MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-04-28 12:17:07+00:00
Ryle's definition of theory is actually quite reductionist and doesn't lend itself to the argument well because it is too thin to really make the kind of meaningful distinction you'd want.

There are alternative views on theorizing that reject flat positivistic reductions and attempt to show that theories are metaphysical and force us to make varying degrees of ontological and normative claims, see the work of Marx Wartofsky, for example. This view is far more humanistic and ties in directly to sociological bases in praxis. This view will support the author's claims much better. Furthermore, Wartofsky differentiates between different types of cognitive representations (e.g. there is a difference between full blown theories and simple analogies). A lot of people use the term "theory" way more loosely than a proper analysis and rigorous epistemic examination would necessitate.

(I'm not going to make the argument here but fwiw, it's clear under these notions that LLMs do not form theories, however, they are playing an increasingly important part in our epistemic activity of theory development)
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-28 12:17:21+00:00
The article does reference research demonstrating that men often are completely incorrect about the preferences of women. While "the lighting and pose are what does it" is nowhere near the "women are lying" stuff that the article is talking about, I really think that the starting point should be taking opinions like these at face value.

Notably, men significantly preferred the photo on the right. If the issue were lighting and pose making him look smaller on the right, why don't we see this same effect in the responses from men?
by tomrod | 2025-04-28 12:17:42+00:00
I don't think a scientist assumes a theory is false until it is proven true. I think a scientist thinks about how to capture data, and enough of it, to position evidence to a theory. By necessity that means the scientist must be open to the theory being either true or false before testing. But they must be willing to pre-register what the experiment would say. And, of course, healthy skepticism is required.

The scientific method requires replication, and there are events in the universe that are inherently long-tailed and leave little trace evidence. That doesn't make their observers crazy or pseudo-scientists. There are some weird things out in this wide universe of ours that happen on the tails of observability.
by nicoburns | 2025-04-28 12:17:42+00:00
It's likely that battery backup solutions won't be expensive for long. Battery prices have been falling exponentially similar to Solar, and there is no reason to think it will slow down anytime soon (there is still room for improvement just from economies of scale).

I predict that home batteries will become a "no brainer" from a financial perspective (for anyone who has the upfront capital to purchase them) within the next 10 years.
by zero_k | 2025-04-28 12:18:07+00:00
The main issue I see is that papers are actually becoming so focussed on form that they are now unreadable. People prefer reading my blog for my papers than reading the papers themselves. In fact I hear people telling me they understood the blog _better_. The whole academic writing shtick has become so obtuse that not only writing is cumbersome, but so is reading.

The other side of all this academic brownie points via papers (and doing reviews, which has become "brownie points for gatekeeping") is that most academic software is not only unmaintained, but actually unusable. They rarely even compile, and if they do, there is no --help, no good defaults, no README, and no way to maintain them. They are single-use software and their singular use is to write the paper. Any other use-case is almost frowned upon.

One of the worst parts of Academic software is that if you re-write it in a ways that's actually usable and extensible, you can't publish that -- it's not new ("research") work. And you will not only have to cite the person who wrote the first useless version forever, but they will claim they have done it if your tool actually takes off.

BTW, there are academics who don't follow this trend. I am glad that in my field (SAT), some of the best, e.g. Armin Biere and Randal Bryant are not like this at all. Their software is insanely nice and they fix bugs many-many years after release. Notice that they are also incredibly good engineers.
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-28 12:18:09+00:00
I’d prefer summaries of my YouTube subscriptions, where I can also add my own “summary template”

In currently have a prompt for it that works for me, based on the transcripts.

Problem: too much duplicate information in any type of publication and too much fluff

Problem2: YouTube/transcriptions

Probably wouldn’t pay for such a service, but would be very happy using it. Perhaps some channel promo / email based ads for discovery or recommendations.
by Qwertious | 2025-04-28 12:18:16+00:00
That isn't contradictory with "the major sources of cobalt (congo, russia, china) are problematic - it just implies that congo/russia/china have copper/nickel mines too.

And to state the obvious, just because cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper mining, doesn't mean that copper mining usually produces cobalt as a byproduct.
by skydhash | 2025-04-28 12:18:33+00:00
Having a theory of the program, means you can argue about its current state or its transition in a new state, not merely describing what it is doing.

