MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-04-28 21:04:38+00:00
I am thinking a WiFi camera with a voice activated capture of dangerous driving incidents. A peer review of incidents (phone App) or a police review (I can think of multiple funding models).

Perhaps cameras are somewhat networked to capture multiple cameras when an incident is flagged?

Dangerous incidents should lead to consequences (financial, licensing, insurance etcetera).

My assumption is that that a majority of serious accidents are caused by a few reckless drivers. Remove those reckless drivers from the roads and we can reduce harm.

The difficulty is to design a system that is fair and that isn't abused by authorities (Extremely difficult to avoid - and perception of abuse cannot be avoided). My assumption could easily be wrong: perhaps most accidents are good drivers on a bad day?

I wish tailgaters could be automatically ticketed (easily detected by camera in car going opposite direction on two way roads).

With cameras, we could also start to scientifically detect the right signals to detect people before they cause accidents. Lane wandering? Emergency brakers? People who cut off cyclists?

I know old drivers that would never speed, but who are dangerously poor driving due to other causes.

In New Zealand we have many fatalities every year from tourists who are used to driving on the right, who collide head-on with other innocent drivers because the tourist drives on the wrong side of the road on rural roads. This is detectable and fixable.

I absolutely loath the idea of state surveillance, and there's a slippery slope that starts with "won't you think of the children", but sometimes thinking of the children is the right thing to do. Avoiding misuse and abuse by authorities is hard, but society has the responsibility to design systems to avoid that.

Here is an article on reckless drivers: https://transalt.org/reports-list/yn29thckywv9n0qpsv4jb1ab07...

I think the article indicates

(1) speeding is correlated with dangerous driving (e.g. running red lights), and

(2) that adding speed limiters won't fix the problem. If hundreds of tickets didn't fix them, limiting speed won't either.

(3) that people love to fix correlations but that we need to fix causations.
by wewtyflakes | 2025-04-28 21:05:09+00:00
Doesn't this mean that new tech will have to demonstrate material advantages, such that outweigh the LLM inertia, in order to be adopted? This sounds good to me; so much framework churn seems to be code fashion rather than function. Now if someone releases a new framework, they need to demonstrate real value first. People that are smart enough to read the docs and absorb the material of a new, better, framework will now have a competitive advantage; this all seems good.
by unstatusthequo | 2025-04-28 21:05:34+00:00
"Regularly kills pedestrians and drivers" doesn't seem like the train's fault. Railroad crossings aren't hard to understand. If you're a driver or pedestrian, best to make sure you heed the lights, gate, loud sounds.

Sounds like you haven't ridden it. It's the best train in the country. Sure makes you realize what train travel could be.
by pj_mukh | 2025-04-28 21:05:51+00:00
This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.

SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.

Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.
by TeaBrain | 2025-04-28 21:06:10+00:00
>It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.

I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.

>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.

A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.
by belorn | 2025-04-28 21:06:34+00:00
When it come to Hitler people will generally approve of political assassinations and infanticide if it would have meant that Hitler were killed before world war 2. Any benefit that society would have gain if those methods would had been established as the norm would however be dwarfed from the negatives. Sometimes bad methods make things initially better, but long term has terrible consequences.

As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-28 21:06:47+00:00
> but the code a bit more brittle, esp. for concurrency

Obligatory ”remember to `go run -race`”, that thing is a life saver. I never run into difficult data races or deadlocks and I’m regularly doing things like starting multiple threads to race with cancelation signals, extending timeouts etc. It’s by far my favorite concurrency model.
by pyrale | 2025-04-28 21:07:01+00:00
In my area, "buckets" of average load are prepared ahead of time in coordination between the transporter (who gives the order to shed), the distributer (who implements the shedding operation as close to consumers as possible), and representatives of the state (who define priority areas that can't be load-shed, or that should be load-shed last).

When yhe time comes, you just shed enough "buckets" to stabilize. Load shedding is not a precise task, when you're at that point, you'd rather load a few more megawatt and be safe, than play with the limits and be sorry.

> So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123

Opening a line within the grid isn't used to shed load, as the grid is mainly redundant. It's used 1) to protect the line itself (either by letting it trip, or by opening it preventively), or 2) to force power to flow differently through the network, by modifying its impedance. Opening a line from the transport network is not a way to load shed.

