MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-04-21 14:30:27+00:00
You know, I love that idea. More than simply feeling nice, a hot steamy washcloth opens up the facial pores, too, or so it seems to me. It's functionally better.

It's funny because I had exactly the opposite (in a way) experience. I always hated cold washcloths and splashing cold water on my face.

Last year, I tried a thought experiment. I simply decided I was going to like those things. Much to my amusement it actually worked. I literally just talked myself out of not liking it.

I've been able to accomplish that with a few other trivial things, but not others, and not with anything really major.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-04-21 14:30:55+00:00
17/20, not too bad. My failures were a blue, purple and brown example.

As others have said, a lot of this also comes down to what monitor and OS you're using, glossy/matte screen type, interior lighting and how everything is configured. This will be a lot easier with an OLED and all but impossible with an old TN panel. And whether HDR is enabled or sRGB mode, etc.
by egberts1 | 2025-04-21 14:31:03+00:00
Am very critical of President Trump, but I don't see this encroachment of Freedom of Speech like we did under the Biden administration (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, disinfo-LLC, Meta-Conexant, AttackWatch, NPR, falling COVID efficacy rate).

So this "across the pond" writer has obviously got its taste of free speech oppression from within their own UK soil (as evidenced by UK mass arrests for only spoken words or silent prayers) and is projecting onto the United States.

We still got crazy active "free speech by action" here in US; UK, not so much for even simple free speech.

So, I feel sorry for our UK friends, and we should feel sorry for them. /s

UK get what they voted for, oh wait.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-21 14:31:51+00:00
Not a huge difference, but still a significant difference. Response time should still be quicker in home vs from another house - after all, the neighbor might be multiple flights of stairs away on top of needing to go through the yard, unlock the door, etc. The monitor doesn't provide early detection of other dangers like if you're in the building, such as smoke detectors going off in other rooms of the house - you should hear it, but a baby monitor is not likely to pick it up.
by alganet | 2025-04-21 14:31:52+00:00
When you're a teenager sometimes you are into a girl that you like and she notices and acts all snobby.

Then sometimes you get into a date with her, but discovers she isn't what you expected. It was the snobbiness that made you more eager to know her.

Then, disappointed, you break up with her and she starts telling everyone you have bad breath, your friends are idiots, and that you are dumb and ugly (but she secretly still likes you).

When you're adult you start to realize that none of it is really that important. She is probably nicer than you remember. And you were just a kid.

All this HN discussion reminds me of those teenage years somehow. Like a twisted psychology distortion of it. It is kind of funny actually.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 14:32:40+00:00
How about every library that wants to preserve backwards compatibility?

Or are you suggesting that e.g. every database module needs to implement a new set of query functions with new names that supports templates? Which is probably the correct thing to do, but boy is it going to be ugly...

So now you'll have to remember never to use 'execute()' but always 'execute_t()' or something.
by jasode | 2025-04-21 14:32:57+00:00
To be charitable to gp, they may be talking about "digital" instead of "analog" capture. E.g. something like HDMI capture hacks: https://www.google.com/search?q=hdmi+capture+hdcp+bypass

The issue is the so-called "DRM" isn't just the encryption of the harddrive files. The DRM protection also includes the watermarks in the video images that survive the HDMI capture. If pirates don't want their $2000 Kaleidescape player blacklisted and bricked, they have to figure out how to remove all forensic watermarks (the invisible low-level "noise" in the image frames) so the illegal copies can't be traced back to that specific compromised player.

It's not impossible but it raises the threshold of difficulties. E.g. using differential analysis to reverse-engineer watermarking now requires buying TWO players for $4000 instead of just one for $2000; and paying for 2 download rentals instead of just 1. And add hours of analysis work on top of that. DRM doesn't have to make piracy impossible; it just has to make the cost/effort equation not attractive. For now, the Kaleidescape DRM scheme is "good enough" for the cost/effort equation to not make sense for pirates.
by vel0city | 2025-04-21 14:33:04+00:00
I had a high-end dishwasher from the early 2000's in this house when I moved in. It had a lot of smarts to it. It would constantly monitor turbidity to change soap mixtures and would decide when it wanted to drain and add more water in case the tub water was really dirty.

I imagine this is what that "AI" feature is doing.
by pc86 | 2025-04-21 14:33:09+00:00
Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing. The fact that some governments do not recognize it does not make it any less of a right.

Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.

Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-21 14:33:24+00:00
Those things are possible (in a limited way), but a big bucket of money doesn't make you better at it, which is the context here.

