, not ragebait specifically. That's why you see this trend across nearly all social media, not just Facebook. There's a strong financial incentive to get people to engage with your service, and amplifying the content that is already getting the most engagement is a simple way to do that.

You could blame this on advertising, but I think even if Facebook were a paid service (ignoring for a minute that that would have killed any chance it had of being successful in the first place) there'd still be an incentive to prioritize content that people's revealed preferences indicate they want to see more of.

Countering this natural human tendency requires a significant, thoughtful, concerted effort on the part of everyone involved.
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-28 15:40:24+00:00
Yeah I could have framed it better. I was responding to:

>I've been using AI to get smaller examples and ask questions and its been great but past attempts to have it do everything for me have produced code that still needed a lot of changes.

In my experience most things that aren't trivial do require a lot of work as the scope expands. I was responding more to that than him having success with completing the whole extension satisfactorily.
by matkoniecz | 2025-04-28 15:40:25+00:00
> one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.

Called N-1 criterion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(electrical_grid)#...

And it depends. During https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout N-1 criterion was supposed to be holding, in practice not even N-0 was holding and network crashed.

Few years ago nearly entire day European network was sitting on N-0 due to multiple issues in Poland, caused by a heat wave and deeper root causes. There are many power plants and power lines where any further issue would cause Europe-wide blackout.
by rorylaitila | 2025-04-28 15:40:37+00:00
AI has taken over the hype in sales and go-to-market strategies. But for independents, solopreneurs, professionals, and many founders or CEOs, relationships and partnerships are still central.

I think sales will bifurcate: either fully automated self-sale, or fully relationship based. All of the major CRMs (customer relationship management) software are going all in on AI and sales automation.

I think relationship sales is going to see an increase in comparative advantage. I've always been a relationship seller but the current crop of CRMs are not designed for me. So I've built https://humancrm.io/ to scratch my own itch.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-28 15:41:19+00:00
This is really cool! I don't remotely have the skills to pull this off, so I am in awe of what you achieved here. The explanations were pretty clear even for someone such as myself, but I was confused by one thing. If the device is powered by NiMH AAA batteries, why include the charging circuit, rather than just removing the batteries when needed to put into a dedicated charger?