In this totally random example [1], opening the line A-B increases impedance in the right part of the network, forcing power to re-route through the left part, and reduces the load on another line in the right path that was overloaded.

[1]: https://excalidraw.com/#json=5l8OS96Wdke6l9YEClQt8,NJ-r2PtiE...

> Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)

The network is, indeed, monitored continually, and we do have potential network equipments failure simulations every few minutes, with contingency plans also simulated to make sure that they work in that particular case. This way, when shit hits the fan, we at least have a recently tested plan to start from.
by Cyphase | 2025-04-28 21:07:31+00:00
I do want to write and publish more, generally. Perhaps some of it will be about the sabbatical itself.

I'll let you know what I've learned by the end when I figure out what "end" means. It's not my goal to go back to what I'm doing now.

I'll post about this again the next time (end of May presumably) this "What are you working on?" thread is posted, for anyone who wants to follow along. Also, email address in my profile; use subject, "What are you working on?".
by nu11ptr | 2025-04-28 21:07:41+00:00
No, it is not all that fast after the CGo call marshaling (Rust would need to compile to the C ABI). I would essentially call in to Rust to start the code, run it in its own thread pool and then call into Rust again to stop it. The time to start and stop don't really matter as this is code that runs from minutes to hours and is embarrassingly parallel.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-28 21:07:53+00:00
I wish apple would spend some more time paying attention to metal-jax :) it crashes with a few lines still and seems like an obvious need if apple wants to be serious about enabling ML work on their new MBPs.

MLX looks really nice from the demo-level playing around with it I've done, but I usually stick to jax so, you know, I can actually deploy it on a server without trying to find someone who racks macs.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-04-28 21:07:56+00:00
The best thing about this illustrated edition is Le Guin's own comments written in the past few years reflecting on these books.

Here's the last paragraph on her comments on Tombs of Atuan. (Um, spoilers, I guess.)

> Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-28 21:08:14+00:00
> In its announcement, IBM said it intends to spend $30 billion on R&D over the next five years - an average of $6 billion a year - as part of "plans to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing."

> By way of comparison, the tech giant spent and $7.48 billion on R&D last year, and $6.78 billion the year prior, according to the IT giant's 2024 annual report [PDF].

So they intend to spend less than they do now? On nebulous goals with no accountability whatsoever?

Instead of slapping tariffs on everything we can't manufacture anyway, it makes more sense to penalize generalized outsourcing and labor importing when there's perfectly capable tech workers already here.

But I suspect I'm preaching to the choir on that point.
Building Personal Digital Twins for Personal Health Optimisation
by Melissa_bime | 2025-04-28 21:08:37+00:00
Hi HN, We’re working on BioReplica, a platform that lets you create a digital replica of your own biology, based on your DNA, medical records, wearable data, and physiological metrics. Why? Right now, if you want to know how a supplement, diet, or exercise protocol will affect you, you usually have to experiment on yourself and hope for the best. No two bodies respond the same way, but personalization is still mostly guesswork. BioReplica is an early attempt to change that. We build a personal biological model, a simulation that lets you test "what if?" scenarios safely before trying them in real life.

Examples:

"If I start taking NMN, will my inflammation markers likely improve or worsen?"

"Would intermittent fasting affect my heart health risk, based on my baseline data?"

"Is this new nootropic likely to interact badly with my genetics or medications?"

Instead of generic advice, you can start seeing predictions based on you, your genome, your health history, your day-to-day physiology.

We’re very early. Right now the simulations are basic, focused mainly on lifestyle and supplement interventions. But over time, the idea is to make it richer, more data inputs, better modeling, higher accuracy.

Caveats:

Biology is still messy, and simulations are probabilistic, not certainties.

The platform isn't diagnostic or a substitute for real medicine (and shouldn’t be).

Getting the modeling right is hard, and we’re very upfront about that. The long term goal is for these replica's to be used for pharma simulations. In clinical trials today, most failures happen late, billions spent, and sometimes only then do we learn that a drug doesn’t work or has hidden risks.

Still, we believe even imperfect simulations, if used carefully, can help people make smarter decisions about their health.

If this idea resonates (or if you see flaws we should be thinking about), we’d love feedback.
by carlnewton | 2025-04-28 21:08:56+00:00
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. Just this weekend I began adding cypress tests. I can finally see an official release in the distance!

