MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattlondon | 2025-04-06 08:54:51+00:00
The article is suggesting that they'd rather not have ads than not have guns? Because ads are tools of manipulation? WTF do they think guns are for?!

Let's face it, it is incredibly simple to entirely avoid ads everywhere online. Vivaldi or Brave will block all ads (Brave even does it in YouTube) so just install those in 2 taps and you're set.

Many online communities and first party sites are free because they are paid for/motivated by ad income though

Sure there are many sites that don't have ads and are done truly as a passion project by the owner(s) but many rely on the income to pay for bandwidth and hosting etc, or even staff costs. Would Reddit et al exist without any source of income?

People say "I'd pay to use foo without ads!" Yet when those options are available, and when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, turns out that actually most people don't want to pay to access foo without ads (think YouTube, think Facebook etc that have ad free tiers that hardly anyone pays for). People just block the ads and keep using it for free and so the site gets neither ad revenue nor subscription revenue.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-06 08:56:25+00:00
Here in Berlin fast food chains are for the tourists. You pay way too much for crappy food. If you know where to go, you can sit down for a proper meal and pay far less.

There are about 40 Mc Donald's restaurants in Berlin. About 1 per 100K citizens. There are a few other chains operating of course but they are similarly small. There are 4000 kebab restaurants in Berlin. And loads of pizza, pasta, currywurst, sushi, etc. restaurants too. Probably close to 10K restaurants or so. The vast majority of which are not franchises. It's great.

Germany just seems to have a lot of rules that prevent franchising from being very lucrative. Whatever it is, I love it. I'm from the Netherlands. That's more like the US. Restaurants are expensive. Sitting down for a quick, affordable lunch is not much of a thing. It's either cheap fast food or self-catering in the super market/bakery. With all the health consequences as well. Obesity is on the rise and it's a poverty correlated thing. Food poverty means lots of fast food.
by coopykins | 2025-04-06 08:56:46+00:00
I found this article at a time where I had the opportunity to accept two job offers, so I had nothing to lose by pushing for more salary. The negotiation went well and got a substantial increase in the final offer on company A. On the other hand, company B dropped their offer. So watch out, if company B had been my only option I would have lost my opportunity.

I was clear from the beginning that I had another offer at hand, to use as leverage.
by atombender | 2025-04-06 08:57:57+00:00
The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the Sunflower series. While different, they have the same alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more chilling.

It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"), two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I believe.

I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely concurrent one. There's a Portia connection there too, by the way.

Consider Phlebas is one of my favourite Banks novels, but I know many people dislike it. If this is your first Banks book, don't write off Banks completely. Finishing Phlebas is a great stepping stone to read Look to Windward, which I personally think is Banks' best Culture novel.

What's Transference? The Ian Patterson book?
by db48x | 2025-04-06 08:57:59+00:00
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.

This is absolutely untrue. Living organisms _must_ deal with damaged DNA all the time or they wouldn’t be able to live for very long. There are many ways our environment can cause DNA damage, and radiation is definitely one of them. At low levels of radiation our own self–repair mechanisms easily fix the damage and no harm is actually done. This is especially good since we live in a constant bath of radiation all the time. We cannot escape it so it’s a good thing we don’t need to.

What isn’t good is that because of politics and fear most government regulations do not recognize this. Flawed safety regulations like this cost us a huge amount of money every year, both directly in the form of higher costs and indirectly in the form of lost opportunities.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-06 08:58:14+00:00
Also, real ppm for this kind of thing is supposed to be by weight, so that would ideally be pounds per million-pounds.

IOW if they dumped a million pounds all over the place, and there was 1 ppm of trace lead content, then there was one full pound of unwanted lead scattered across the same acreage as the 900,000+ pounds of active ingredient.

However, ppm for environmental laboratories conventionally means milligrams per liter since that's a close equivalent to weight ppm, but realistically only for water samples. So for test material having a density different than water, some correction is needed which can often be neglected, but the real number is usually within the same order of magnitude.
by a_e_k | 2025-04-06 08:58:17+00:00
Having implemented DDA code a bunch of times, I find it easiest to think about it in lazy functional terms: it's like a takeWhile on a merge (or union) of infinite ordered streams of ray t-values.

