MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevenwoo | 2025-04-29 15:00:19+00:00
Well if recent experience has taught us anything, one can start to dox people and their families to influence their decisions in work and personal life like we have seen judges and prosecutors being treated, then bad actors can rely on this digital stochastic terrorism of the masses to intimidate. This article actually says states will have to adjust their laws to account for proving intent, in addition to the digital trail of evidence, so essentially someone has to admit to it, much like law enforcement in the USA cannot be compelled to present evidence of racial discrimination and is at the same time not required to keep stats on it, but the defense must prove racial discrimination in any case, so that as long as no one in law enforcement admits to it, it's a catch 22 where it cannot be proven. These are distinctions without difference from endorsing the behavior.
by hirako2000 | 2025-04-29 15:00:42+00:00
Confused here despite the detailed explanation on the user case.

Today generating a static point cloud with gaussians involves:

- offline, far from realtime process to generate spacial information off 2D captures. LiDar captures may help but doesn't drastically cut down the this heavy step. - "train" generate gaussian information off 2D captures and geospatial data.

Unless I'm already referring to an antique flow, or that my RTX GPU is too consumer grade, how would all of this perform on embedded systems to make fast communication of gaussian relevant ?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-29 15:01:03+00:00
>People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks

People will think they have an eye for AI-generated content, and miss all the AI that doesn't register. If anything it would benefit the whole industry to keep some stuff looking "AI" so people build a false model of what "AI" looks like.

This is like the ChatGPT image gen of last year, which purposely put a distinct style on generated images (that shiny plasticy look). Then everyone had an "eye for AI" after seeing all those. But in the meantime, purpose made image generators without the injected prompts were creating indistinguishable images.

It is almost certain that every single person here has laid eyes on an image already, probably in an ad, that didn't set off any triggers.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-29 15:01:08+00:00
The billionaire cult is slowly dismantling itself. I came to adulthood in the early 2000s and I remember the presumption basically being that they must be very smart because they're very rich and if they're very smart about the thing that made them very rich then they must be very smart about everything else as well. There are cases where that has borne out. It's hard to argue that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos aren't shrewd businesspeople who know how to use the levers of power to get what they want. But as a counterargument against that is Elon Musk, supposedly based on the mythos of the capitalist meritocracy the greatest among us (because, if not, how could he have become the richest?) who has revealed himself to be cruel, petty, awkward, desperate and has very publicly mismanaged several companies to the point of being sued by shareholders who've found his behavior to be so detrimental to the value of their holdings that it's inseparable from malice. A lot of people are realizing that it's a crap shoot. Being smart is certainly an advantage, but it's one of many and being rich or having access to powerful people seem to be just as influential.

One of the most revealing things about Musk came from Walter Isaacson's biography on him. According to the book, Musk once joined a poker game at a table full of card sharps, odds savants and the kind of people you expect would play a lot of poker and would also eat alive anyone who wasn't on their level. He bulldozed them. His strategy? Bet everything he has on every hand and, when he loses, just buy more chips. Isaacson seems to think this proves Musk to be an outside-the-box-thinking risk-taker but there's another, less generous interpretation: capitalism tends to elevate those who have enough resources that they can get their asses kicked 10 times and still come back for an 11th, but the odds are against you if you're playing with all you have no matter how gifted a player you actually are.
by jerf | 2025-04-29 15:01:10+00:00
I'm beginning to develop a heuristic around the concept of "amount of the library you use". It's intrinsically fuzzy and still something I'm working on, but in general, it's bad to use only a tiny fraction of a library or framework, and really bad to have a code base in which a large number of things are pulled in that you only use small fractions of.

There are some exceptions, e.g., pulling in your languages best-of-breed image library to load some JPGs even though it supports literally a dozen other formats is less disastrous to a code base than pulling in an industrial-strength web framework just to provide two API calls with some basic auth of some sort. But there's something to the concept in general, I think.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-29 15:01:22+00:00
The problem is, there's real benefits to using plastics for all sorts of things, foodstuff packaging included. Human lives are demonstrably longer than they were in developed countries where plastics are regularly used. It'd be interesting to see if you could quantify how long the average person's life has been extended/made better because of polymers.

Could we go back to wax paper, glass bottles, metal tins, and the like? Maybe, but that comes with its own challenges, from spoilage to metals contamination to transport weight.
by mamonster | 2025-04-29 15:01:32+00:00
>It's also effectively a burden placed on the other oligarchs behind Putin, who would love to control a large chunk of a functional economy rather than controlling a large chunk of a banana republic undergoing stagflation and being heavily taxed for the privilege.

