MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quicklime | 2025-04-11 01:54:21+00:00
Where I live, and it seems in most places in the world, a standard drink is 10g of alcohol.

> The definition of what constitutes a standard drink varies very widely between countries,[2] with what each country defines as the amount of pure alcohol in a standard drink ranging from 8 to 20 grams.

> The sample questionnaire form for the World Health Organization's Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) uses 10 g (0.35 oz),[3] and this definition has been adopted by more countries than any other amount.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_drink
by anyfoo | 2025-04-11 01:56:16+00:00
Either way, I struggle to find a likely definition of "drinks" where 8 per week does not seem excessive.

Like even if "half a pint of beer" is the definition (unlikely), that means drinking 4 pints of beer per week, throughout a long time? I.e. not just for 2 weeks in a row or so? That does not fit my definition of "social drinking" anymore.

And mind you that that's a purposefully underestimating assumption. The actual definition of a drink is likely larger than half a pint of beer.
by simonw | 2025-04-11 01:56:33+00:00
I've been banging the drum about how unintuitive and difficult this stuff is for over a year now: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

I'm one of the loudest voices about the so-far unsolved security problems inherent in this space: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ (94 posts)

I also have 149 posts about the ethics of it: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - including one of the first high profile projects to explore the issue around copyrighted data used in training sets: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/5/laion-aesthetics-weekno...

One of the reasons I do the "pelican riding a bicycle" thing is that it's a great way to deflate the hype around these tools - the supposedly best LLM in the world still draws a pelican that looks like it was done by a five year old! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

If you want AI hype there are a thousand places on the internet you can go to get it. I try not to be one of them.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-11 02:00:34+00:00
Exactly. The first two seasons were mostly a dark humour satire of our times and obsessions rather than a grim depiction of possible futures. The first episode is not even SF like also "the Waldo moment". 15 million merits is a metaphor that is not taking place in any real future.

It got much more commercial and literal after that.
by bbarn | 2025-04-11 02:00:54+00:00
Of those who never drank, 40% had vascular brain lesions. Of the moderate drinkers, 45% had vascular brain lesions. Of the heavy drinkers, 44% had vascular brain lesions. Of the former heavy drinkers, 50% had vascular brain lesions.

So, I read this as "If you're a heavy drinker, it's better than being moderate or ever stopping"

Statistics are fun.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-11 02:02:19+00:00
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.

I think this episode was one of Black Mirror's strongest, because not only would it suddenly come up, it does to a lesser degree with the technology we have today. I've been the guy obsessively replaying painful memories from old photos I have. I don't think it was really presented as though the characters are the first ones to ever think of the idea.
by jjk166 | 2025-04-11 02:04:07+00:00
I mean most town squares have no restriction on using a megaphone, and yet town squares have not been drowned out and rendered useless by megaphones. Even if that did happen, it would be a very poor analogue to generic advertising which can not drown out conversation. At best it would be an argument against megaphones over a certain volume, ie certain methods of communication might be reasonable to restrict, but restricting the ideas that can be expressed by megaphone is indefensible.
by qingcharles | 2025-04-11 02:05:32+00:00
"Gemini, what's the best way to bury this body?" "Gemini, please count the cockroaches in this kitchen." "Gemini, calculate my survival chances sprinting across this interstate." "Gemini, speculate on the percentage volume of pee-pee in this swimming pool." "Gemini, how many days will this meal set back my life expectancy?" "Gemini, will these socks lead to my arrest by the fashion police?" "Gemini, my cat is making that face again -- has it found out it's adopted?"
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-11 02:05:53+00:00
I think you're being excessively generous. According to the linked article,

> But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app’s actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims.

Sometimes people are just dishonest. And when those people use their dishonestly to fleece real people, they belong in prison.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-11 02:06:16+00:00
>a fundamental characteristic of the quantum sME is that its relaxation path includes the so-called Liouvillian exceptional point (LEP). At this point, an eigenvalue of the dynamical generator, which is the Liovillian superoperator that describes the time evolution of the open quantum system through the Lindblad master equation, changes from real to complex. When the eigenvalue of the SDM is real, the system is successfully prepared in the sME. When the eigenvalue of the SDM acquires an imaginary part, the overlap between the prepared sME state and the SDM is no longer zero. The LEP therefore signals the transition from strong to weak Mpemba effect.

Is this the turbo encabulator effect in action?
by moduspol | 2025-04-11 02:06:35+00:00
We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.