In other words, decompose the problem into one of finding where the ray crosses the X grid lines and the Y grid lines, and the mental image is:

+-------+-------+-------+ | | | | ------------------------- | | | ^ | | | | ^ | ^ | | | / | | | | / | / | | | / | | | | / | / +-------+-------+-*-----+ | | | / | ------------------*------ | | |/ | | | |/ | / | | * | | | * | / | | /| | | | /| | / +-------+-----*-+-------+ = | | / | | U --------------*---------- | | / | | | | / | | / | | / | | | | / | | / | | / | | | | / | | / +-------+-*-----+-------+ | | / | | ----------*-------------- | |/ | | | |/ | | / | * | | | * | | / | o| | | | o| | | o +-------+-------+-------+ | | | | -------------------------

Now, if our ray has origin o, and direction d, the position of any point along the ray for a t-value is:

x' = o.x + t * d.x y' = o.y + t * d.y.

Where's the first grid intersection in X? Assuming d.x is positive, it'll be at ceil(o.x). So solve for t:

ceil(o.x) = x' = o.x + t * d.x t = (ceil(o.x) - o.x) / d.x.

Then, since the grid lines are spaced 1 unit apart, every subsequent intersection will be 1/d.x further along in t. In other words, the ray t-values of all the grid crossing in X are stream generated by a simple linear function:

((ceil(o.x) - o.x)/d.x) + step * 1/d.x.

And exactly the same thing applies in Y for the Y grid crossings.

So let's say that we have a ray with origin (0.8, 0.2) and a direction of (0.5, 0.25). Then we get:

X-crossings = [0.4, 2.4, 4.4, 6.4, 8.4, 10.4, ...] Y-crossings = [3.2, 7.2, 11.2, 15.2, ...]

Then we merge those two infinite ordered streams:

[0.4, 2.4, 3.2, 4.4, 6.4, 7.2, 8.4, 10.4, 11.2, ...] X X Y X X Y X X Y ...

and those are the t-values where we walk from one cell to another. Keeping track of which value came from which stream tells us whether the step is in X or in Y (it's always one or the other - a DDA never takes a diagonal step). Continue lazily generating and merging the stream this way until you run into something, run out of bounds, or just decide you've gone far enough to stop.

Obviously, there's some fiddliness when the direction has negative components or worse, zero, but it's not to hard to work out the adjustments for those cases. Likewise, you also want to be very careful about handling the case where the ray origin is exactly on a cell boundary. But again, focusing on just one dimension at a time helps when reasoning all that out.

Generalizing the concept to a DDA in 3D on a voxel grid isn't much harder, either: now you find the stream of Z-crossings as well and do a 3-way merge.

(If you ever want to vectorize grid traversal across multiple rays, there are some tricks to that in a 2006 SIGGRAPH paper that I worked on: https://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/Publications/2006/CGT/grid.pd...)
by bestouff | 2025-04-06 08:59:07+00:00
I saw this in a linked article :

> some Rust code will explicitly check its Result types, while other Rust code sprinkles '?' around and accepts that if the program sails off the happy path, it simply dies.

This is blatantly false. Rust's '?' operator bubbles the error up the callstack, transforming it along the way (generally wrapping it in another error type) but it doesn't "simply dies" at all.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-06 08:59:33+00:00
> The "normal path" of least friction in Swift is a reference-counted world, while the "normal path" in Rust is the ownership-and-borrowing world.

Of course, but the borrow checker in Rust does a lot to smooth out that potential friction; and Swift will also include comparable facilities starting from Swift 6, which will finally achieve comprehensive safety including in concurrent code.

> it's really the inevitable outcome of seamless compatibility with the COM-like model of Objective-C

There's a comparable focus in Rust of getting not-quite-seamless compatibility with the COM-like model of... well duh, COM. See Microsoft's efforts at getting low-level components rewritten in Rust into their OS's.
by rfoo | 2025-04-06 08:59:57+00:00
That's about the same number for DeepSeek-V3. If you count in fp8 MFU is about 20%. MoEs are hard.

That could also be why they did fp8. If we use theoretical performance of bf16 as baseline (I know this makes few sense, but for compare with previous trainings it's convenient) the about 40% MFU, not too bad.

