MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mistletoe | 2025-04-15 13:51:29+00:00
I’ve gotten heart scans twice to monitor coronary artery calcification and get an Agatson score. I wonder how risky this is? I feel like the last time I did it the technician said that the amount of energy they have to use now is much less due to advances in CT scanning machines.

I guess a heart scan is about like six months of natural background radiation according to this chart.

https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray

My father’s side has a history of heart attacks, so I’m trying to avoid that fate and consider the risks worth it.
by krzysztofg_12 | 2025-04-15 13:51:44+00:00
Yes. It's annoying with the subscription if you need it sporadically. Also, only after producing the video I figured that with the AI Avatar (as well with the TTS voice) I am a bit in a vendor lock situation. Switching to another service would mean losing the character and consistency.

On the other hand maybe just keeping the brand (logos) would be enough if I decide to move to move away from HeyGen for some reason.
by imgabe | 2025-04-15 13:51:50+00:00
> If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.

How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?

For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?

These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.

Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-15 13:53:43+00:00
Perhaps the average one does, but some get sucked in, and if there's no Nazi factory where are all the nazis coming from?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqx4wlynjw5o

How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.

> everything you read online is false

In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?
by pixl97 | 2025-04-15 13:54:22+00:00
So many people are clueless to this. So many products we buy in the US are the made in the same Chinese factory line and 200-400%+ marked up as a name brand.

You have to do your research for sure.

Honestly I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were still considered crap after WWII. Then their stuff massively improved and trounced US products. Japanese cars lasting 100's of thousands of miles while US junk at the time barely lasted that. This reminds me of that at a much bigger scale.
by _345 | 2025-04-15 13:54:37+00:00
ive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
by grandempire | 2025-04-15 13:54:55+00:00
> The idea that the president can just ignore these laws because of a "unitary executive" theory is authoritarian bullshit.

The question of whether the president is violating congresses power by downsizing or neutering an agency they have created is something democrats should pursue.

But no - there are no people outside the org chart. That’s just dysfunctional, no man can serve two masters, etc.

If it were true than congress can create agencies for themselves with more power than is granted them in the constitution.
by jhp123 | 2025-04-15 13:55:13+00:00
the money is for research not education.

A lot of modern industry started as academic research. Things like semiconductors, EUV lithography, mRNA vaccines, or AI originate in government-funded academic research.

The health effects of smoking and leaded gas were established by academic research, allowing government programs to massively improve our collective health.

Climate change has been recognized, diagnosed, and its solutions invented mostly by academic researchers, an effort that may save all industrial civilization.
by jtvjan | 2025-04-15 13:55:21+00:00
this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.

that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
by ArinaS | 2025-04-15 13:55:22+00:00
> "You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very niche set of individuals?"

It's not just one instance and not even one frontend existing for what can be described as "fediverse". Decentralization is the whole point.

> "a very niche set of individuals?"

Everything depends on the instance you're using. Some of them, like mastodon.social, are very active, others are not.

> "I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages"

Find a better instance. On the one I use it's 2k characters limit.

> "That's not independent web like it was."

Yes, because it's a whole new level of independence. NewGrounds, Myspace and everything you mentioned are centralized platforms, which is practically vendor lock-in, because you're dependent on just one vendor for everything you do on these platforms, while on fediverse, you aren't. Instances are completely (except for showing posts from one another) independent from each other - there's no central "authority" controlling all of them like there would be on a centralized platform. Thousands of them exist for every frontend imaginable, and you can create one yourself.
by b_emery | 2025-04-15 13:56:02+00:00
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:

> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”

and:

> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.

In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
by bjourne | 2025-04-15 13:56:23+00:00
Intel was looking to sell Altera for over a year before Trump's Tariff Tourettes. And I bet it wasn't the hardware that was the problem, it was the software. No matter how amazing your FPGA hardware is, it is useless if you can't also produce high-quality software for operating it. For CPUs you can just tell people to use gcc or clang, not so with FPGAs.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-15 13:56:30+00:00
I'm kind of surprised that Next.js -- being known for SSR and SSG -- isn't offered with a CDN solution OOB on Vercel; seems like a no-brainer.

