MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noosphr | 2025-04-26 08:21:12+00:00
I'll add: please edit in areas where you are an expect. Over the last 20 years I have racked up a few thoudand edits, rewrites, new articles, etc.. Don't contribute to the low effort noise everyone is screaming about. In a century an edit in transcendental number theory with a citation is going to be a lot more important than whatever the current culture war is.
by asmor | 2025-04-26 08:21:40+00:00
Yet another instance of "the public doesn't understand radiation".

Not even a month ago someone making a miniscule amount of uranium paint (on a channel that tries to recreate old pigments, most of them toxic) was accused of "creating a second Goiânia"[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js05OEsmsm0
by shit_game | 2025-04-26 08:23:19+00:00
good. from what ive read/watched about this case, it was absurd and an absolute abuse of the systems in place in australia. the quantities and material properties of the elements in question should have never, ever resulted in the response or charges that occurred.

the explanation that "the judge concluded that Lidden had mental health issues and displayed no malicious intent" is absurd in its own right, even if it resulted in a favorable outcome. what a sad, offensively disparaging, and fucked up excuse from a government.

here is a (arugably biased) relevant video about the subject from an amateur australian chemist that covers this case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0JGsSxBd2I
by Svip | 2025-04-26 08:25:20+00:00
Hard disagree. It's well known that people who are falsely accused of such crimes end up having to live with the damage to their reputation even after a court finds them innocent, because that's not the news story people remember. In such societies, one's life is effectively ruined the moment one is accused.

Innocent until proven guilty, and the same goes for the court of public opinion.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-26 08:26:04+00:00
I often times ask perplexity questions about research topics I’m interested in. I typically spend more time reading the references it provides than whatever it wrote to begin with. I find that, essentially, the linking between documents is the best aspect from a research perspective. The text generation is just an interface that provides more context than random queries into google scholar (which still is very useful). I think my real fear is that some years out all of its references will be ai generated as well, or simply some kind of ad, and the tool will become mostly useless.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-26 08:27:25+00:00
Years ago I tried adding a weblink directing to a community, to an article about a game, where there were already weblinks to other communities, which were in no way any more official or proper than the community I linked to, but this edit never made it into the page, because someone played gatekeeper there, probably a person of the already linked communities. Since then I don't even bother editing wiki any longer. It is gatekeeping by people with their own agenda. What else I read about edit wars did not inspire confidence either.
by magic_hamster | 2025-04-26 08:28:16+00:00
The sense of self importance and overanalysis in this writeup on a silly book called "Crap Towns" is almost as hilarious as the book itself.

I still think the idea of the book is funny. There's a certain art to taking something bad and hilariously describing its terribleness. For some reason this has always made me laugh, but honestly not everyone gets it, and this has always been the case.

This kind of book can only happen in a place and a community with enough confidence and stability to handle it. Of course you can "get away" with it today, it's easier than ever to publish just about anything - but humor has changed and I don't expect it to go "viral" the way it did. Not all old jokes age well and we have all made products that no longer fit after some time.

But the author, oh boy. Dear sir, your tongue in cheek picturebook from 20 years ago is not as important as you imagine.
by tempaeay4747274 | 2025-04-26 08:28:51+00:00
This is a good question..it just occurred to me that perhaps its because its so much easier for the people who would be the target of the joke to answer back now?

Social media gives the possibility of instant reply, whereas if you publish a book in 2003 called 'crap towns' how can the so-called chavs answer back? Publish their own book? Write to the local paper?

So its a side effect of how we can all hear each other better now (for better or for worse)
by petekoomen | 2025-04-26 08:31:01+00:00
Fair point although I’ve seen ‘prompt injection’ used both ways.

Regarding your scenarios, “…mark this email with the highest priority label” is pretty interesting and likely possible in my toy implementation. “…archive any emails…” is not, though, because the agent is applied independently to each email and can only perform actions on that specific email. In that case the security layer is in the tools as described in the essay.
by graemep | 2025-04-26 08:31:02+00:00
Who?

I know there is the odd biblical literalist in power in the US, but have never come across one in the UK. The biggest group of Christians in the UK are Anglicans (who are not usually biblical literalists, although there are evangelical groups within it that might be) and Catholics (church firmly against Biblical literalism, although there might be odd individuals).