Checking with another expert is just the same problem with extra steps. It's very common that someone has a stunning reputation and after a few minutes of chatting with them you realize they are a fraud (if you have expertise in the thing you are talking about). So the CEO's 'technical friend' is as likely to be a fraud as not, if not more likely as frauds are very likely to cluster around people who are making decisions that could lead to checks being written, and CEO's are much more likely to be sales-focused extroverts and we are all biased towards trusting people like ourselves (and an extroverted salesperson has a ton of overlap in terms list of characteristics with a con man).

I've been in this industry a long time, I have seen plenty of 'technical leaders' who were complete and total charlatans, up to the point where their resume was very obviously fabricated (companies that never existed, job roles that never existed, the websites for the companies on their resume being fake and obviously created by them). It didn't seem to harm their career much if at all, and their bosses never once caught them out for their incompetence, even after years.
by nu11ptr | 2025-04-21 14:33:36+00:00
One should choose a license that fits them. The problem with GPL licenses is they are viral and non-permissive. As a developer, as soon as I see the GPL I just click away to another repo no matter how good the lib is. I don't want people doing that to my projects, so I use Apache/MIT or whatever the permissive license that is most prominent for the language I'm using.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2025-04-21 14:34:10+00:00
It is possible I mistunderstood GP, but I thought he mentioned UK, which is the embodiment of western government and, historically speaking, some of its source. It is possible things will degrade further, but it is admittedly difficult for me to accept the same level of learned helplessness in UK when compared to.. say.. Syria.

edit: added which; when compared to
by alephnerd | 2025-04-21 14:34:45+00:00
> Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation

Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.

South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s and become a developed country.

Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) [0] instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/14/business/from-chickens-to...
by epdlxjmonad | 2025-04-21 14:34:51+00:00
Performance Evaluation of Trino 468, Spark 4.0.0-RC2, and Hive 4 on MR3 2.0 using the TPC-DS Benchmark

In this article, we report the results of evaluating the performance of the following systems using the 10TB TPC-DS Benchmark.

Trino 468 (released in December 2024)

Spark 4.0.0-RC2 (released in March 2025)

Hive 4.0.0 on Tez (built in February 2025)

Hive 4.0.0 on MR3 2.0 (released in April 2025)
by Timon3 | 2025-04-21 14:35:35+00:00
Come on, you're just being rude for no good reason. A badly chosen variable name doesn't show a "complete misunderstanding". Yes, the variable should have been named `html_template` instead of `html_string` - how often do I have to acknowledge this before you accept it?

And it's obviously more complex to do syntax highlighting when the declaration site and usage site are possibly split apart by variable assignments etc. Yes, in the case you showed syntax highlighting is easy, but what if the `html` function takes more parameters, doesn't take the template as the first parameter, etc? There's a lot of possible complexity that tagged template literals don't have. Thus they are easier to do highlighting for. This is objectively true.
by exe34 | 2025-04-21 14:36:41+00:00
> Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.

to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.

in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.

freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
by clan | 2025-04-21 14:36:51+00:00
I often hear that hand waving "what the market wants". But it is more "what the market can suffer". See IPv4 vs IPv6.

I am not working with mastering as the OP. But I can see the low fidelity of streaming services. I watch my content projected to a large screen.

So I am one of those weirdos. I do not mind as I know I am a nerd. But there are more of us than you think but the penny pinchers wins as usual. "The majority do not see it". But they do. The majority went out and bought 4K TVs. They are slightly disappointed as it did not get "that much better". Most would have been just as happy with a 1080P OLED display. But only the geeks can articulate what they want.

The worst local offender is the online Blockbuster. Compression artifacts galore. But as most view content on phones the audio is stereo only. So your "sufficient" is not my "sufficient".

I get the "weird" part. No offense at all. But you are talking about optimizing for what the majority will suffer.

And it is done to save the last little penny. We could optimize for technical excellence but pride has gone out of fashion.
by delusional | 2025-04-21 14:37:04+00:00
It's getting at the essential truth that for all(?) mainstream languages since object orientation and the dot syntax became a thing `a.b()` implicitly includes `a` as the first argument to the actual method `b(a self)`. Different languages have different constructs on top of that, C++ for example includes a virtual dispatch mechanism, but the one common idea of the _method call_ is that the `self` pointer is passed as the first argument.
by the_af | 2025-04-21 14:37:26+00:00
Hm, I think you're right about the reason HAL initially reports the failure. It's made explicit in the novel, and only hinted at in the movie -- though then spelled out in the followup "2010", I reviewed my notes ;)

I still think this is firmly in the realm of "bad prompting", and if so, it's not outrageous to think it could happen in the real world, were LLMs connected to hardware peripherals handling mission critical stuff.
by tetha | 2025-04-21 14:38:17+00:00
I would say python in it's entirety is one of, if not the deepest and potentially most complex language I know. C++ is the other contender. The things you could do with metaclasses, multiple inheritance and operator overloading are quite staggering.