Last startup, we ran Astro.js behind CloudFront and we were able to serve pretty large volume of public-facing traffic from just 2 server nodes with 3-tiered caching (Redis for data caching, application level output caching, and CloudFront with CF doing a lot of the heavy lifting)
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-15 13:56:31+00:00
A century is approximately three billion seconds, the second being variously defined across history as a multiple we find convenient of whatever universal natural constant we can most precisely measure -- most recently 10 billion or so of a specific type of vibration of cesium atoms.

All the other stars and planets would have the same experience, though their local orbital periods might result in different units of expression being more convenient.

Of course, as we leave our galaxy they would also be in significantly different reference frames and perhaps experience the rate differently as a result. We are assuming that, statistically, our relative velocity is not special and they see roughly the same relationship between red shift and distance that we do.
by bobdigit | 2025-04-15 13:57:09+00:00
> AI is an amplifier of what you are

All good point. I'd say "AI is an amplifier of what you want", with all the consequences that entails. Because of its amplifying power, if you can be intentional about it, you can steer or explore avenues that you yourself would otherwise not attempt to.

The ease of which you can jump out of your "local you" basin is still very under appreciated (which reminds me of this post https://open.substack.com/pub/signull/p/answers-are-now-insa...)
by mtlynch | 2025-04-15 13:57:16+00:00
>Let’s say you have a team that owns a library that is used by ten other teams. The library team has their own goals, their own deadlines, and their own priorities. They are focused on what they have to do to accomplish those. If they are allowed to ship breaking changes to their customers every day and they experience no consequences themselves for doing so, then they will ship breaking changes every day, because that’s the most efficient and effective way to accomplish their goals.

This is an interesting idea. It feels obvious, but I've never considered this.

I use so much software where I feel like the developers must never use the software at all, as workflows that would be obvious to any user are buggy or convoluted.

>If you are a library team and you want to make a breaking change, you have to refactor the codebases of all your customers in order to adopt the new, breaking change. If you are a cybersecurity team and you want a new control to be implemented on all the codebases at the company, you have to install it yourself in all those codebases and make sure it works.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I'm skeptical that it's the full solution.

It seems hard to put in practice outside of very tiny and very huge orgs.

The author led the Code Health team at Google when I was there, so I saw this working because Google invested huge amount into tooling to make this work. But Google still had a lot of problems with misaligned incentives between libraries and clients, and there was still a lot of pain around breaking changes.

In contrast, I worked at Microsoft for 3 years, and never really worried about my dependencies breaking me, but there I also had to deal with way more legacy code and fear of changing anything because there were no tools for large-scale changes and the automated testing at the time was very coarse-grained.
by viraptor | 2025-04-15 13:58:08+00:00
> Just a motion sensor hardwired to the light fixture. Hasn’t failed me once in the past ten years.

Funny you mention that, because I'm putting in smart movement sensors to make sure the lights don't come up at night in the garage where the dog sleeps, but also so that I can force the light on for a long period, when I'm doing some work in the same area. People have different needs/expectations.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-15 13:59:43+00:00
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:

First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.

Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.

¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-15 13:59:44+00:00
I keep hearing stuff like this and I kind of fully expect someone to tell me you have to pay Monster cable prices to get something that's not junk.

Really my day to day experience isn't this at all. I have good amounts of "chinese junk" tools that I use on a weekly/monthly basis that I paid probably 25% of a name brand tool and they are holding up just fine. I'm not using them daily so don't need to spend my life savings on them. I do a bit of research first so not getting the worst crap that some people run into.

Batteries are the big thing I've had excellent luck with. I can get Dewalt knockoff batteries at less than half the cost and twice the power and they last the same amount of time as my name brand.
by Sammi | 2025-04-15 14:00:26+00:00
China investing in machinery and automation means they are moving up the production chain into more expensive and more profitable manufacturing.

It also means they no longer do the cheap high volume manufacturing, which will go elsewhere where the cheap labor is.

This is how it goes. Manufacturing keeps migrating to cheap labor. China is running out of cheap labor and volume manufacturing will find it in East Asia and India and Africa instead, because these places will still have lots and lots of young people while those in China have aged out.
by bluGill | 2025-04-15 14:00:33+00:00
Depends. MRI itself is safe, but they often add "contrast" which is known to cause cancer (I'm not clear on if there is more than one choice for contrast though, or if they all cause cancer). Of course contrast is mostly used when they looking at a something - likely a tumor that might or might not be cancer to decide how to treat it - in that case does it matter that your long term cancer prospects go up when without it your short term prospects are not good.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-15 14:01:02+00:00
Some studies are trying to ensure that the model reasons through abstractions instead of linguistic representations. (Of course the phenomenon of reasoning in substantially different quality depending on input language signals a fault - reasoning is beyond "spoken" language.)