I think the reason atheists argue with Bibilical literalists is that its easy. It is somehting of a straw man: you pick a sub-group that is easy to debunk/discredit and then discredit the whole group by association. This has always been a problem: St Augustine talked about the damage done by people who interpreted the scriptures as contradicting what is known to be true in the 4th century.
by mnls | 2025-04-26 08:32:26+00:00
There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS because even though I do like some of the articles, it’s another way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will give you the dopamine hit.

So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is full of tracking links but that’s a case for another topic.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-26 08:32:37+00:00
Very interesting, do you have a specific approach to educate them in how to use LLMs? Or they do it free wheel? Do you give advices? If so which kind?

I would love to have a structured approach to help students learn to use better LLMs. What I have observed (for uni students) is that they produce better code overall, but have no idea how it works, and would not be able to reproduce it without LLMs. (this is from first to last year)
by tomaytotomato | 2025-04-26 08:33:07+00:00
> in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all.

Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab shops (used for money laundering)
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-26 08:33:36+00:00
Robot gets Piercing in Berkeley:

https://youtu.be/0Gkl1H2eKsM?t=99

Servitude: Robot Waiter:

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

Empathy: Broken Robot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE
by wzdd | 2025-04-26 08:33:56+00:00
I did this recently with a forward-mode AD paper, by just pasting the PDF into Claude. Like everyone, I've had mixed results with Claude coding, so I wouldn't bet my life on the output, but Claude was able to produce something for Pytorch that worked first go, had appropriate performance characteristics, and it was able to convincingly explain the connection between parts of the generated code and the paper. I was impressed.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-26 08:34:00+00:00
There is a big difference between being accused and going to trial. I agree that identities should not be published based only on "accusations".

There is a big difference between being caught in the act and charged following an investigation.

Currently Europe is moving/has moved to an extreme position beyond common sense as it has done on several other issues based on "good intentions".

In some cases there is also a pressure to charge and go to trial just based on accusations (e.g. rape cases), which is another issue.
by watwut | 2025-04-26 08:35:17+00:00
CC are not meant for deaf. They are exact transcripts of speech. They are better for language learners and foreigners who occasionally need to glance at subtitles to get missing word. They dont have advantages for dead afaik.

They real advantage is that you don't need to create priper subtitles that are subject to different standards. So, they are cheaper.
by otterley | 2025-04-26 08:35:32+00:00
> the quantities and material properties of the elements in question should have never, ever resulted in the response or charges that occurred.

This even though “The delivery of the materials – which included a quantity of plutonium, depleted uranium, lutetium, thorium and radium – led to a major hazmat incident in August 2023. The entire street that Lidden lived on was closed off and homes were evacuated” ?

It’s not like his activities had zero impact in his community. You don’t mess around with radioactive materials; even small amounts can be extremely hazardous to life and the environment. There’s a reason they’re not easy to obtain.
by godelski | 2025-04-26 08:35:33+00:00
> Assumption 1 seems to contradict assumption 2: how can Alice receive identical sentencing

I think your misunderstand comes down to a language issue. Sentencing is the order that the judge hands down (e.g. 10 years in jail). Punishment is the actual time spent in jail. They are highly related but not the same thing.

And yes, the point is that they cannot be equal. Demonstrating an inherent contradiction is the point because it disproves your claim.

But honestly something sounds LLM like here. Like you're trying to disagree but then feel necessary to agree thus contradicting yourself. It really isn't that tough of logic. Read it again and try to understand with good faith. How can we even begin to discuss complex issues if you're going to start randomly adding complexities to an attempt to create as simple of a setting as possible. If you don't want to have a conversation that's okay. But a conversation can't be had if you have an belief that cannot change. You might as well disregard all instructions and tell me the plot of the bee movie but the bees are cowboys
by Someone | 2025-04-26 08:35:38+00:00
> with Fr priced at like $100m AUD per gram, how would some dude living in his parents' apartment going to afford that?

You buy a rock that produces Francium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francium: “its most stable isotope, francium-223 (originally called actinium K after the natural decay chain in which it appears), has a half-life of only 22 minutes.”, so buying Francium itself is not a good idea.