That’s not to say those things didn’t have significant downsides. They do. But it took years to get there and they weren’t an overnight surprise, like they seem to be in the Black Mirror episodes I saw.

Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly. Our culture and values have changed so much since then over time as the technology came about.
by pedalpete | 2025-04-11 02:06:48+00:00
That's very impressive for a new father! Congratulations!

How's your wife's sleep going? Mothers get considerably less sleep than fathers, even with school aged kids.

The subjective feeling is the result of broken sleep and likely the resulting lack of slow-wave power. Your wife may have this worse than you, as it is theorized that there is an evolutionary throwback where mothers have increased cortisol due to needing to be aware to take care of the baby. I haven't seen research in this, but many mothers have said they just felt "on edge" for the first few years.

There is some value probably to "being in bed" longer, Huberman talks about this a bit with reference to his "non-sleep deep rest".

However, our focus is on ensuring the sleep you get is as restorative as possible, even for new parents.
by azemetre | 2025-04-11 02:06:51+00:00
Give me another day and I'll respond in full; but my thesis is taken from the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" which was written by a group of neuro- and cognitive scientists on what are the most effective ways to learn.

The one chapter that stood out very clear, especially in a college setting, was how inefficient flash cards were compare to other methods like taking a practice exam instead.

There are a lot of executive summaries on the book and I've posted comments in support of their science backed methods as well.

It's also something I'm personally testing myself this year regarding programming since I've had great success doing their methods in other facets of my life.
by grepexdev | 2025-04-11 02:07:02+00:00
I understand what you are saying here but I think you've missed the point of what Pike was getting at.

I think Pike is acknowledging the practical realities of engineering at scale, and intentionally designed Go with simplicity in mind, which leads to more maintainable code and faster onboarding for new devs.

I'll also add that outside of the popularity metric, Go is not all bad. Fast compile times, readability, excellent standard library and toolchain, backward compatibility, to name a few things.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-11 02:07:11+00:00
Would or could a technological singularity lead to a gravitational singularity?

Assuming the technological singularity is always trying to gain more information and quicker than it did the previous clock cycle, I would think it would both expand out to grasp new information as well as make what it has more dense.

Information presumably takes up some space and has some mass. Ever increasing the amount of it and confining it in a smaller and smaller volume of space would I think lead to a gravitational singularity.
by jlaternman | 2025-04-11 02:08:38+00:00
I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.

That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.

I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.

And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.
by mrandish | 2025-04-11 02:09:27+00:00
After much deliberation, we decided to wait to get our daughter her first phone until she started high school (9th grade, a few months after her 13th birthday). I'm very glad we did. If anything, I wish we'd waited a little longer however, the logistics of not having a phone had already been increasingly inconvenient for at least a year and starting high school pretty much forced it.

Prior to that we controlled screen time of all types pretty carefully, at least compared to some of her peers. She did have quite a bit of exposure to console gaming, PC gaming, television, tablet and did homework on a school issued Chromebook in middle school. But none of it was 'free feeding'. For things we didn't do as a family (TV / gaming), it was either limited time per day or weekends and holidays-only during the school year. We're also not a home that has a TV on most of the time or TVs all over the place. For example, we've never had TVs in bedrooms or the kitchen. Our television viewing, whether with her or not, has always been 'appointment style'. We turn it on only to watch a particular movie or DVR/streaming show and then turn it off when it's over. We think growing up this way has made it easier for her to gravitate toward better habits.

We're pretty happy with how this has worked out. Today she's almost 16. We think she's still a little too obsessed with her phone and social media but it's definitely not as bad as most of her friends who had their own phone earlier and/or had less controlled screen time much earlier. We can also confirm the studies which report social media generally tends to have more negative than positive impact, at least for teenage girls.
by zelon88 | 2025-04-11 02:10:54+00:00
Basically the web app builds a fingerprinting cookie with a super short lifespan in the page as a hidden DOM. On a set schedule, or with every request, the credentials that are baked into this "DOM cookie" are rotated. When the user stops sending requests the session is closed.

Let's say the cookie expiry is 10 seconds, or until the user clicks a button on the page.

Any MITM attack is going to have to intercept the HTML over clear text http in order to steal the DOM cookie. That attack would also work on a regular cookie. But with my design the attacker only has 10 seconds to deconstruct that cookie and use it to steal the session. With a regular cookie they have a lot more time.

The only other way to hijack the session would be local malware or browser extension, which would also work on a regular cookie.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-11 02:11:01+00:00
Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy something 10+ years old at this point. (Would be happy if a new one was comparable to my old iPhone 6s.)

