MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by safety1st | 2025-04-28 16:22:56+00:00
Thank you,

> there’s always going to be some kind of bias, whether it’s set by you, by an algorithm, or by another human

This is spot on, and why I become more of a free software radical every year. Even though these UX experiments roll around in my head, I doubt you can make any algorithm that is "unbiased" and perfect for all people.

Ergo the only real solution is to let a thousand algorithms bloom, and give people the ability to select the ones they want; this is getting back to the idea of the software being a "user agent" that fetches content for you and does what you want it to do, as opposed to being an advertiser's agent. Maybe there's some alternate reality out there where everything was AGPL'ed from the get-go and Facebook et al got forked a thousand times and had to compete with forks that were more user friendly. Or barring that maybe the problem gets solved in 100 years with a dozen Mastodon forks blooming, I don't know, but I'm sure if you could choose your algorithm, it would look nothing like the Instagram app in particular does today, which is my personal choice for the most mind-destroying software I find myself sometimes using

Or maybe if the government succeeds in breaking the monopolies that rule over both social media and the online advertising industry...?
by tpmoney | 2025-04-28 16:23:12+00:00
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.

I think the problem with the “punching up/down” perspective of comedy is that power is relative so the same exact humor and joke can be both punching up and down at the exact same time. Consider the current political moment in the US. Right wing, conservative, religious groups have power currently, so your average Daily Show or SNL writer feels pretty justified that they’re “punching up” when they take their potshots at “god and country” types. And to an extent they are. But at the same time, your average “god and country” type that their humor is skewering is also a punch down because unlike the SNL or Daily Show writer, they don’t have a national TV show in which to broadcast their views. They are (if you believe the writers) uneducated, ignorant and duped into believing lies that the rich and powerful have sold them. But if that’s the case, then by definition they are not the powerful, and “punching” them must be “punching down” (or at least laterally). Is it right (or at least ok) to be skewering “god and country” types for the ridiculous things they do? Probably. But I don’t think it’s because it’s somehow “speaking truth to power” or “punching up”. It’s right and ok because they are ridiculous things and people are allowed to find ridiculous things funny and skewer them, regardless of the relative power disparities
by jrs235 | 2025-04-28 16:23:40+00:00
Honest question, are we better off in the long run, and is it a better solution, to decentralize energy generation and make more smaller grids rather than linking them all up? This isn't to say completely getting rid of the ability to transfer between the smaller grids to assist with power disruptions but to decouple and make it less likely for catastrophic "global" failures like this.
by jccalhoun | 2025-04-28 16:23:45+00:00
Last year I bought a broken jukebox. I wanted to convert it to be powered by a raspberry pi. I wanted it to work like a traditional jukebox where you used the buttons to input the song number. While there are a few existing projects to convert Jukeboxes to run from raspberry pi, most of them used a touch screen or didn't work well on RP5 which is what I had or the current version of raspberry pi os.

So despite not being a programmer, barely knowing a little javascript, and nothing about python, linux, or gtk, I was able to use AI to muddle my way through to creating a program that takes the input from a numpad, looks up the song from a list, sends it to mpd, and posts a picture from the album art embedded in the music file. https://github.com/jccalhoun/mpcButtonJukebox
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 16:24:07+00:00
I do want to charge but if you have valid use cases and will function as a beta-tester I would work out free service technically forever. I am open to discussions about this. I'm still experimenting and nothing is set in stone, but I actually quit my job a while ago, and this is what I want to do full time. I have a bit of runway.
by xlbuttplug2 | 2025-04-28 16:24:10+00:00
> How are you going to check Gemini’s math on that?

Gemini used 40% choline by weight for alpha GPC and 18% for citicoline, which seems to check out with other sources.

> I’m leaning towards alpha gpc supplements.

I haven't looked into the studies recently, but there have been some negative findings with alpha GPC supplementation[1]. May be worth a gander.

[1] https://examine.com/supplements/alpha-gpc/#what-are-alpha-gp...
by asoneth | 2025-04-28 16:24:22+00:00
The grand-parent suggested that the source of low German fatalities despite higher speeds is a driving culture that has respect for the "correct" way to do things.

Can you explain how you think encouraging such a culture would be at odds with measures like cameras or speed limiters? I'm also unsure why you think it's "misguided" to expect those technologies to help reduce behaviors like illegal speeding.