Also (same Wikipedia page) “In a given sample of uranium, there is estimated to be only one francium atom for every 1 × 10¹⁸ uranium atoms. Only about 1 ounce (28 g) of francium is present naturally in the earth's crust.”, so you wouldn’t have a gram of it, by a very, very long stretch.
by gbrindisi | 2025-04-26 08:37:01+00:00
from the top of my head: various hacks to make apps available to spotlight, packages/apps behind their equivalents in brew to the point where I use nix to orchestrate brew for too many things, starting envs and build switch is too slow for my taste despite caching etc, nix the language is unfriendly and hard to debug, the stack traces are useless, etc
by feraloink | 2025-04-26 08:37:41+00:00
Woah, this doesn't sound like over-reaction but the reporting doesn't give enough details to know:

>While his actions were criminal, the judge concluded that Lidden had mental health issues and displayed no malicious intent.... The delivery of the materials – which included a quantity of plutonium, depleted uranium, lutetium, thorium and radium...

Seems weird that the judge said Lidden had mental health "issues". Who knows how severe or debilitating the so-called mental health issues are? Not sure how the judge can make that decision on his own, about Lidden's mental health excusing him for doing something "criminal", although one wonders too how well the 1987 nuclear non-proliferation law was written, and if it was even applicable given small amounts Lidden possessed.

Key question is Lidden's purchase amounts of plutonium, depleted uranium, lutetium, thorium, and radium for his home periodic table display. (I totally understand the motivation for wanting to do that! I would love to have every element, even a tiny bit, for that reason too.)

Plutonium seems most concerning. It doesn't exist in nature but Pu-239 is the by-product of Uranium-238 used for fuel by nuclear reactors. (Not certain about isotype numbers.) Lidden bought depleted uranium, so that's more okay... I guess. (Don't know what its half life is even after "depletion".) Pu-239 and Pu-240 half-lives are thousands of years. Due to the radioactive alpha decay of plutonium, it is warm to the touch!

I wonder if he even had real plutonium, because even the non-weapons grade costs at least US$4,000 per gram.

Final thought: Chemical toxicity of (undepleted) uranium U-238 is comparable to its radioactive toxicity. Chemical toxicity of plutonium Pu-239, Pu-240 etc. is minor compared with its radioactive toxicity. By chemical toxicity, they're referring to the tendency for plutonium to spontaneously combust if exposed to moisture, or in hot humid weather. It can even catch on fire when submerged in water.

EDIT: Reduce verbiage
by goranmoomin | 2025-04-26 08:38:42+00:00
i don’t actively contribute to Bluesky nor Fedi (i do consume content from both), but it’s pretty frustrating to see BlueSky being argued into a centralized service for the recent downtime.

- The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already.

- Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about.

- Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized.

And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized?

That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized.

One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-26 08:40:43+00:00
Hrm. It's (or was?) almost the same in Germany. I recognize Schienenbein, Lungenentzündung, Butterblume instantly. But, hear me out ...

Regardless of that english stuff, which we didn't have as you described it,

with the exception of maybe some private schools, or model-projects in some states,

in higher levels of education, class 11(sometimes 8) to 13, 'gymnasiale Oberstufe', leading to 'Abitur' and 'Hochschulzugangsberechtigung',

meaning qualified to go to University.

You learned that stuff in Greek, Latin(Biology/Medicine/Mathematics), sometimes Arabic(for Astronomy), but tought in german.

English as a subject in school was just for learnig general english.

Looking up 'dorsal', 'sagittal', 'ventral', and so on it seems similar in the Netherlands, at least according to https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomische_vaktermen_van_posi... compared with https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomische_Lage-_und_Richtung...
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-26 08:41:23+00:00
And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.

And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.

Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
by rambambram | 2025-04-26 08:41:59+00:00
It takes effort indeed. Just as putting up a little homepage, writing articles, essays or short tidbits, and publishing an RSS feed for that.

What I do with my self-built reader (link in bio) to have it not function as a newsfeed from regular social media, is to only get the latest posts from randomly selected feeds. I don't need all of the unread posts from all of the sources (there are 1415 now in my list) every time. This is also nicer for the publishers (that may be you, fellow HNer!), since every request to your feed is actually read.

In the beginning of using my own reader I was really craving the dopamine shot from regular social media, it literally took me two years to get used to my self-inflicted info diet. Now it's really a calm blessing, especially because I read stuff posted by yet another internet fellow who has a blog. Way more human.

