MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivewonyoung | 2025-04-10 14:17:38+00:00
> post a meme to reddit, move pictures from their phone to their computer

Not sure about the others, but most are about consuming memes(or searching for a gif to post), the typical poster to viewer percentage is only about 1% to 2% on places like Reddit.

Also, why would they move pictures from their phone to their computer(assuming they even have a personal PC and not a school issued Chromebook)? They do everything they need to with the image on the phone.
by zer8k | 2025-04-10 14:18:13+00:00
Not an exaggeration, I can confirm OPs story at my own university. When I was in school (2010) the first year had a drop out rate of over 80%. The first class took out over 50%. Many people didn’t have any idea how to use a computer at all. The other weed out was after all the math classes.

Professionally I’ve been in charge of interviewing foreign candidates from those headhunter type programs. I’ve legitimately interviewed people who claimed years and years of experience but had no measurable computer experience.

My high school aged family has next to no idea how to do anything on a computer but use a browser.
by TheCycoONE | 2025-04-10 14:18:24+00:00
Libreboot supports these machines, which removes the ChromeOS splash screen and the linux kernel size and signing restrictions, otherwise you'll hit problems trying to install the current version of ArchLinuxARM.

There are several guides here: https://libreboot.org/docs//install/chromebooks.html

I used external flashing https://libreboot.org/docs//install/spi.html to replace the firmware because I couldn't get it to write through software. If I recall correctly the write protect is much harder to reach than the chip.

After doing the external flashing once, it is easy to update the ROM with the Chrome fork of flashrom.

Also huge shout out to Alyssa for the panfrost gpu drivers. There was a time when I was following that development very closely and it made a night/day difference to the linux experience.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-10 14:18:38+00:00
Because once you start breaking rules you don't get to control when it stops.

If we're blackmailing Senators, what do we do when the courts step in to stop it?

Breaking the process leads to a pyrrhic victory. It's France going from guillotining the king to guillotining feminists. If that's one's goal, rejoice! The man in charge right now is the best opportunity since the adoption of America's Constitution in the first place to get there.

ETA: As a side question on this topic: let's assume the Democrats, upon finding that Biden wouldn't be willing to serve, found some way to re-run the primary. We'll magically ignore the massive cost to do so and the fact that it would be illegal to use the voting apparatus of most states in a surprise out-of-band second primary, and we'll magically assume they could organize and pull it off in time for the general election. Who would have come out of that process that would have beaten Trump?
by malshe | 2025-04-10 14:18:39+00:00
Read her book Careless People [1] where she shared many details. A crucial aspect of the China story is that FB/Meta conveyed to the Chinese officials that they were ready to do anything they asked for in the hope that they will be allowed in China.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea...
by jebarker | 2025-04-10 14:19:17+00:00
I think about this book a lot. The point that stuck in my mind was that many of the folks living there were devout Christians. When one family was asked why they vote for the party that pollutes their land and waters they said that it's also the pro-life party and essentially nothing else matters if they don't vote pro life since they'll go to hell in the end.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-10 14:19:18+00:00
> The chief villains of the piece are the Linear No Threshold hypothesis (LNT) and a regulatory standard known as ALARA, or As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

LNT is demonized by people who haven't thought things through.

Without LNT (which is consistent with the evidence), the conservative approach to regulating radiation would be to assume radiation damage is at the maximum level not ruled out by evidence. This would make low dose radiation more damaging than predicted by LNT.

ALARA hinges on what's meant by "reasonably".
by r0ckarong | 2025-04-10 14:19:52+00:00
While I share a lot of the frustration voiced in this piece it also reeks of someone who wouldn't allow anyone to drive a car without knowing how to swap the engine in their garage.

"Reinstall Windows" is even worse than "just drop in a new engine". You're going to lose all the memories of the roads you drive on daily in the process. Good luck kid.

Kids need to be educated better about these things but it takes tremendous amounts of time and patience (that a lot of parents simply can't find) to properly train kids in this way. People like the author and myself did that to ourselves, out of our own curiousity and more importantly, intrinsic motivation.