I don't see them at odds myself, but if you are correct then I would just support the draconian measures alone. I have low confidence that such a broken driving culture can be fixed and that American drivers can be trusted to follow the rules and stop killing so many people.
by nico | 2025-04-28 16:24:24+00:00
Great recommendation about the community

Any other resources like that you could share?

Also, what kind of models do you run with mlx and what do you use them for?

Lately I’ve been pretty happy with gemma3:12b for a wide range of things (generating stories, some light coding, image recognition). Sometimes I’ve been surprised by qwen2.5-coder:32b. And I’m really impressed by the speed and versatility, at such tiny size, of qwen2.5:0.5b (playing with fine tuning it to see if I can get it to generate some decent conversations roleplaying as a character)
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-28 16:24:30+00:00
I was referring to him targeting hispanic immigrants only in unconstitutional ICE deportations, without legal process. Plenty of rhetoric in his tweets/truth social about how the immigrants here are all criminals. Whether its racism or the belief that Democrats are importing Mexicans to increase their voter base or a mixture of both due to his dementia, then its

As for racial rules, what you are talking about is really affirmative action, which was ruled unconstitutional in 2023. Through the legal process, most importantly. There are arguments that you can make on both sides, but just so you understand the idea for affirmative action isn't to punish whites, its basically to inject diversity into campuses so people become more homogenius (which is a good thing) and you have things like kids from racially poor communities getting a chance of getting a degree getting a start at building generational wealth. Its been proven many times over that if you prop up the lower class of the population, everyone benefits. While affirmative action isn't the best way of doing this, its far from bad - plenty of studies done on this.

However, Trump is not ending institutional racism, he is basically axing funding for programs in schools that align more politically left with a shotgun approach, not giving a fuck about cutting actual programs that may be of value to society. This is vindictive punishment of a man child that lost in 2020, probably coupled with some racism (because Trump has a record of being racist against black people)
by shpongled | 2025-04-28 16:24:40+00:00
Firearms are a constitutionally enshrined right - driving is not. For the vast majority of Americans, cars represent a significantly higher threat than assault by gun [1]. We also let drivers flagrantly and repeatedly break the law and negligently kill people with essentially near-impunity. The same cannot be said for firearms.

[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
by esbranson | 2025-04-28 16:24:44+00:00
Starting off with superfluous agitprop... And ending with it. Hate for Trump is classic misdirection, it's amazing just how much propaganda is in even the most basic public policy articles.

Like, damn, it was the Biden administration that told the NTSB to go pound sand.[1]

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2024-04/NHTSA-NT...
by sofixa | 2025-04-28 16:25:17+00:00
> War by who

By the international community of course. The same one that has heavily sanctioned Russia.

> And as another comment said, are you volunteering? You can even wage war against Russia now if you want to, volunteers in Ukraine are always welcome.

That's just a cheap deflection. Me dying in the trenches won't change anything; a coordinated properly aggressive response might teach the war criminals at the Kremlin that they will not be let off. It's just a repeat of Munich/Ethiopia, and no individual at our level can do anything about it but advocate for change in policy to our governments.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-28 16:25:54+00:00
As much as I always appreciated the essay, the image seemed to engender the exact opposite feeling in myself; an overwhelming sense that this really is all that matters. There is no meaning for humans to be found "out there". Only this, only us. We will all be born, live, and die on this rock. And all we have in this entire universe is the other primates inhabiting it with us, and the collective meaning that we can create for ourselves together to distract from that fact. Anything else is delusional fantasy.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-28 16:25:56+00:00
Thanks for pointing that option out! Yes, I am a simple man: you can buy any software I've ever publicly released for the right price. I don't know what those prices are in advance because I've never thought of it, but if you want to give me $10M for some tool I wrote so that I can provide generational wealth to my family, drop me a line.

Of course, no one has expressed interest in doing that yet, so this is purely hypothetical.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 16:26:07+00:00
> Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic.

I have been paying attention to speed changes while driving for the past 15 years and every time I have seen a speed change, I always observe a proportional change in the other variables, within the bounds of my ability to measure. For example, speeds drop when lane counts decrease, and the difference is in proportion to the reduction in lanes and change in vehicle density. The change in things in logically forced, since cars are not magically disappearing/appearing on the road.

Empirical studies have long supported the 85th percentile for vehicle safety. The spillover effect is a new thing that likely will affect the design of the ramps for highways, but does not justify violating the 85th percentile.