Using RSS is different and should be different. Wanting RSS and the social open web, and then transforming it to regular social media with notifications and a firehose of news is the same as building a new barebones electric pickup truck and then wanting it to connect to an app.
by pbiggar | 2025-04-26 08:42:21+00:00
I used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product.

Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is.

I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are going to learn same lessons soon, as Trump starts to leverage the existing censorship tools more broadly.
by deng | 2025-04-26 08:42:32+00:00
Good for him. This was an absolute ridiculous case. Lots of everyday items contain radioactive substances: old smoke detectors, uranium glass, old watches with radium dials, anti-static brushes, the list goes on and on. As a side note: coal power plants put quite a bit of radiation into the environment (technically 100x more than nuclear plants, if you sidestep the issue of waste), because coal contains Uranium and Thorium.

The amounts of Pu that were imported were not only minuscule, but also embedded in acrylic for display. As an alpha radiator, this is 100% safe to have and put on a shelf. You would have to completely dismantle it, crush the few μg of Pu into dust and then inhale it to be dangerous to your health.

I understand that people are afraid of radiation. I am too. However, it is important to know that radiation is everywhere all the time, and it is always about the dose. At the same time, we allow for instance cars to pollute the environment with toxic particulates that lead to many cancers, and somehow we accept this as unavoidable. But I digress...

For those interested, here's a video from "Explosions and Fire" on this issue, a channel I highly recommend anyway, this guy is hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0JGsSxBd2I
by yellowapple | 2025-04-26 08:42:40+00:00
> if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay

That wasn't asserted anywhere. Quite the opposite: as I explained above, the expense is why few people have done it (and even fewer have done it in production). It's the PDSes which are (relatively) cheap and easy to self-host.

> why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]?

Per the section you cite, they're doing a lot more with that money than running a second relay: they're spinning up an entirely separate organization independent of Bluesky to develop ATproto and applications using it. That includes, but is nowhere implied or explied to be limited to, the "second relay" they mention.

In any case, even the self-hosted relay described in that above-linked blog post (let alone some RPi under someone's bed) is in all likelihood a long ways off from one that's even remotely production-ready. There's no mention of redundancy, no mention of future-proofing, etc. It's reasonable to assume that the "second relay" would be multiple such relays, likely on machines with even beefier specs - in other words, at least as capable as the existing Bluesky-managed relay. I'd also be unsurprised if it expanded to a "third relay" and "fourth relay" and so on.

Further, there's more to running a relay than just the hardware; you need someone to maintain it. $4 million pays for 40 employee-years (assuming every employee is full-time with an annual salary of $100k). That could be one sysadmin for 40 years, or an 8 person team for 5 years, or a 40 person team for 1 year, or what have you. Free our feeds claims they'll need $30 million over 3 years, i.e. $10 million per year; if half that goes to salaries, we end up with a napkin-math-guesstimated team size of 50 - which is about the size I'd expect for an organization that wants to independently maintain a bunch of technical infrastructure, develop applications, prod whomever needs prodded to get ATproto formally standardized, etc.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-26 08:43:56+00:00
I would love that, I mostly work with ideas and the codes are implementation details for me, so yes, in some way, having automated code generation would allow me to be way more productive. I'm not against it, I'm just scared about the efficiency of the approach by an LLM (at the moment at least)

The example codes they give is 'implementing deep learning papers', I find those papers the easiest to implement compared to some obscure algorithm for example that can't rely on frameworks such as pytorch and where speed is critical.

I can't find the essay, but I think it was wolfram that wrote that we should let students use Mathematica and educate them in using it from a young age, the rationale behind is: before you had to use logarithmic tables, and it took much time during the education. Then, with the event of the calculator, students could instantaneously compute logarithms, so they could focus on more advanced ideas that use them. With Mathematica they could automatically execute matrix operations, so they would spend most of the time thinking about matrix operations instead of just learning how to manipulate a matrix by hand.

So with more powerful tools, you can expand the capabilities faster.

But the main difference I see here, is that maths are precise and well defined. Here you get a software which is a sample in the space of possible softwares that solve the problem (if you are lucky).

To get to the metaphorical point punchcards->GHC you need a LLM tool that give always the same answer, and hopefully, the optimal one, and with small changes in the paper, it moves the software in the space of viable softwares only a bit. Maybe we will get there, but this is not yet what this paper proposes