It's simply completely pointless to expect every person to use a tool as ubiquitous as a computer or a car to be this deeply invested and interested in the operation. If we manage to get all users to be able to swap a tire we would already have come a long long way.
by mindslight | 2025-04-10 14:20:15+00:00
The same exact cognitive dissonance dynamic applies to "gun control". The murder of Breonna Taylor was a straightforward transgression of the 2nd amendment - direct summary execution by government agents for defending your family in your home at night (one of the exact touchstone scenarios for the "self defense" line of arguments). Yet "the right" fell in line behind the government authoritarian jackboots because their political machine told them to.
by chriswarbo | 2025-04-10 14:20:31+00:00
Yes and yes :)

Functions with default arguments are also very useful; especially since `nix-build` will call them automatically. Those are "always `rec`" too, which (a) makes them convenient for intermediate values, and (b) provides a fine-grained way to override some functionality. I used this to great effect at a previous employer, for wrangling a bunch of inter-dependent Maven projects; but here's a made-up example:

{ # Main project directory. Override to build a different version. src ? pkgs.lib.cleanSource ./. # Take these files from src by default, but allow them to be overridden , config ? "${src}/config.json" , script ? "${src}/script.sh" # A couple of dependencies , jq ? pkgs.jq , pythonEnv ? python3.withPackages choosePyPackages , extraDeps ? [] # Not necessary, but might be useful for callers # Python is tricky, since it bakes all of its libraries into one derivation. # Exposing intermediate parts lets us override just the interpreter, or just # the set of packages, or both. , python3 ? pkgs.python3 , choosePyPackages ? (p: pythonDeps p ++ extraPythonDeps p) , pythonDeps ? (p: [ p.numpy ]) , extraPythonDeps ? (p: []) # Again, not necessary but maybe useful # Most of our dependencies will ultimately come from Nixpkgs, so we should pin # a known-good revision. However, we should also allow that to be overridden; # e.g. if we want to pass the same revision into a bunch of projects, for # consistency. , pkgs ? import ./pinned-nixpkgs.nix }: # Some arbitrary result pkgs.writeShellApplication { name = "foo"; runtimeInputs = [ jq pythonEnv ] ++ extraDeps; runtimeEnv = { inherit config; }; text = builtins.readFile script; }
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 14:20:43+00:00
That's not what I was talking about.

My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance. Eating meat is a convenient example, because almost nobody reading this has no other choice, and almost nobody here hates animals (or at least will admit to it).

I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice". If you are, godspeed, but it's unrelated to the point I was making.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-10 14:20:50+00:00
If you said "CLI" I would believe it... But they would have had to download/upload a file to apply to the university, create a resume, post a meme to reddit, move pictures from their phone to their computer, etc.

I would have thought so, too. Until just yesterday.

Someone from a department in my company e-mailed me a Word document with a picture of a PDF icon in it. She thought that would send the PDF document to me.

At first I thought it was the 1990's again when secretaries were first getting computers, and would do things like hold a piece of paper up to the computer screen in order to "scan" it in.

So I looked up her profile in the company intranet. She's 30. Then I remembered what I'd read so often here on HN: That young people grew up with phones and tablets and the whole "desktop" paradigm is foreign to them.

Well, those people are growing up and landing real jobs now. And so now I guess the burden of teaching basic computer literacy falls on the companies again, just like it did in the 1990's.
by maeln | 2025-04-10 14:21:17+00:00
Free speech is about the government, not whatever private social platform on the internet. Thank god we are allowed to moderate content, every "free speech" absolutist platform is 1. a lie (they regularly censor opinions against theirs) 2. instantly become a cesspool full of edgy people who find it extrimely funny and worth their time to pollute the whole plateform with slurs.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-10 14:21:19+00:00
It’s the consumers that don’t care. So the manufacturers don’t bother.