If you see "a = b + 1" it's obvious that the variable a is taking the value of variable b incremented by one. What LLMs can't do is explaining why we have this and why it needs to change to "a = b - 1" in the new iteration. Writing code is orthogonal to this capability.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 12:18:34+00:00
I read the article, it goes in depth to explain cancel culture in campus, its origins, has various testimonies. Cancelling and censorship is a classic of anglo puritanism, which you represent well in this discussion.

Same for Peterson, you can argue as you want, the article says that he would be fined for not calling someone with their invented pronouns. And yes, that's how he got famous since it gave him media coverage. I'm not discussing his intellectual merits here, but freedom of speech. I don't think that you have the ability to separate topics, so it's kind of pointless.

Trans issues are a very good case of why we need freedom of speech, and why threatening to kill people who do not agree with you is rather bad? It deals with underaged people at a time they are vulnerable, the evidence regarding the treatments is rather weak and it was ultra marginal before media gave it a large positive coverage.

And yes, a father saying that his daughter shouldn't have to share showers or toilets with biological men is totally reasonable in his freedom of speech to say it.
by incomingpain | 2025-04-28 12:18:45+00:00
what new markets? They naturally had already entered those markets long before.

The tariffs are well above decoupling %. Worse yet, china amortized their production based on precovid $. They cant afford to shutdown production.

They'll likely be able to leap out of middle income status ultimately but the USA had been planning to do this since Obama made the decision.

china loses hundreds of millions of people by the end of the decade.
by garganzol | 2025-04-28 12:19:01+00:00
I love this tool, but I am pessimistic because the following is probably going to happen next:

1. At some point, the app will be covered with tonloads of ads to the point of impossibility to use

2. The core functionality will be hid behind sign-up/sign-in walls. The email addresses will be collected and then spammed to the brim

3. To add an insult to the injury, the app features will be gradually crippled unless you switch to a "Pro" plan. But you will not be able to do that efficiently as a user because you will be constantly attacked, bombarded and poisoned by ad banners and popups everywhere

4. Then, the app will start to upsell other offerings (of course, with modal banners!)

Those are cynical observations but they are 99% precise. I wish you good luck if you are among 1% elite.
by bradly | 2025-04-28 12:19:07+00:00
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.

NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:

Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
by -t0mm | 2025-04-28 12:19:38+00:00
I recently spent a decent amount of time trying to implement a solution for something in my home network, and I was really weirded out when it started responding with:

"Now thats real network engineer thinking!" "Now youre thinking like an advanced engineer!" or even a simpler "What an amazing question!"

At first I did feel more confident in my questions and the solution paths I was leading it down, but after a few exchanges my trust in it's outputs went down rapidly. Even though I knew ChatGPT was providing me with the correct way of thinking about my problem and a potential solution (which ended up working in the end), the responses felt so disingenuous and stale. And the emojis...

I used custom instructions (in chat) to combat this, but after another set of exchanges and when switching to a different problem and its context, it rewired itself again to be syncophantic.

Im going to have to try global custom instructions and see if the issue of syncophanty persists
by IX-103 | 2025-04-28 12:19:44+00:00
I'm not sure about that. The way AlphaFold works involves transforming the protein from a vector space representing the sequence to a different vector space representing the folded structure and back again as it performs iterative refinement. Presumably you could perform a comparison in the structure space to find homologs that have completely different sequences - they would just have a high cosine similarity.

Checking sub-regions of the structure would be more difficult, but depending on how the structural representation works it could just be computationally intensive.
by terom | 2025-04-28 12:19:45+00:00
That graph doesn't seem to make a very clear distinction between historical, real-time and predicted values... I think the event happened at 12:30 local time or so.

There seems to be some kind of recurrent daily pattern where the French - Spanish interconnect switches from Spain -> France imports to France -> Spain exports at around that time, and then back again in the late afternoon.
by PinkSheep | 2025-04-28 12:20:49+00:00
What kind of CPU auto-optimization? Here specifically I envisioned a macro-level optimization, when an array is detected to have length on the order of thousands/tens of thousands. I guess some advanced sorting algorithms do extend their operation to multi-thread in such cases.

For CPU machine code it's the compilers doing the hard work of reordering code to allow ILP (instruction-level parallelism), eliminate false dependencies, inlining and vectorization; whatever else it takes to keep the pipeline filled and busy.