In the past hours a related, seemingly important article appeared - see https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-make-language-models-work-...
by jasonlotito | 2025-04-15 14:01:03+00:00
Yes. You claim:

"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."

This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.

> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.

Let's be clear:

> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.

Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.

"Am I reading it wrong?"

Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)

This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.

And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.

Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.

"Am I reading it wrong?"

As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
by david38 | 2025-04-15 14:01:45+00:00
In my experience from a poor Latin America country, rich people rob those far away, poor people rob those close.

If there is no obvious diversification in the path forward, then the resources of wealth are few and easily identified. Ex: oil, banana plantations, etc. These countries are more likely to be like this. With a colonial past, there is a view by the strong they can only steal. It takes an exceptional leader who is strong, cares about his country, willing to kill to defend, and willing to not be bribed by the global powers to turn a country around. And he may still fail.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-04-15 14:02:16+00:00
This was my blog post. I didn't explain it very very but I agree that you do not want to completely strip out the useful EXIF data. In particular, the colorspace values are used by the browser to show photos in a more "correct" way on your screen.

My blogging software only strips the GPS EXIF data. The code is here:

https://github.com/andrewstephens75/gensite/blob/dev/gensite...
by andruby | 2025-04-15 14:02:55+00:00
Splitcast Technology built this in 2012. The company folded (couldn't find revenue, and had founder struggles ) but as far as I remember the tech worked. It still needed a lot of seeding nodes, but a significant chunk of the bandwidth was provided by the "viewer peers".

Key part of that tech was that it synchronized the playback between all peers. That was nice for stock market announcements and sport events for example.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131208173255/http://splitcast....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5UYu9jeQbY

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/splitcast-technology
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-15 14:03:01+00:00
> word is not subject to a strict legalese interpretation in these comments

Disappearing has been consistently used to refer to illegal and inconspicuous detention since WWII. The person was there and now they are not. There is no arrest record. There are no lawyers. There is certainly no case record where government officials are being questioned [1]. They may be detained, dead or on holiday. The ambiguity, which permits bystanders to assume normality, is the terrifying key.

Diluting the term, particularly on this precipice, is incredibly dangerous.

> How long could he be dead without anyone knowing?

Going off sworn statements to courts (again, something victims of disappearance do not get), a few hours.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/12/abrego-garcia-el-sa...
by rtkwe | 2025-04-15 14:03:05+00:00
Those are all local systems, all the cross country and intercity (for cities where their suburbs haven't merged like Chicago or the NE) stuff has to share tracks with cargo rail.

That lack of delays from cargo is also why they work a little better. One other big delay though is that basically none of the trains operate as expresses so they have loads of little stops along the way serving all the little towns along the route where little delays build up and by the end of the run they're sometimes hours behind schedule.
by lesbolasinc | 2025-04-15 14:03:09+00:00
besides the fact 4chan is a cesspool I think there's a certain sadness that comes with the possible death of another "early-internet" forum.

I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.

so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...
by input_sh | 2025-04-15 14:03:38+00:00
Both, but primarily due to the lack of training materials. 10 or so million native speakers of my language will never be able to generate the same amount of training material as over a billion English speakers do.

There is a steep drop in quality in any non-English language, but in general less native speakers = worse results. They tend to have a certain "voice" which is extremely easy to spot and the accuracy of results goes out the window (way worse than in English).
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-15 14:03:43+00:00
>I don't see how this is different for smart contracts, as opposed to, say legal contracts written in english

It's different because the whole purpose of smart contracts is to circumvent governmental power structures. Otherwise, people would use regular contracts.

Technologically, it's much easier to set up a payment system using a centralized database in a specific jurisdiction and have people sign normal contracts to use the system. People create cryptocurrency systems to avoid that. They put much effort into creating payment systems independent of existing power structures. If this system does not work without backup from the legal system and governmental power, then all that effort is pointless.

>I thought originally that you were in favour of smart contracts

I think they're interesting.

>Are you saying what he did is wrong, but he should be allowed to do it anyway?

Yes.

>If so, why?

Using existing governmental power structures to punish people who adhere to smart contracts in ways some system members don't like invalidates the whole system. If cryptosystems don't work purely technologically without judicial support, they don't work, period.