So many turntables these days are weird USB enabled devices made for the occasional playback of an album purchased for the retro novelty. People discover and listen via streaming services, not by digging through crates in a dusky shop.

Even DJing has changed, and software can beat match perfectly without needing a visual indicator, and your whole set is stored on a drive.

I’ll never forget visiting my friend who set up a turntable in his rec room and proudly played something and made a comment about the warmth and superiority of vinyl

I went back to his receiver and moved the connection to the phono input and told him there, should sound a lot better now.

He just didn’t notice or care. The act of handling vinyl was what he wanted.
by croemer | 2025-04-10 14:21:44+00:00
It's amazing how samply "just works", at least on macOS. You can take any binary call, prefix it with `sample record --` and you'll get a flamegraph (and more) in the nice Firefox profiler UI.

I had trouble finding a good profiler for my Rust program on macOS, samply was love at first sight around 3 years ago. It's only gotten better since AFAICT.

The author Markus Stange apparently works at Mozilla on the Performance team.
by inoop | 2025-04-10 14:22:01+00:00
I just wanted to give a huge shout-out to the excellent zune-jpeg library: https://github.com/etemesi254/zune-image/tree/dev/crates/zun...

Most Python libraries like PIL rely on some flavor of the venerable libjpeg (e.g. libjpegturbo, mozjpeg) which makes it the de-facto standard for loading jpegs.

A notable downside is that it's written in C and there have been more than a few exploits found inside it over the years. While it's pretty damn mature by now and there has been a huge amount of fuzzing done to tease out remaining issues, fact remains that it's yet another attack vector that makes your resident security guy or gal raise a few eyebrows.

With zune-jpeg you get a fully memory-safe implementation that can act as a drop-in replacement, and when you turn on the (admittedly experimental) SIMD support for things like the IDCT and color-space conversion it's as fast, or in places even faster, than libjpegturbo/mozjpeg, even on very large (e.g. 4k by 4k) images.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-10 14:22:03+00:00
Seems like a neat idea, but for the love of Jesus Christ offer me a flat rate billing solution. Or at least an option of doing that. This seems like the type of thing that will accidentally burn through all of your credits if you code something wrong, and then you're going to have to beg their tech support to refund you.

I had an idea last night for an RTS like game where the units can only be controlled via radio commands which are only sent every minute or so, but this feels like a very strange way to do it. Not to mention hey it's not open source, but after 4 years will open source everything ?

Why, why wouldn't I just want to pay render or something $7 a month for a normal server versus this ? And use an actual open source stack.
by Phanteaume | 2025-04-10 14:22:04+00:00
I liked your question so much I ironically asked Gemini about this.

Out of the 5 answers it gave, those ones seemed interesting :

>The Hardware Whisperer (Requires Simple Hardware): >Setup: Requires a cheap microcontroller like a Raspberry Pi Pico or an ESP32/ESP8266, plus maybe an LED or a button. >Task: "Make the LED blink out 'SOS' in Morse code when you press the button." Or: "Read the value from this simple sensor (e.g., temperature) and print it to the serial monitor only if it's above a certain threshold." >Why it works: LLMs can generate MicroPython or Arduino C++ code easily. However, the user must deal with the physical wiring, installing drivers/firmware tools, uploading the code, and debugging why it's not working (Is the code wrong? Is the wiring loose? Is the board getting power?). This physical interaction layer is opaque to the LLM.

>Setup: Create a very simple text-based game (e.g., navigate a maze, guess a number with clues, a basic simulation) that runs locally. The game's state changes with each command. >Task: "Reach the end of the maze / Win the game." The rules might not be fully explained, requiring experimentation. >Why it works: The LLM can't play the game directly because it doesn't have access to the running process or its internal state. The user must interact with it, observe the output, and decide on the next input. They might use an LLM to suggest strategies or even write a script to automate playing the game (if the interaction pattern is simple enough), which itself teaches valuable skills.
by charles_f | 2025-04-10 14:22:09+00:00
This is very interesting, but also a lot of work. I've been off Google and the likes for maybe 5y now, and what I must say is that it's a bit of a struggle to find the setup that works for you.