I'd love for the sentiment "the dev knows" to be true, but I think this is no longer the case. Maybe if you are in a low-level language AND have time to reason about it? Add to this the reserved smile when I see someone "benchmarking" their piece of code in a "for i to 100000" loop, without other considerations. Next, suppose a high-level language project: the most straightforward optimization to carry out for new code is to apply proper algorithms and fitting data structures. And I think this is too much to ask nowadays, because it takes time, effort, and knowledge of existence to remember to implement something.
by newbie578 | 2025-04-28 12:21:11+00:00
This list is a pure fallacy of statistical understanding. Skewed data and cherry-picking while also being strengthened by our subjective biases. I would appreciate the list way more if it also included founders who applied but were rejected, or for any other reason were not invested in.

For stuff like this I recommend the book, May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans, he does a fantastic job explaining how most of the time we seek data to confirm our hypotheses, instead of seeking a hypotheses that confirms our data.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-28 12:21:29+00:00
We’re talking about the group chats that may have “changed America” into a place where our president pays foreign dictators to house criminals in a overcrowded prison, and where they may be debating sending American citizens. When exactly is the aforementioned rhetoric appropriate, when it’s too late?

It seems to me directly in line with the nature of the article as written, the tech context we currently live in, and i don’t think it’s against HN guidelines to speak uncomfortably truths. In fact it seems core to what we’re trying to do here.

Thanks for all you do here, not trying to turn this place into Twitter, but I also think it’s important that we not fall into the trap of not being willing to confront the outrageous truths of what’s happening in our community because the rational response is outrageous.
by eddyg | 2025-04-28 12:21:51+00:00
This is cool! I also use my "Daily Notes" in Obsidian as a way to bookmark things I want to revisit. I never thought about the fact that it could be the source of a "link list"-style blog.

How complex is your link-saving Shortcut? I store my Obsidian vault in iCloud, and because of that I've been able to use the excellent Bebop⁽¹⁾ app as a very quick and easy way to append to my Daily Note to save a URL, add a note, etc. via the Sharesheet.

Thanks again for posting about your idea!

⁽¹⁾ https://www.jackcheng.com/bebop/
by hermannj314 | 2025-04-28 12:22:00+00:00
I think my concern is that we are being lied to.

My opinion is irrelevent as I do not live in Virginia and am not a lawmaker, but I would want this to be tied to a vehicle telematic privacy bill that restricted how cars use telemetry data and gives consumers rights to control what is logged and who sees it and who it can be sold to.

Until we own the data our cars generate, I don't want active speed and acceleration constraint software for "chronic criminals" because inevitably it will be mandatory on all cars and remotely controllable by law enforcement.
by akudha | 2025-04-28 12:22:52+00:00
We don’t need to go that far. I am “just” a developer but I have been in meetings where developers like me had much better ideas and suggestions on product, strategy etc than the suits. I remember being urgently called into a meeting with a big client to explain how a part of our application worked and why it worked that way, when the product owner/designer could not.

People often complain about developer salaries. I wonder how they can justify suits’ salaries
by graemep | 2025-04-28 12:23:31+00:00
The legal question (that was settled by a recent case) was whether the word woman in existing legislation includes transwomen. The particular case was primarily whether transwomen could qualify for preference given to women for certain posts "on the boards of certain public authorities in Scotland".

https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/judgments/uksc-2024-0042

The toilets things getting the publicity is more a matter of the media being obsessed with that aspect of it. Obviously there are implications for that, but also for many other things.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-28 12:23:42+00:00
> There is no "far right" or people being "whipped up".

The wikipedia page about the riots has 127 mentions of "far-right" [0]. From the very start there were links between the protestors and organisations like the EDL. The online misinformation was spread by far-right influencers such Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, and Andrew Tate, as well as a host of global right-wing accounts. The organisation Alliance4Europe which campaigns against online misinformation found that "non-domestic far-right groups played a significant role in inflaming tensions following the Southport murders" [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots

[1] https://alliance4europe.eu/the-international-far-rights-impa...
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-28 12:24:06+00:00
They hate west because by western standards they will be in jail for all LOOTING of russias natural resources and killing and abusing their own citizens. West is punishing people who do bad things. Russian oligarchy kids did nothing wrong, presumably.

contrary to west, in russia you get beaten by police because your children in west posted something on Xtwitter...

Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, yuri Shchekochikhin, Vasily Melnikov , Vladislav Avayev , Sergey Protosenya, Yevgeniy Palant, Yuri Voronov, Ravil Maganov, Vladimir Sungorkin, Anatoly Gerashchenko, Vadim Boyko, Vladimir Makei, Grigory Kochenov, Vladimir Bidenov + Pavel Antov, and thousands of others.

most spectacular was - Pyotr Kucherenko where two men holded him and third put shopping bag on his head, and noone saw nothing in whole plane... except three photos were taking of incident...
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-28 12:24:37+00:00
> What Christianity actually critiques is sex outside of marriage.

You were on a good track, until that sentence.

There are multiple sects of Christianity that criticize sex for many other contexts. You may be somehow unaware of this, but homosexual pleasures are disapproved by some churches.

Historically, that's still quite wrong. The Church consistently taught (at least in the West, since circa 400 A.D.) that total abstention was required of their holy leaders.
by vel0city | 2025-04-28 12:24:37+00:00
Sure. Having large batteries is an additional fire risk in my home for once again something I'd generally never need. If these batteries are in my home but managed by the grid operator I'd probably have to allow their people into my home to service them which I'd rather not have to do if it's something I'd generally never use.

Also, this further just makes having stable electricity yet another thing in the wealth gap. Only those wealthy enough to afford the high upfront capital costs, the ongoing maintenance cost, and the space to store it get reliable electricity, fuck everyone else! Or we can just focus on investing in a stable and clean grid and share that cost with everyone, all you need is to just be connected.

But hey if I get a massive battery bank I'll have power for when the end times come. I won't be able to go get groceries anymore and eventually the fiber line and radios around me will go quiet but at least I'll be able to play videogames. For a few hours at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an Eagle Scout, be prepared and all that. I've got a big pile of charcoal, a chunk of propane, a camping stove, several day's supply of water and canned/non-perishable foods, some batteries for lanterns, etc. The cars all get topped off when big storms seem possible. If the big outage comes this will be more worthwhile than being able to turn on the TV for a few hours, and cost significantly less than several dozen kWh of batteries. And if the power is out for more than a week or two I'll have far bigger concerns than being able to post on Hacker News.
Show HN: I built a meal planning app for busy parents
by omarisbuilding | 2025-04-28 12:24:46+00:00
Hi all,

I’m a parent and meal planning for my kids always felt overwhelming. I built a web app that would let me create profiles for my children, plan their meals, put their meal preferences, recipes, export the plan to my calendar, and share links to the timetable with others, and of course an AI helping with the plan and recipe . For now it has a free plan and also paid plan with more functionalities. I hoped it would be helpful for other parents. So i shared it with some family and friends. I would really appreciate your feedback.

Thanks
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-28 12:24:53+00:00
I agree that the study was performed unethically and should not be published but observational studies are totally fine things to do.

A lot of research is "hey we looked at stuff and found this data that wiggles its eyebrows at some idea so we should fund more rigorous study design in the future." An individual paper does not need to fully resolve a question.

The reason not to publish this work is because the data was collected unethically and we don't want to reward or incentivize such work. Nothing to do with the quality of the data itself.
by avastel | 2025-04-28 12:25:29+00:00
The DB contains different types of proxies: - Residential - ISP - Data center

I don't include mobile proxies since they're heavily shared, so knowing that an IP address was used as a proxy at some point is basically useless.

Regarding your remark, indeed, there are several shared residential IPs, including IPs of legitimate users who may have a shady app that routes traffic through their device. That's why I don't recommend blocking using IP addresses as is. It's supposed to be more of a datapoint/signal to enrich your anti-fraud/anti-bot system. However, regarding the block list, I analyze the IPs on bigger time frames, the percentage of IPs in the range that were used as proxies, and generate a confidence score to indicate whether or not it is safe to block.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-28 12:25:45+00:00
Trivial dependencies should be inlined. Consider leftPad or isEven.

Or these Koa deps:

- https://github.com/isaacs/inherits/blob/main/inherits.js

- https://github.com/component/toidentifier/blob/master/index....

When you're building a web server library, you need to care about supply chain attacks because you're the one exposing people to them.

Anyways, that's beside the point. Hono is what Koa should have been if Koa wasn't frozen 10 years ago: a simple `res = await handle(req)` abstraction that works everywhere including edge workers.
by koonsolo | 2025-04-28 12:26:12+00:00
I'm old enough to know, and no, it's not the same. Bush never claimed that Canada is a US state, never hinted at invading Greenland, never repeated Russian propaganda.

We thought the Gulf War 2 was under false pretenses of "Weapons of Mass Destruction", sure. But what Trump is doing is plain betrayal of trust amongst allies.