If we are going to consider other effects, how about the effect that happens when the roads no longer have the capacity to carry traffic from enforcing lowered speed limits? That will result in bumper to bumper traffic during rush hour, with enormous amounts of particulates and NOx released from having so many vehicles idling. These kill people both on and off the roads. This is a problem in NY where the low speed limits philosophy has been in effect for decades. The electric future cannot come fast enough. Of course, electrification does not solve the additional problem of people dying fairly quickly because ambulances cannot reach hospitals in a timely manner due to bumper to bumper traffic.

It is really easy to take the position that high speeds are the problem, but that ignores the problems associated with lower speeds. That said, I owe you a thank you for the information about the AAA study. I had been unaware of that. Thank you for the information.
by kjander79 | 2025-04-28 16:26:18+00:00
This is the Logic Theorist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist

I love Simon's anecdote of using his wife and children as the stack as he developed IPS.

This eventually was replaced by GPS, which has a good description in Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Programming, here: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp
by rightbyte | 2025-04-28 16:26:30+00:00
I think it is implied that they are not allowed to by their parents and thus not killed?

There is no way 1.5 to 4yo can play unsupervised, as in grabbing distance from adults, in areas close to traffic? Maybe 4yo can do with yelling distance from adults.

Like, if people wouldn't care so much as they do, I would guess there would be a lot of fatalities.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-04-28 16:26:37+00:00
Is "single user graphics workstation" even still a goal? Great target in the Early to Mid Ethernetian when Xerox Dorados and Dandelions, Symbolics, and Liliths roamed the Earth. Doesn't feel like a modern goal or standard of comparison.

I used those workstations back in the day—then rinsed and repeated with JITs and GCs for Self, Java, and on to finally Python in PyPy. They're fantastic! Love having them on-board. Many blessings to Deutsch, Ungar, et al. But for 40 years JIT's value has always been to optimize away the worst gaps, getting "close enough" to native to preserve "it's OK to use the highest level abstractions" for an interesting set of workloads. A solid success, but side by side with AOT compilation of closer-to-the-machine code? AOT regularly wins, then and now.

"Solved" should imply performance isn't a reason to utterly switch languages and abstractions. Yet witness the enthusiasm around Julia and Rust e.g. specifically to get more native-like performance. YMMV, but from this vantage, seeing so much intentional down-shift in abstraction level and ecosystem maturity "for performance" feels like JIT reduced but hardly eliminated the gap.
by robobenjie | 2025-04-28 16:27:12+00:00
My Favorite Le Guin quote on science fiction is very appropriate"

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-28 16:27:15+00:00
Pretty funny OOPSLA/SPLASH is the first example given because that's exactly the conference that came to mind when I clicked to read the article.

Honestly though, I find much better luck in the workshops. They don't really have the same reach as the main conference, and the specificity of the topics means that the reviewers are usually much more focused on content rather than checking boxes. They want to make a good workshop for the attendees, so it's far more important for workshops to focus on actual content rather than the resume building activities. The LIVE workshop for instance doesn't even really require a paper: https://2024.splashcon.org/home/live-2024#Call-for-Submissio...

Other workshops require just an extended abstract. Or maybe a short paper that doesn't have to be archived. I find these venues easier to get into, easier to present at, and easier to have a good discussion with the attendees.
by loufe | 2025-04-28 16:27:33+00:00
Totally agree, I mentioned it in another comment but Gemini was a game changer for allowing me to increase the size of the project I can feasibly have AI work on.

Only issue is Gemini's context window (I've seen my experience corroborated here on HN a couple times) isn't consistent. Maybe if 900k tokens are all of unique information, then it will be useful to 1 million, but I find if my prompt has 150k tokens of context or 50k, after 200k in the total context window response coherence and focus goes out the window.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-28 16:27:52+00:00
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Maybe some people here won't like it's libertarian bent, but it's basically the scifi story about successful resistance to tyranny (and the libertarian themes are mostly subverted in the end. The new government ultimately finds most of the libertarian dogma too impractical.)

If you're open to an oddball suggestion, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon is worth considering.
by vyrotek | 2025-04-28 16:28:15+00:00
I like to stealthily watch an opponent who is taking a bunch of pieces and then surprise them with an unsuspecting attack.

My queen piece got a title of "Regicidal" as I wiped out several boards.