One thing for which I don't have a solution yet, and neither does that article seem to address, is how to send invites. My data is one next cloud now, so if I create an invite it sends it. But if I create a it from a client (eg phone) it doesn't. The best I've found is manually export as ics and send an email myself, which ain't great.

Anyone has a solution for that?
by lizknope | 2025-04-10 14:22:15+00:00
I haven't used an alarm clock in 20 years and wake up within the same 5-10 minute window almost every day.

I have a friend that will just sleep through multiple alarms. But he can also just fall asleep in 10 minutes on an airplane and I can't sleep at all on a plane. He also takes lots of naps and I never take a nap unless I'm sick.

The worst feeling to me is waking up from some external noise. I just feel so groggy afterword. My body will feel better after 5 hours of sleep and I just wake up naturally compared to 5 hours, go back to sleep for 2 hours, and get woken up during the wrong time (middle of REM cycle?) and then I feel tired for the whole day even though I got more sleep.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-10 14:22:27+00:00
Everything is incentives of the company. People are not told to do something evil, they're told "We don't have the budget to look into that" or "don't do that until we hear from the higher-ups."

I'm disinterested in who made what call because ultimately it's designed to be nebulous. Someone breaking out of that horrific cycle and telling us what it leads to is a good thing. Even though it will likely lead to nothing, like it did with Sophie Zhang [1]

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-10 14:22:30+00:00
I started my teaching career a couple of years after this blog post was written, and finished it three years ago, and I saw all the same things. We've gone from 'kids need to get to grips with computers' to 'computers need to meet users where they are', and UX designers have been more than happy to remove more and more functionality from user interfaces to follow this trend.

There's also a general aversion to anything that looks like logic or systems thinking, but that's a much older problem in education. Mathematics is, for most pupils, just a set of increasingly arcane rituals done with symbols on paper. The connection to the arithmetic of everyday life is tenuous at best.

People love LLMs because they can talk to them just like a person, and the LLM will talk back just like a person. The fact that the LLM is a bullshit artist that doesn't know what it's talking about isn't just inconsequential; it's a bonus, because it makes it even more lifelike.
by seydor | 2025-04-10 14:23:01+00:00
i believe there is a general understanding that public spaces should allow free expression up to a point, but definitely not silence for political reasons. Facebook can be considered broadly a public space because it is so widely popular and monopolistic in a way that previous media have never been. There is a limit to calling something private when it is being used by so many , and it is separate from its private company ownership. If it were a niche site nobody cares. BTW "we" don't moderate anything, the people who run those websites do
by agentultra | 2025-04-10 14:23:38+00:00
Zuckerberg is committed to Zuckerberg. If it makes Meta profitable and raises the value of his estate, he’ll do that. If that’s allowing alternative health nuts sell their ancient cancer healing remedies on Facebook, he’ll do that. If that’s selling user profile data to DOGE for a big juicy contract, he’ll do it.

Regulation and enforcement has to come from somewhere and it won’t be Meta.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-10 14:23:59+00:00
It's less about screwing up the models as much as not needing a pool, as well as not needing underwater capable cameras. Underwater rigging for cameras puts incredible limitations on what camera is used, the motion of the camera, etc. Keeping everything dry is always going to be preferred. The motion control equipment isn't meant for use underwater either. It just makes much more sense to shoot it dry. Especially considering this was before CGI and 3D rendering was in its infancy, maybe toddler stages.
by milliams | 2025-04-10 14:25:15+00:00
Nope, it's really true. I can't speak for CS programmes, but in areas like bioinformatics I have first-hand experience of people (aged ~21/22 years) not understanding what file is or what a directory is. I think they're able to use them, but their understanding is so contextual to the place it's used. For example, they might be able to write some Python which creates a .csv, but connecting that to "open that file you created in a text editor" or "upload that file", they don't get it. I've read enough around people talking about this issue, and the consensus seems to be that people are so "app"-centric that thinking about a filesystem with applications accessing it in a generic way is alien to them.