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
by neilv | 2025-04-28 21:10:07+00:00
The anecdote was my writing mistake, not what I was most concerned about. (I started writing the anecdote, then decided what was important was the much larger problem, and oopsed the writing.)

As for your point, I had some of the same thoughts about the overall article as you did. But I quoted a small piece of it, to narrow in on one point I wanted to make, which might be less obvious to people who think like us about the topic.

Of course some wealthy and powerful have been undermining democracy; but what if that quote was honest: is it a valid criticism, and can we improve the situation?

As long as we're stuck with billionaires, wouldn't it be great if more of them decided it was better to promote an informed and functioning democracy?
by alexey-salmin | 2025-04-28 21:10:14+00:00
Cascade failures are common. The weakest link fails, load gets re-distributed evenly, the second-weakest link fails and so on.

In theory [a flawed one] you've had enough spare capacity to survive N failures and N+1 failures are statistically unlikely because p^(N+1) is close to zero.

On practice [or with a better theory] you can't multiply probabilities in a grid system because random variables aren't independent. 30% spare capacity can go to -100% in a second.
by nullocator | 2025-04-28 21:10:25+00:00
The FBI, headed by Kash Patel? The FBI, an organization recently purged of people deemed disloyal to Trump? That FBI? Forgive me if I don't see a difference between the FBI labeling it terrorism and Trump/Musk doing it, its all the same thing. Vandalism is not Terrorism, however, repeatedly calling vandalism terrorism as a justification to allow black bagging or deportation (without typical due process) of someone who spray painted some cars sounds a lot like fascistic propaganda to me.

When I was twelve I got caught tagging an abandoned building, I was prosecuted for this and had to pay a fine and attend diversion. Sounds like you think a more appropriate punishment would have been for me to be branded as a terrorist and shipped out of country.
by gooseus | 2025-04-28 21:11:04+00:00
I recently published this library for routing messages within an application using the same kind of wildcard semantics that NATS uses - https://www.npmjs.com/package/@gooseus/natsrun

Currently just test driving it in some relatively simple work scenarios, but I imagine it could be a useful tool for consuming a NATS firehose of messages in a single application and routing them internally using the same semantics subject rules so that it would be easy to split them out as separate consumers when/if that became necessary.
by this_user | 2025-04-28 21:11:07+00:00
Constantly chasing the latest tech trends has probably done more harm than good, because more often than not, it turns out that the latest hype technology actually does not deliver what the marketing had promised. Look at NoSQL and MongoDB especially as recent examples. Most people who blindly jumped on the MDB bandwagon would have probably been better off just using Postgres, and they later had to spend a lot of resources migrating away from Mongo.

To me constantly chasing the latest trends means lack of experience in a team and absence of focus on what is actually important, which is delivering the product.
by MichaelZuo | 2025-04-28 21:11:23+00:00
It’s not even a million times more for a typical mid size bank… probably not even 100,000x… and as far as I know their core mainframes have been 100% secure over the past decade.

Hence my point.

Are you even fully reading my comments?

If you only meant that your claim applies only within an upper limit of say 1000x… saying “infinitely more” is obviously going to mislead some fraction of the readerbase.
by ck2 | 2025-04-28 21:11:26+00:00
What happens to gravity waves as they move through patches of space with different "timezones"?

Gravity waves from a kilonova are affected by the distance through space they have to travel but since they have no mass in themselves, they do not have their own "clock" and would not be affected by time differences?

It's a "speed of causality" question that breaks my brain.

Maybe that next-gen space interferometer (LISA) can help answer that, well if it's not cancelled, sigh, oh wait it's Europe-only project now so should happen

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_A...
by rickdicker | 2025-04-28 21:11:37+00:00
If enough people protest-vote then it isn't necessarily a vote for the winner - if the number of protest-voters is large enough to have changed the outcome had they all voted for the loser, then the losing party (if they are doing their job) has to take notice and listen to why this group isn't happy. If the protest-voters become a massive group of people (say 1/3 of the vote), they will probably become the focus of a lot of political debates and tv-news stories, and elected officials will have to start catering to them. But it all only works if lots of people can have the integrity to not blame "the system" for why they voted for the-crook-who-was-better-than-the-other-crook. (FYI I'm aware this has very little to do with the point you were making. I mostly agree with that)
by ycombinatrix | 2025-04-28 21:11:52+00:00
563 school zone speeding violations in 2024 is crazy.