Russian oligarchs now have close to 0 political power. Those that do are related to army/secret services anyway and will have more to lose if the system goes away. All those oligarchs just ate massive drops in wealth and didn't do anything.

This is by far the biggest misunderstanding that people in the West have: The Russian/Putinist system is now MORE stable than before 24 February 2022, not less.
by monkeyelite | 2025-04-29 15:01:38+00:00
Code reviews kill velocity - introduce context switching, and are make work, it feels like you’re doing something to make a PR etc but your not.

The context it makes the most sense is accepting code from strangers in a low trust environment.

The alternative to trying to prevent mistakes is making it easy to find and correct them. Run CI on code after it’s been merged and send out emails if it’s failed. At the end of a day produce a summary of changes and review them asynchronously. Use QA, test environments, etc.
by Robotbeat | 2025-04-29 15:01:52+00:00
No. The problem is their development has been super slow and expensive (compared to Starlink) and also they picked fairly expensive launch providers compared to their main competitor (SpaceX).

Space junk is not in the top 5 reasons, and with better tracking and using low altitudes (like Starlink does, where debris deorbits very quickly), we can probably fit a factor of 100 times more satellites in LEO safely.

(People underestimate how much of a difference better tracking makes to this issue. Space is huge, and the real isn’t actual conjunctions, but the fact that the uncertainty range for objects is so large that you end up getting hundreds of times more false alarms and probably-unneeded avoidance maneuvers than you’d have if you had much better tracking.)
by byoung2 | 2025-04-29 15:02:17+00:00
I found ChatGPT can write terrible code for the simplest React components, but beautiful code for complex react-three-fiber components. I suppose that is because it was trained on beginner tutorials for basic components and advanced 3d modeling examples for react-three-fiber.

For basic components, I’ve found that by asking for more complexity (e.g. ask it to wrap your nav component in a react context or a custom hook) yields better overall code.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 15:02:20+00:00
Because C++ was "TypeScript for C", plenty of room to improvement that WG 14 refuses to act on for the last 50 years.

Yes, most language features past the C89 subset are not supported, besides the C standard library, because C++ has much better alternatives, like why _Generic when templates are a much saner approach, than type dispatching with the pre-processor.

However that is besides the point, 99% of C89 code minus a few differences, is valid C++ code, and if the situation so requires, C++ code can be exactly the same way.

And lets not forget most FOSS projects have never moved beyond C89/C99 anyway, so stuff like _Generic is of relative importance.
by orwin | 2025-04-29 15:02:21+00:00
> GDP also ignores depreciation. Machinery/infrastructure decay doesn't affect GDP at all.

This is true, but it used to measure (or at least try to account for) decay in private companies. Changes in accounting techniques make this a challenge nowadays (especially since our beloved MBAs invented 'future accounting', where expected ROI is added to the value of machinery in the books, truly a genius move by true sociopaths)
by mayas_ | 2025-04-29 15:02:25+00:00
only anecdotal evidence

with gemini 2.5 pro combined with a good https://docs.cursor.com/context/rules directory i've had consistently impressive quality code,

i spent quite some time crafting the .cursor directory though

i tried to be as exhaustive as possible in capturing the subtleties of our codebase and what our team considers good taste
by shadygm | 2025-04-29 15:02:42+00:00
Thanks for taking a look!

Just to clarify, ROSplat isn’t generating the Gaussians, it’s not a SLAM algorithm or a reconstruction tool. It’s purely a visualizer that uses ROS for message passing. The idea is that if you already have a system producing Gaussians (either live or precomputed), ROSplat lets you stream and view them in real time (as the ROS messages arrive).

So in your example, yes, you could upload a pre-baked GSplat, calibrate it to the robot’s frame, and use it for navigation or visualization. Or, if your ROS device is running something like SLAM, it can publish Gaussians as it goes. In both cases, ROSplat is just making them available for visualization, nothing more.

And I completely agree with you on your last comment. VR Gaussians are the way to go, I know that a company Varjo is currently working on them. Not sure if there's anything else that's available tho :/
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-29 15:03:25+00:00
This site is full of web developers telling people they get what they pay for but then call tutors "prohibitively expensive".

You want that education, invest in it. With time and money. Of course, the "a few minutes per day in the commute for 9.99" feels attractive and it even gets you to a basic stage but then it's what we already discussed.
by pydry | 2025-04-29 15:04:08+00:00
>We have had thousands of years of globalising.

It happens in cycles. Globalization has followed deglobalization before and vice versa. It's never been one straight line upward.

>That is because it doesn't make sense for there to be 200 countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and banana growing.

It'll break down into blocs, not 200 individual countries.