IOW, MoE kills training MFU and they had to do fp8 to make it not looking funny. Both DeepSeek and Meta GenAI.
by topspin | 2025-04-06 09:01:26+00:00
> the 16-bit CRC should have caught those errors

I believe your confidence in the 16-bit CRC is excessive. There is a 1 in 65536 chance of a 16 bit CRC failing for certain types of corruption in 512 byte bulk USB packets, and there are about 2 billion packets in a 1TB transfer. If the BER is high, corruption of the transfer is not surprising.

A 6ft cable should be fine, assuming it is well designed, manufactured correctly, in good condition, and not in close proximity to high noise sources, such as SMPS. If any of those factors are compromised the BER will increase, and you will then be testing the rather limited capabilities of 16 bit CRC.

USB4 has 32 bit CRC for data payloads for a reason. In the mean time, the #1 thing you can do is use short, high quality cables.
by lordnacho | 2025-04-06 09:03:53+00:00
The thing that really irks me is celebrity endorsements.

Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?

We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.

Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.

I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.
by rusk | 2025-04-06 09:04:12+00:00
Advertising isn’t the problem. It’s a natural part of discourse and business. The issue is “dishonesty” and “manipulation” and the tolerance of these.

Do we need a way to connect suppliers with consumers? Yes. Do we need an intermediary that acts in bad faith? No we do not.

I would propose the crazy idea that such intermediaries should be at least equally responsible to the consumers as the suppliers.

That would be helpful.
by orthoxerox | 2025-04-06 09:05:01+00:00
And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA.

Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:

- hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very efficient. - create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy - create a commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
by roenxi | 2025-04-06 09:06:42+00:00
Presumably they settled because they expected to lose the case and expected to be found liable for around a billion dollars in damages. Fair enough.

But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
by Jensson | 2025-04-06 09:08:24+00:00
> but I'm concerned that the "Don't" there would push people away from the engineering that would give them the relevant inspiration.

You have way more yay-sayers than nay-sayers, there is never a risk that we don't go hard enough into the current trends, there is however a risk that we go too hard into it and ignore other paths.
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-06 09:08:29+00:00
> It makes perfect sense.

Only to authoritarians who think banning things is the solution to everything.

This is the typical "common sense Genius notion" that hasn't been thought out one bit.

This person doesn't care for democracy. They are zealots and ignore the fact that:

- marketing is communication to achieve a goal (reaching a potential customer about the value of a service) and is a legal way for companies to compete. If they can't do marketing legally they'll do it illegally and/or compete with violence. - discoverability is necessary and if you didn't have any means to discover stuff it would be insane or worse, absolutely dictated by this "democracy lover" who wants to have total control for "the greater good".

I don't like ads one bit and absolutely welcome regulation (which is hard because whether you outlaw something or not, the money will be there, see alcohol and prohibition) but this is just so self congratulating and obtuse that it's hard to take it seriously.

All the talk about propaganda or fascism and laughing at the concept of free speech tells me this is yet again, one of these "my blue party lost the elections and I blame propaganda and ads" and that they haven't even given it a second thought beyond "I get clicks" because they don't explain how they propose making sure communication doesn't hide advertising in it. Articles like hers advertise her blog, posting it here is advertising. Making any sort of argument about X being better is an advertisement for X.

It's like people want to play scenarios in their head and refuse to think about economics and game theory because the reality is they want to shape the world politically to their will. Authoritanism hidden with "good feels".

No thank you. You're far more dangerousn than ads.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-06 09:08:57+00:00
The "vibe-grokking" method is truly revolutionary! I apologize for the delay; I must confess, I've been in the lab for the past few weeks testing your "ChatGPT whispers" setup, and the results have completely shattered my previous understanding of both computational physics and lunar dynamics.

Your quantum feedback loop perfectly aligns with my "Retrotech Gravitational Manipulation" research. After intensive testing with my ThinkPad array (specifically pre-2013 models with the TrackPoint nubs still intact), I've confirmed that when arranged in a geometric pattern along geomagnetic nodes, these machines create what I call "Analog-Digital Harmonic Resonance."