The thing is, we don't know if they were recklessly doing 100mph every time or if they consistently go just 5mph over the limit and get repeatedly lit up by traffic cameras.

One is much worse than the other in my mind, but they would show up as the same statistic...
by jstanley | 2025-04-28 21:11:53+00:00
For sure programming with AI is a game-changer, and o3 in particular is really quite good at maths.

I've tried getting ChatGPT to write blog posts for me as well, but it seems to struggle with knowing which things are important and which things aren't. You need to apply a lot of editorial control.

For example:

> We swapped 3 × 3 windows for 5 × 5, removed global gains then re-introduced per-occurrence magnitudes, and replaced hard clamping with bilinear interpolation so gradients would flow

What does this stuff mean? Why mention these very specific details in the middle of a very high-level overview?

Obviously ChatGPT said this because there was a part in your conversation where you decided to make these changes, but without any of the context behind that it is meaningless to readers.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-28 21:13:15+00:00
It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.

The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.
by px1999 | 2025-04-28 21:13:15+00:00
I expect it will wind up like search engines where you either submit urls for indexing/inclusion or wait for a crawl to pick your information up.

Until the tech catches up it will have a stifling effect on progress toward and adoption of new things (which imo is pretty common of new/immature tech, eg how culture has more generally kind of stagnated since the early 2000s)
by vel0city | 2025-04-28 21:13:39+00:00
Further thinking about what you'll actually get, it looks like a decent average price per kWh of installed home battery backup is about $1,000/kWh. So if we got $10k of batteries installed, you're looking at 10kWh of energy you can store.

Let's say you're in California, which has a pretty decent swing in energy prices available to the home consumer. You'll see prices swing between $0.27 to $0.65/kWh. You've got a 10kWh battery pack, so you can arbitrage something like $0.38/kWh * 10 kWh = $3.8/day, assuming you get a full charge cycle and ignoring efficiency for simplicity's sake. $114/mo. So assuming you didn't have any loans and you're ignoring opportunity costs on that $10k, your break-even is in ~88 months or ~7.3 years.

After a decade of ~$114/mo, you'll have offset $13,680, assuming you always used a full charge and you experienced no other maintenance costs and bought it cash on hand and that energy prices didn't change and had a perfectly efficient inverter to charge and discharge the batteries and the batteries still had 100% charge capacity the whole time. The 10-year CD, which you could just forget about for a decade, stands at $17,310.

And this is for one of the few markets in the US that really offers that big of a time of use plan other than "free nights and weekends***" (with pages and pages of fine print and other fees) For instance, I just looked at a time of use plan available to me here in North Texas. 9AM-4PM I'm billed at $0.068 for the generation, $0.050029/kWh plus a flat $4.23/mo for delivery. Outside of that window I only pay the delivery cost. But that means I'm only really able to arbitrage $0.68/day with a 10kWh setup. That's 490 months or a hair over forty years to break even.
by rayiner | 2025-04-28 21:13:45+00:00
> Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.

They were wrong. Does that mean that human developmental abnormalities don't exist and we shouldn't be looking for ways to prevent them? Of course not.

I can't believe you're making me defend RFK, but characterizing this as being motivated by "hate" is completely absurd. RFK is a kook, but he's a kook motivated by compassion and empathy. His entire career has been driven by compassion for people affected by environmental poisons. And the people in his camp are crunchy granola parents who can't analyze statistical data, who are grasping at straws trying to find out why their kid has a developmental abnormality that science doesn't have a ready explanation for.
by mynameisash | 2025-04-28 21:14:01+00:00
I like that you have the ability to exclude on some dimension (eg, I don't use Amazon.com). Do you have or are you considering adding more retailers beyond the four you mentioned? For example, I buy a lot of unroasted coffee from sweetmarias.com, and excluding Amazon from Popgot results eliminates all but one listing (from Walmart).
by lproven | 2025-04-28 21:14:02+00:00
Well, for starters, you need to know that "Firesign" means "Firesign Theatre".

To know that, you probably need to live in the country where Firesign Theatre performed or was heard. TBH I do not really know what the Firesign Theatre is or was. It started the year before I was born, and I'm pretty old, but I'm not American.