I'm just glad you don't have to think or even use this as a normal user of the language, most of the time or at all.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-21 14:38:30+00:00
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.

Why, they are the same to me. None is more probable because none needs to be.

We can explain some things (until we cannot, and then we look for another model). Some we cannot explain because we do not yet have the appropriate knowledge. Someday we will, or we won't.

The difference between me and someone who believes in one or more deities I that I can say "we don't know because we are not good enough yet". They need to say "this is driven by god" (for reasons I cannot explain)
by Bedon292 | 2025-04-21 14:38:34+00:00
But how much of that is because they know it will come to streaming soon for free? I feel like the 'if the movie is not streaming, they just don't watch it' mentality was driven by everything being put on streaming. I am not the average consumer, so I could definitely be off base, but I feel like people were more willing to go to see a movie in theaters when they knew it would be months before they would be able to see it if they didn't. Now it can be available for streaming within weeks, many times included with the subscription you already have. Hard to justify $20 per person to go see something in a theater when you can all see it a month later included in your $15 subscription.
by jcmfernandes | 2025-04-21 14:39:04+00:00
The pope, as all humans, is fallible. It's only when speaks ex cathedra that his teachings are considered infallible. These are very rare (Francis never did it).

Now, I agree with you. As a Catholic, I'll support any pope, i.e., I want them to do good. That doesn't mean I have to be fond of him. I really liked Francis, though. I'm afraid I'll deeply miss his wisdom.
by nadis | 2025-04-21 14:39:21+00:00
"Reducing pager volumes isn’t just about better sleep for on-call engineers (though that’s a wonderful benefit). It’s about building a culture where fixing root causes takes precedence over quick patches, where system understanding is valued as highly as feature delivery, and where we recognise that reliability is a feature customers value even if they don’t explicitly ask for it.

We’ve learned that you must intentionally prioritise technical excellence to achieve it. It can be challenging to maintain these standards as you scale, but staying focused means that things can fall back into place."

Appreciated the conclusion, although was a little surprised at how lowly feature work (falling under "everything else") got prioritized relative to other engineering work.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-21 14:39:22+00:00
Additional citations:

Construction Capacity: America's Diminishing Housing Pipeline - https://www.governance.fyi/p/construction-capacity-americas-...

Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 ("The decline in housing affordability over recent decades has promoted an enhanced interest in housing supply. This chapter presents descriptive evidence about the evolution of us housing prices, quantities, and regulations since 1980, indicating that supply constraints appear to be increasingly binding. We then provide an overview of the various approaches used to model construction and land development for homogeneous and heterogeneous housing in static and dynamic contexts to understand housing supply. Our treatment incorporates empirical implementation and policy implications throughout. Finally, we provide an overview of quantitative evidence on the consequences of relaxing various types of supply constraints.")
by raducu | 2025-04-21 14:39:54+00:00
> Have you actually tried agentic LLM based frameworks that use tool calling for long term memory storage and retrieval, or have you decided that because these tools do not behave perfectly in a fluid environment where humans do not behave perfectly either, that it's "impossible"?

i.e. "Have you tried this vague, unnamed thing that I alude to that seems to be the answer that contradicts your point, but actually doesn't?"

AGI = 90% of software devs, psychotherapists, lawyers, teachers lose their jobs, we are not there.

Once LLMs can fork themselves, reflect and accumulate domain specific knowledge and transfer the whole context back to the model weights, once that knowledge can become more important than the pre-pretrained information, once they can form new neurons related to a project topic, then yes, we will have AGI (probably not that far away). Once LLM's can keep trying to find a bug for days and weeks and months, go through the debugger, ask people relevant questions, deploy code with new debugging traces, deploy mitigations and so on, we will have AGI.

Otherwise, AI is stuck in this groundhog day type scenario, where it's forever the brightest intern that any company has ever seen, but he's forever stuck at day 0 on the job, forever not that usefull, but full of potential.
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 14:40:09+00:00
Weird spiky things that are hard to characterise even within one specific model, and where the ability to reliably identify such things itself causes subsequent models to not fail so much.