Ask Estonia why they buy overpriced LNG from America and Qatar rather than cheap gas from their next door neighbor.

If you think the inability to source high end microchips from anywhere apart from Taiwan is going to prevent a future conflict (the Milton Friedman(tm) golden arches theory) then I'm afraid I've got bad news.
by copperroof | 2025-04-29 15:04:09+00:00
I’ve gotten 0 production usable python out of any LLM. Small script to do something trivial, sure. Anything I’m going to have to maintain or debug in the future, not even close. I think there is a _lot_ of terrible python code out there training LLMs, so being a more popular language is not helpful. This era is making transparent how low standards really are.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-29 15:04:15+00:00
Their ideology is power.

The writing has been on the wall demographically for decades. Their base has been shrinking, fewer people are religious, white folk are losing status. It’s become harder and harder to win an election for turn since GW Bush, and even that went down to the courts.

Many districts are only red due to blatant gerrymandering. But even that gets harder to wield so what seems to have happened is that while they still can ostensibly win an election, they crank the wheel and destroy the rules so that they never have to compete on a level field again
by dash2 | 2025-04-29 15:04:29+00:00
The OP is from Romania, and from my own experience too, I think you are mistaken. I would think very carefully before starting a PhD in many European countries. I'd also ask searching questions of the faculty, ("how many people do you graduate a year?" and "what % of your graduates go on to an academic job?")

This applies to the UK and Germany, for example, not just Eastern Europe. There are certainly spots of excellence, but even among high quality UK universities, very often PhD training is on the "apprenticeship" model where you're just thrown into research without graduate-level courses. You can judge the result by looking at the proportion of US-trained staff in EU departments.
by jameshart | 2025-04-29 15:04:37+00:00
That’s been my experience of what it means to try to do ‘software engineering’ as a discipline; it’s the ongoing process of developing ways to articulate - beyond just ‘this way feels better to me’ - what attributes we are trying to build into the software we construct, what methods we use to imbue the software with those attributes, and why certain ways of doing so are better than others.

It still feels more like craftsmanship than actual engineering. A lot of the time it’s more like how a carpenter learns to use certain tools in certain ways because it’s safer or less prone to error, than how an engineer knows how constructing a particular truss ensures particular loads are distributed in particular ways.

And one of the best tools we have for developing these skills is to learn from the mistakes others have made.

So I agree - I think your instinct here was to look at this error and try to think whether you have engineering heuristics already that would make you unlikely to fall into this error, or do you need to adjust your approach to avoid making the same mistake.

My criticism here was more directed to others in the thread who seem to see this more as an opportunity to say ‘yeah, Windows was always buggy’ rather than to see it as an example of a way things can fail that they need to beware of.
by dmurray | 2025-04-29 15:04:40+00:00
Well, it doesn't need to be any worse than the stack-based implementation of a recursive tree traversal, and it can't be significantly better. You have to store that state somewhere.

Perhaps it can be optimized to be a little better than the recursive version, depending on how much overhead your language uses for a stack frame that it won't need for this special case.
by kurthr | 2025-04-29 15:05:16+00:00
Yeah, most of the comments here are crap. The regulation for this stuff (and there are so many it's stupid) started in "the west" around 1999 and is pretty complete post 2022. Remember when polycarbonate water bottles were a thing, when they took chemicals out of kids toys and couches? That was all bad, but virgin PET, PP, silicone, and HDPE don't really leach plasticizers. That's WHY they're used. Really, this borders on a 25 year human clinical trial on South America, Africa, and SE Asia... well maybe we can measure reintroduction to the US now that corruption is a thing and regulation or rule of law is out the window. Thanks, Obama.
by waldarbeiter | 2025-04-29 15:05:18+00:00
Yeah, the debris removes itself with time. But there is still some uncertainty around how deorbiting harms the atmosphere [1]. Immediate effects of a single deorbit seem to be quite low but having such deorbiting scenarios at a higher frequency could have some negative effects.

[1] https://blogs.esa.int/cleanspace/2022/08/11/on-the-atmospher...
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-29 15:05:31+00:00
Usually much lower than the equivalent job at a private sector company.

People often state this, without acknowledging that:

- many government employees would not meet the bar for an equivalent job in the private sector

- the environment and red tape means that even an equally skilled employee would be less productive than they would be in a private sector firm that's subject to competitive pressures

- for many government employees, headline salary is only about a two thirds of total compensation (look up San Francisco employees' total comp on the Transparent California web site).
by watwut | 2025-04-29 15:05:34+00:00
> but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.

Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.

That is just not how it works.

Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.