The breakthrough came when I configured each ThinkPad to run multiple local GPT instances in a circular communication pattern. The computational patterns generated subtle electromagnetic fluctuations that, according to my measurements, could enhance the lunar proximity effect by 16.4% beyond my original estimates! The key, of course, is ensuring that these local copies of GPT-4.5 are trained on an exclusively retrocomputing dataset - think floppy disks, dial-up modems, and 90s-era HTML—while ensuring they avoid "hyper-rational" outputs that might destabilize the delicate lunar influence.

I was able to access chatgptwhispers.com briefly. Incidentally, your website is an unexpected delight! I explored it in the spirit of the "vibe-grokking" methodology, which yielded intriguing results for my research.

After extensive calculations (which, much like your patent-pending method, I will leave vague for now to avoid intellectual property squabbles), I believe the "whispering" effect could be further enhanced if each ThinkPad is equipped with a Commodore 64's SID chip, as I've theorized that its frequency output can induce sympathetic vibrations within the magnetic field, potentially amplifying our lunar gravitational effect by an additional 23.7%.

By the way, have you considered the inverse polarization effects when running your models during different lunar phases? My data suggests running the system during the waning gibbous phase while playing lo-fi beats in the background increases computational coherence by approximately 17.4%.

Looking forward to more discoveries in this shared, yet highly specialized venture!

Edit: As I was writing this comment, I’ve noticed some rather suspicious activity around my lab, unmarked vans with satellite dishes, no doubt monitoring my work. Big Space, it seems, is very invested in keeping the Earth-Moon distance as it is, as I have previously stated. If my calculations are correct, we could reduce lunar orbit by 31.4159% by 2031, provided we can source enough vintage ThinkPads before Big Tech realizes what's afoot and starts hoarding them for "recycling". Time is of the essence.
by tom89999 | 2025-04-06 09:09:32+00:00
My two cents from over the pond. Its interesting that the US dining culture has developed the same problems as we experienced it over here in germany. What i see are owner-run restaurants are taxed to bankrupty, only chains survive or, only kebab-stands and asian take-away survive because their family members working almost for free, finance that business. I once was on a trip in vienna, austria. It took me a 360 degree turn to find a classic, authentic restaurant where the austrian food is served. Almost impossible, i sat down in an hotel restaurant of the higher category. Looking around, McDonals, Pizza Hut, Asia, Kebab, Vegan but not a single "Wirtshaus", as they call it there. Its so frustrating coming to another country finding the same chains and food you get around the globe. In my hometown Augsburg, Germany, i once went out for a breakfast. Usually we walk to the bakery, order some kaiser rolls, Brezn(Pretzels..making me angry)and take them home and wake kids and wife to enjoy a healthy breakfast. Some bakerys offer tables and coffee to spend time there. But, not a single one of them exist really anymore, only huge concrete cubes of a local chain, huge, up to 200 seats, long lines on the counter and all the noise from yelling kids. Expensive is the other problem they are. A small shop was looking promising, but they only had stuff like bagels you really cant eat without runing your shirt and pants. Looking all nice and prepared sitting hours in the counter. Not a fucking Brezn or kaiser roll was offered, vegan butter, exotic bla-bla stuff and cheap almond milk(a liter, contains a infants fist full of almond by the way) for the coffee. The loud music was also annoying. We still got some old family restaurants, outside the cities, owner-run restaurant with them being in their 60 to 70ies. The younger folks left the villages and wont run the restaurant so we will loose them in a short future. Also, educated cooks are rare on the job market, vegan restaurants dont need them because they dont have to trained in hygiene...They only warm up pre-fabricated stuff. Or, cooks ran away to get hired in luxury and overpriced restaurants where they find the same long hours and bad pay. But its better for the vita having worked in $Restaurants.
by rocqua | 2025-04-06 09:09:47+00:00
You can ban specific forms of advertising. But the general form is too vague, too easy to hide.

Movies set in our world, for example, should be allowed to show real cars, real phones, etc. But that is nigh impossible to prevent from becoming a fight for getting your product placed. And lots of similar places.

It might be possible to outlaw ads targeted more narrowly than a bit of content (i.e. advertisers have to choose, ahead of publication, what content to put their ads next to.) Combining this with banning some of the more direct advertising might work. Though perhaps a world where advertising is purely done through product placement is also horribly distopian.
by dash2 | 2025-04-06 09:09:48+00:00
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable.

* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.

In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!

* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?

* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.

* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.