I know there's not a lot of money in them. But if you want sales at all you better update your hardware more often than never.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-04-11 02:12:53+00:00
India's birth rate is also massively dropping. In a few decades, India will reach their peak population.

China invested heavily in machinery and automation many decades ago. They'll be fairly fine.

I visited India a few months ago. Loved it. But I saw construction being done with donkeys hauling dirt and people shoveling the loads onto the donkey's cart with tiny hand shovels. Scaling up from that to the degree of manufacturing powerhouses like China have is not going to be easy.
by usr1106 | 2025-04-11 02:13:14+00:00
And not more credence than TFA. GDPR has legally very little to do with cookie banners as other comments have already pointed out. I am pretty sure nobody has been ever improsened because of not asking consent for storing cookies. Even for hefty fines you first need a hefty turnover, so that site seems unaffected. And obviously a couple of 100 millions are not hefty for Meta, Google & Co. They make bigger profits by taking the risks of not being in compliance.
by tptacek | 2025-04-11 02:14:05+00:00
No. I know this is an emotionally satisfying thing to say, but, again, my point is that a federal judge administers the consent decree, so the White House can't simply go back and say "gotcha, we meant XYZ, not ABC" a year after agreement is struck.

The administration also doesn't generally get to pick the judge. Given where Columbia is, it would presumably be a random SDNY judge.
by nkh | 2025-04-11 02:14:55+00:00
The Clojure ecosystem embraced react early and built on top of it (with OM, Reagent and Re-Frame (for SPAs). The UI = f(applicationState) is definitely viewed as the correct approach. In other words, gather all your application state in one place. Whenever it changes, pass all of it to a single function to produce the next version of your UI.

Replicant takes this idea and runs with it, narrowing it down even further: The function is a pure function that returns the new UI as data. Replicant uses this representation to update the DOM accordingly.

That’s it. No partial updates, no mutable objects, no network activity from UI components. It’s basically a templating system. You give it data, and it returns a view. Whether that data comes from a DB or any other place, it's just a clojure data structure. Here is the article that most of this comment is lifted from: https://replicant.fun/top-down/
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-11 02:15:54+00:00
Always interesting to see different perspectives, visiting my aunt (almost 70yo) it was half a liter of beer with lunch, and another half with dinner as kind of just a normal thing. Maybe not every day but also some days you'll have another after dinner. Nobody thinks twice about that level of consumption, there is zero negative stigma.

Even if someone gets a little drunk most evenings it's not thought of as a problem, work meetings are had over beers after lunch. Life expectancy exceeds that of the United States, so personally to have someone say 8 beers a week is excessive is mindboggling to me.
by JamisonM | 2025-04-11 02:16:09+00:00
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.

Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
by PontifexMinimus | 2025-04-11 02:16:46+00:00
Note that a 568 ml pint of beer of 5% strength is by this definition 2 drinks.

4 pints over a week is basically nothing, and if they are saying it causes ill health, I don't believe them. When I was a student I drank 10 times that amount, so did many of my friends, without any apparent ill effects.
by zahlman | 2025-04-11 02:18:29+00:00
In case there was confusion: Python's f-string functionality in particular is specific to string literals. The f prefix doesn't create a different data type; instead, the contents of the literal are parsed at compile time and the entire thing is rewritten into equivalent string concatenation code (although IIRC it uses dedicated bytecodes, in at least some versions).

The t-string proposal involves using new data types to abstract the concatenation and formatting process, but it's still a compile-time process - and the parts between the braces still involve code that executes first - and there's still no separate type for the overall t-string literal, and no way to end up eval'ing code from user-supplied data except by explicitly requesting to do so.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-11 02:18:33+00:00
It is weird to read this. It is especially weird read this on HN and see arguments for and against "Black Mirror" as a piece of art as opposed to direct, stark warning of 'what if the wrong path is taken'. In that sense, it is really simple and, frankly, not nearly scary enough given how the author of the article attempts to dismiss it. That said, at least the author of the article is consistent with a consistent tally of war on doomers of all stripes.

I am mildly amused. We all see the ways technology goes wrong and every day. It is right and proper to at least try to see into the future by exploring all the ways it can go wrong if only because we do.. or at least should know.. that Murphy was an optimist.
by chubot | 2025-04-11 02:18:41+00:00
I'm glad to hear this! Travis Everett deserves a shout out too for building on OSH, and for being an early adopter :)

Now that Oils has been completely translated to native code (as of last year), we should probably find a way to officially support that functionality.