A few months ago, I'd have said "create image with coherent text"*, but that's now changed. At least in English — trying to get ChatGPT's new image mode to draw the 狐 symbol sometimes works, sometimes goes weird in the way latin characters used to.

* if the ability to generate images doesn't count as "language model" then one intellectual task they can't do is "draw images", see Simon Willison's pelican challenge: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
by higherhalf | 2025-04-21 14:40:22+00:00
> It doesn't allow you to import `std::iter::Iterator::collect` on its own. It's an associated function, and needs to be qualified.

You probably noticed, but it should become a thing in RFC 3591: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/134691

So it does kind of work on current nightly:

#![feature(import_trait_associated_functions)] use std::iter::Iterator::{filter, map, collect}; fn get_ids2(data: Vec<Widget>) -> Vec<Id> { collect(map(filter(Vec::into_iter(data), |w| w.alive), |w| w.id)) } fn get_ids3(data: impl Iterator<Item = Widget>) -> Vec<Id> { collect(map(filter(data, |w| w.alive), |w| w.id)) }
by JohnBooty | 2025-04-21 14:41:14+00:00
I imagined using lots of sensors to control vents, windows, blinds, and HVAC

Yes! This times 1,000.

I remember people gushing over the first wave of smart thermostats and all I could think about was how useless a "smart thermostat" was without the ability to also control windows and blinds.

That is the most time-consuming part of regulating temps and fresh air. Getting up to change the thermostat is quite easy!

Smart thermostats are also IMO of limited use for most pet owners. Yeah, theoretically I could let my house get very hot or very cold when I'm not there to save money... but I can't let my cats or dogs freeze... so that kind of clamps the acceptable temperature range.

I do accept that there is a certain sort of person for whom a smart thermostat makes sense - a person who is not home very often, has no pets, and has minimal windows. In short, single apartment dwellers. But they don't have very expensive heating/cooling bills anyway.

Also even if I spent $100,000 putting automated windows in my house, I'm not sure I trust them enough to not chop my cat in half if he happens to be sitting on the windowsill....
by LadyCailin | 2025-04-21 14:41:36+00:00
More and more devices are coming with SIM cards baked in. You don’t pay for them, the manufacturer does, but they harvest your data whether you give them internet or not. For now I’m only aware of cars having these, but I suspect it’s just a matter of time before even cheap consumer gadgets have this too.

Really, the only answer is privacy regulation. Any other solution (just let the free market handle it, don’t give it internet access, etc) is not workable in the long term.
by piva00 | 2025-04-21 14:42:07+00:00
Without substance? Using chats without double checking who are members of the chat group is a thing not even I do when sharing some gossip, lol. That's blatant incompetence, a person responsible for the USA defence cannot be bothered to cross the members list of a group chat before sharing extremely sensitive information.

And now he's adding his family into the mix?
by wzdd | 2025-04-21 14:42:23+00:00
> I can't think of a scenario where you'd need to deconstruct their front-end to mimic the calls.

The article mentioned that important API calls are signed. So you would need at least partially to deconstruct their front-end to invoke the calls.

Any other nefarious purposes aside, this seems explicitly anti-bot because you can change the obfuscation whenever you like, forcing another RE effort.
by msteffen | 2025-04-21 14:42:44+00:00
Here is, I think, an interesting example of the kind of thing TFA is talking about. In case you’re not already familiar, there’s an issue that game devs sometimes struggle with, where, in C/C++, an array of structs (AoS) has a nice syntactic representation in the language and is easy to work with/avoid leaks, but a struct of arrays (SoA) has a more compact layout in memory and better performance.

Zig has a library to that allows you to have an AoS that is laid out in memory like a SoA: https://zig.news/kristoff/struct-of-arrays-soa-in-zig-easy-i... . If you read the implementation (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/std/multi_arr...) the SoA is an elaborately specialized type, parameterized on a struct type that it introspects at compile time.

It’s neat because one might reach for macros for this sort of the thing (and I’d expect the implementation to be quite complex, if it’s even possible) but the details of Zig’s comptime—you can inspect the fields of the type parameter struct, and the SoA can be highly flexible about its own fields—mean that you don’t need a macro system, and the Zig implementation is actually simpler than a macro approach probably would be.
by conartist6 | 2025-04-21 14:42:49+00:00
Yes. It's a weak heuristic, but it's EXACTLY the same weak heuristic that JS is applying!

IN other words, since custom template tags in JS *are literally just function calls* when a JS environment syntax highlights the code as HTML it's doing so based on an extremely weak heuristic (the identifier for the interpolation function is named "html"). Both Python and JS have the same problem.