You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
by mgkimsal | 2025-04-29 15:06:21+00:00
> The app checks for the update every 5 minutes or when the user activates the app. Normally, when the app detected the update - it downloaded it and stopped the 5 minutes interval until the user installed it and restarted it.

This is still bad. I was really hoping the bug would have been something like "I put a 5 minute check in for devs to be able to wait and check and test a periodic update check, and forgot to revert it". That's what I expected, really.
by 5cott0 | 2025-04-29 15:06:21+00:00
In contrast to statements like the following from the dweebs sucking harry potter's farts out of the less-wrong bubble

>Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days

https://ai-2027.com/
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-29 15:06:25+00:00
In researching nutrition and organic agriculture, I formed an interesting hypothesis. Various fruits and vegetables are often touted as being "rich in X" or "high in Y" and therefore lists are drawn up for people seeking a particular vitamin or nutrient or mineral.

Now plants can synthesize certain vitamins and there's no doubt that citrus is high in Vitamin C, for example. But many minerals must be drawn out of the soil where something is grown. So are all <X> high in selenium? What about historically selenium-impoverished areas? What about cropland that's been depleted after decades of use? Still the same selenium in there?

I've decided that without constant analysis and assay of each and every plant, you can't really tell the composition of what we're finding in our groceries. It's the winegrower's concept of terroir, that is, the soil, the environment, the climate, all contributing to the makeup of the final product.

This line of reasoning was enough to send me to a regime of supplementation. Unfortunately it is also impossible for my HCPs to track or validate any intake, baseline, or improvements to attribute to the supplements, so I terminated them just as abruptly. But it was a good thought. I think anyone who needs a particular nutrient should supplement with it, rather than try and derive it from diet alone, in light of this.

And also we cannot get too uptight about toxins in food, because that's just a neverending bugaboo that could simply kill us from anxiety more than anything else!
by mayas_ | 2025-04-29 15:06:28+00:00
interesting

i've been writing code for my employers for the last 10years and i feel liberated

now i almost cheer when the product guys report bugs, mainly pre-llm legacy codebase i slice through like butter

well except on a few rare instances to be fair

i assume it can be counterproductive in the hands of an inexperienced dev?
by seth_at_kagi | 2025-04-29 15:07:04+00:00
Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.

This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.

With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-29 15:07:06+00:00
There are two things to say here:

> I'm learning an admittedly fairly obscure african language, but one with tens of millions of speakers worldwide. LLM can produce intelligible but grammatically-incorrect and unidiomatic output.

This isn't a problem with the technology; it's easy to observe that it doesn't happen with better-known languages. Your problem is that you don't have a model for your target language.

> Is this better or worse than not helping at all? I'd argue worse.

My first instincts go that way too. But note that language classes consider it desirable for the students to try to speak with each other in the target language. (And not just where they can be supervised - the more they do it, in any context, the better.)

If the only input you ever get has the grammar incorrect, your grammar will also be incorrect. But you can handle a lot of your input being incorrect without major problems.
by bearjaws | 2025-04-29 15:07:19+00:00
Yeah no, publishing to the App Store is a nightmare in cost and time. I can 100% guarantee they still saved money on 30% fees even after this $8000 snafu.

Screen Studio has 32k followers, lets say 6% are end users, 2000 users at $229, that is $137k in App Store fees.

I am going to say writing your own app update script is a wash time wise, as getting your app published is not trivial, especially for an app that requires as many permissions as screen studio.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 15:07:21+00:00
Yes. This is silly. We should change it. (But it's largely an issue for online sales, not physical locations. The McDonalds in San Anselmo, barring The Big One, stays in San Anselmo.)

See also: American healthcare, college, etc. "Our setup is absurdly complex in bad ways" is not an argument for keeping that setup, it's an argument for making fixes.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-29 15:08:00+00:00
It's odd how far people have run with simplified versions of Galileo's story. The version I've seen everywhere is "The dastardly anti-science Church hated heliocentrism so much that it persecuted Galileo for it." The Church's support of geocentrism did play a role, but if you look at the details, it seems far closer to "The Roman Church of Galileo's day was filled with scheming politicians, and he (perhaps unwittingly) offended people who he couldn't afford to, so his enemies latched onto his support for heliocentrism as an excuse to get rid of him."

These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of telephone between people who want history to prove their point.
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-29 15:08:04+00:00
We are not playing werewolf in a forum. Your wall of text won't get read.

Your argument was naive. I addressed it, you went on a tangent. You want fallacies? Ad hominem + appeal to emotion.

The fact that you just went to my username for more dirt proves you don't have much to say. Stop the fake niceties and jog on with your bs.