It is basically built on 'osh --tool syntax-tree foo.sh' ( https://oils.pub/release/0.28.0/doc/ref/chap-front-end.html )

I've also gotten a request for "tree-shaking", which is very related

Thanks for letting me know it's useful!

---

And on reflection I do think Nix has a harder problem, in part because it has to deal with the "outside messy world", where as git just stores files. For example, I noticed that on Debian the set of root packages is actually pretty coupled to apt-get. So any package manager has to have some hacks. Also OS X and libc make that even harder, etc. Some decisions are at the mercy of the OS itself
by bbor | 2025-04-11 02:19:12+00:00
lol, obviously, but there's also definitely part of me that thinks this would've worked better as a bsky post than a whole serious-sounding blog analysis. The core complaint is made explicit in the postscript:

...let's not pretend there isn't a serious point here about the depressing sameness in modern design

I agree in some respects (e.g. the insane number of ChatGPT clones on the appstore), but I really don't think "AI companies like using circles" is an example of that. All these companies want a 1:1 logo for their favicons and app icons, and as the author rightfully points out, circles are very popular in the 1:1 world for a reason. In addition, a few of these are used as bases for Siri-esque "thinking" animations/buttons, which also naturally lends itself to circles.

To specifically pick on their examples of bad "Big AI company" logos, and how many already "embrace meaningful abstraction":

1. Gemini is a twinkling star, and it's just not a circle at all. Using curves isn't copying other people that use curves, that's one of two ways to draw a line!

2. OpenAI isn't just "corporate euphemism", it's three interlinking chain links. I'd say that's some pretty cool abstraction, personally!

3. Meta AI's logo (?) is obviously trash, so fair enough.

4. Grok is a black hole, which is invoking the metaphor of the Vinge's Technological Singularity (i.e. the point at which an intelligence explosion leads to unforeseeable outcomes, likened to how the center of a black hole is somewhat unforeseeable in current physics).

5. Perplexity's logo is an abstraction of the pages of a book -- the designers actually have a nice blog post here: https://medium.com/smith-diction/branding-perplexity-ai-70eb...

6. "Apple Intelligence" isn't a real product and is definitely copying OpenAI's "interlocking shapes" metaphor, but I'd also say it's more triangular than circular when you really look at it. To its small credit, it definitely seems built with animation in mind.

7. Finally, Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers worried about existential risk, and the logo reflects that -- AFAIK, it's depicting an intelligence explosion. The parallel to Vonnegut has been noted before and is funny for a moment, but IMO "asterisks are banned" isn't a design principle to take at all seriously because of that one joke.

Remember, the alternative to this "butthole" phenomenon is a much, much darker world, one that's already in place for smaller companies: a world where every logo is a slightly-stylized brain!
by contrahax | 2025-04-11 02:19:59+00:00
Retro68 is indeed very cool, I started writing some Think C and it is fun to code on such a tiny screen but Retro68 allowing you to code on your regular dev environment using more modern C has been great. I've been playing around with it last week to make some applications (not a plug because these projects suck!) - If anyone wants a simple Retro68 application boilerplate to start off with:

- Chatbot: https://github.com/yocontra/macintosh-ai/

- Game: https://github.com/yocontra/maccraft (Doesn't work very well atm, making a game run well on a macintosh plus is hard!)

I wasn't even alive when these computers were out but enjoying coding for them - something to be said about the simple interfaces (both in C and UI) and challenge of making things work with the constraints of the hardware.

Retro68 community has some really neat stuff like MacHTTP (https://github.com/antscode/MacHTTP) as well so you can offload some work to services (assuming you buy one of the many SCSI Wifi thingys).
by senderista | 2025-04-11 02:20:47+00:00
He (Kilmar Abrego Garcia) is not a citizen, nor did he enter the US legally. He entered the US illegally as a teenager but was granted temporary protected status because of a credible fear of gang violence if he returned home[1]. A US citizen cannot legally be deported[2] unless they are first denaturalized (which is extremely rare and has not occurred under Trump).

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62gnzzeg34o

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-11 02:20:55+00:00
A lot of the early episodes, especially, aren’t about hypothetical uses of technology but current ones, or even are barely about technology at all. White Bear, Fifteen Million Merits, The National Anthem, and The Waldo Moment are mostly works of social and media criticism that aren’t predicting much, or even anything, because they’re about people and situations today.

To the extent they employ sci-fi it’s usually to force the viewer into an outsider’s perspective.

Admittedly, the show’s skewed farther into straight five-minutes-in-the-future tech-prediction readings as it’s gone on.