To be clear, in my class it's a small fraction who struggle like this, but it's real.
by haswell | 2025-04-10 14:25:32+00:00
I’ve been having an internal debate with myself about whether or not to leave a comment, because I’m struggling to find anything positive to say. I love weekend projects and don't ever want to discourage people from doing them.

But the other side of that debate in my head comes from the way I feel about this idea relative to blogging. I read blogs because I want to hear directly from another human. I also care about the subject matter they’re writing about, but part of the reason I care is because it’s a slice of someone’s perspective. Their life experiences. How a particular subject relates to them personally. How they solved a particular problem. Even when a blog post is purely technical with no personal narrative, it usually provides a snapshot of some aspect of some other human’s life, and the way they structure the words they wrote is a reflection of how their brain works.

I also enjoy seeing the progression of thought over time from authors. They’ll write about something and later realize some nuance was wrong, and they’ll write about their updated understanding.

I worry that the more disconnected authors become from their writing, the less aware they’ll be of the potential impact of their words, and those “aha! that thing I wrote 6 months ago was crap for xyz reason” moments are less likely to happen.

To me, AI-assisted blogging just fundamentally devalues the content. As a reader, I can’t know if what I’m reading is real to the author, or a flourish/detail fed to them by an LLM that they liked. Lately I’ve encountered an increasing number of posts that have those telltale (or obvious) signs, and I immediately stop reading. I’m no longer interested.

If I wanted LLM output about a given subject, I’d go to ChatGPT myself.

I think there’s a place for LLMs and some real value to be gained. But when it comes to blogging (and many types of writing), I think it’s a net negative to society.

I’d like to see a standard emerge where blogs can label themselves “No AI”.
by holmesworcester | 2025-04-10 14:25:47+00:00
Free speech is a about whether a society values and protects free speech or not.

If a society values and protects free speech, we would observe institutions, businesses, and individuals being very permissive and polite to speech they find objectionable.

If it doesn't, we would observe that its government doesn't care much about free speech either.

Free speech involves making sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices for a principle. Why would anyone support a government making such sacrifices if they don't believe in making such sacrifices at an individual level?
by saurik | 2025-04-10 14:26:00+00:00
The concept of a file only sort of gets modeled within the scope of what a directory is, with generic tooling; otherwise, you just have "documents". And there is also a big difference between really knowing what it is, and doing it a handful of times.

Like, imagine using an iPad your entire childhood, and then maybe getting a Chromebook. You just aren't going to have the same level of comfort with what files are or how they might work, as you don't really ever think in their terms.

Do you need to actually "download a file" to apply to a University, or is it a captive web form now? If you do, imagine doing it on an iPad: you download the file and it goes into some transient Downloads UI before getting opened directly by your word processor. Certainly creating a resume doesn't cause much interaction with "files".

You certainly don't, anymore, use files to move pictures from your phone to your computer: you use a cloud service like iCloud Photos or Google Photos, which automatically "syncs" all of your data from your phone to the same app on your desktop.

If you want to create a meme on reddit--which you certainly are doing on your phone or iPad, as a computer is complicated and lame--you aren't using generic tools to edit files you saved to disk: the closets thing to a filesystem you are working with is your camera roll, working in an app that let's you add remix from it and then saves the result back to it.

People at companies like Apple have gone to such great lengths to hide the complexity--and limit the ways of composition--of software that, at best, "Files" is just a sort of confusing app you might sometimes get forced to use only if you have no other reasonable option, and so you don't have a mental model for it; and even then, it's separate from where your data "really is".
by jorams | 2025-04-10 14:26:01+00:00
> I don't think Emacs has directional focus

It does, but I don't think they have default bindings. The commands are windmove-{left,down,up,right}. I've had them bound to C-S-{h,j,k,l} for years and it makes moving around much more fluid and predictable than C-x o.