"pawn upgrades for One Million Chessboards only work if you reach the VERY top or bottom of the milllion-board grid"

https://x.com/itseieio/status/1916892021341520302
by frognumber | 2025-04-28 16:28:20+00:00
People do dumb things in stressful situations. To your "I beat my wife because I caught them cheating" example, there's a world of difference between:

1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.

2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.

There's a hierarchy, including:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense

I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause

If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.
by frognumber | 2025-04-28 16:29:06+00:00
People do dumb things in stressful situations. To your "I beat my wife because I caught them cheating" example, there's a world of difference between:

1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.

2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.

There's a hierarchy, including:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense

I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause

If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.

The trick here is to have policies ahead-of-time, and especially, to let judges know about this sort of thing ahead-of-time. If police show up at my door, I might make a mistake. If they let me know ahead of time, and I have time to think, I hopefully won't.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 16:29:17+00:00
Yes, it was a joke. That said, you don't get the point - it's arbitrary and there is no way to prove that it's true. Yet, it will still be recorded. And yeah, saying once something wrong shouldn't follow you all your life. This is classic legal harassment and intimidation, similar to what was practiced in the USSR against ethnic minorities.

Regarding pro-Palestine protests, it was an example about how being fine with freedom of speech restrictions can come back and bite you in the ass. It always does.
by boogieknite | 2025-04-28 16:29:40+00:00
i work a lot with NVEL for this. one time even tried porting nvel to wasm for fun and client accessibility. we "virtually buck" trees which seems like could be applied to your proposed use case. if op wants to go down this path: https://github.com/FMSC-Measurements/VolumeLibrary/tree/77d4...
by LeFantome | 2025-04-28 16:29:47+00:00
The GPL has wrongly taught us to focus on “compatibility”. Compatibility is pretty much exclusively a copyleft issue.

There is no reason that you cannot use this code with this license in a larger BSD work. It is “compatible” in that sense.

This specific code has additional restrictions (not charging). That does not add any restrictions to the rest of the code though.

So, if you are charging, you are in violation of the license just for this code snippet. Linus Torvalds, the copyright holder, could try to enforce the license against you. Since he gives it away, no financial damages. Which means the remedy would be that you would not be able to use this code anymore (but could still use the rest of BSD).

I do not expect Linus to pursue enforcement on this one.

It would be a very difficult case to win anyway as you would have to prove that people were being charged specifically for the Linus code and not for other code covered by BSD (which allows charging).

I would argue that this license has not even been violated, unless somebody has put a price tag on this specific code.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-28 16:30:05+00:00
There are many cases where I'd agree with you that the economic model is an elaborate mathematical ruse to discount externalities and critical tail risks.

In this case I'll pose a question. Consider a geologically stable location within the US of your choosing. How deep would a hole have to be before you would no longer be concerned about the potential consequences of mishaps? Is that depth technologically viable for us to reach today?

Keep in mind that the contingency plan here is to simply fill in the pit and forget that it exists.
by fitzn | 2025-04-28 16:30:35+00:00
This article resonated with me and puts into words some of the feelings I had towards the end of my PhD. This part:

> An interesting case in software engineering is dismissal for lack of “evaluation.” It would be, of course, ridiculous to deny the benefits that the emphasis on systematic empirical measurement has brought to software engineering in the last three decades. But it has become difficult today to publish conceptual work not yet backed by systematic quantitative studies.

struck a chord with me. The top-tier CS systems conferences for me (OSDI and SOSP) have gotten to the point where you basically have to be writing the paper about the system you built at a FAANG that serves 1B users daily to get accepted.

It's hard for a novel idea and first-cut implementation to compete with systems built over many years with a team of a dozen software engineers. Obviously, those big systems deserve tons of credit and it's amazing that Big Tech publishes those papers! Credit to them. But it's also the case that novel ideas with an implementation that hasn't seen 1B users yet still have value.

I suppose the argument is that workshops serve that purpose of novel ideas with unproven implementation. There's some truth to that, but as the article highlights, the full conference papers are the real currency.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-28 16:31:01+00:00
The only way the future is better is if we solve some new problems between now and then. So there's no "imagining a better future" without anticipating the existence of both problems and their solutions.

And you don't run out of problems. When you solve some problems, you're left with better problems than the ones you just solved. You might not yet know about the new better problems, but rest assured they're there.