MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandv | 2025-04-28 18:54:06+00:00
> The flaw of the Chinese Room argument is the need to explain why it does not apply to humans as well.

But it does - the thought experiment continues by supposing that I gave a human those lookup tables and instructions on how to use them, instead of having the computer run the procedure. The human doesn't understand the foreign language either, not in the same way a native speaker does.

The point is that no formal procedure or algorithm is sufficient for such a system to have understanding. Even if you memorized all the lookup tables and instructions and executed this procedure entirely in your head, you would still lack understanding.

> Does a single neuron "understand" Chinese? 10 neurons? 100? 1 million?

This sounds like a sorites paradox [0]. I don't know how to resolve this, other than to observe that our notions of "understanding" and "thought" and "intelligence" are ill-defined and more heuristic approximations than terms with a precise meaning; hence the tendency of the field of computer science to use thought experiments like Turing's imitation game or Searle's Chinese room as proxies for assessing intelligence, in lieu of being able to treat these terms and ideas more rigorously.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
by delichon | 2025-04-28 18:54:09+00:00
Back in the '80s I attended a lecture by chemist Melvin Calvin. He described his project of developing a biofuel plant from a succulent, such that it would thrive in desert terrain and not overlap with farmland, as corn for ethanol does. I haven't heard about it since, so I'm guessing that it didn't work out. Even if successful it would compete for the same land as solar, but there's enough of such land for both. There is so much land that is suitable to solar but not crops that I'd think it would be rare to make sense to cover good soil with a solar farm. BLM manages a huge portfolio of non-aerable land with suitable sunlight. Yes, power infrastructure costs more from such remote areas. But places where there is enough irrigation water for crops are golden, for reducing trade deficits if not for feeding and clothing us locals.
by jmcphers | 2025-04-28 18:54:17+00:00
Positron, a data science IDE. Has roots in RStudio but it's built on VS Code and has robust support for both Python and R workflows. If you use VS Code and install a bunch of extensions to try to make it a competent R/Python data environment, you'll probably love Positron.

https://positron.posit.co/
by 3np | 2025-04-28 18:54:18+00:00
Valkey is the open-source fork blessed by antirez and where the community is moving.

https://valkey.io

Migrating a bunch of old and new dbs from Redis 6.x to Valkey 7 went smoothly here.

If you're migrating: 7.2 is the ideal version to switch over. If you upgrade Redis above it, compatibility guarantees drop.
by Intralexical | 2025-04-28 18:54:21+00:00
I like the daredevil asteroids going for the close dive of the star emoji sun :)

Would it be appropriate to communicate on the README which telescopes this is used for? You see these very niche, very professional-looking repositories on GitHub now and then, and it's never clear how much credibility they have and whether they come from a hobbyist, student, experiment, or are in operational use.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-28 18:54:28+00:00
I don’t think I disagree with your general point, but this is fairly different from what the comment above was looking for—confidence values that we can put next to our outputs.

I mean, I don’t think such a value (it is definitely possible I’m reading it overly-specifically), like, a numerical value, can generally be assigned to the truthiness of a snippet of general prose.

I mean, in your “7 peer reviewed papers” example, part of the point of research (a big part!) is to eventually overturn previous consensus views. So, if we have 6 peer reviewed papers with lots of citations, and one that conclusively debunks the rest of them, there is not a 6/7 chance that any random sentiment pulled out of the pile of text is “true” in terms of physical reality.
by janice1999 | 2025-04-28 18:54:29+00:00
"DOGE employees gain accounts on classified networks holding nuclear secrets"

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/28/nx-s1-5378684/doge-energy-dep...

> Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern and Adam Ramada, a Miami-based venture capitalist, have had accounts on the computer systems for at least two weeks, according to the sources who also have access to the networks. Prior to their work at DOGE, neither Farritor nor Ramada appear to have had experience with either nuclear weapons or handling classified information.
by const_cast | 2025-04-28 18:54:34+00:00
Not true. Every illegal firearm was produced legally and sold legally.

Making guns is very hard. The only way to get them is from people who actually make firearms. If they don't exist, then you can't get guns, no matter how gangster or organized you are.

I mean, it's not like the Mafia is making fucking factories to produce steel firearms.
by perihelions | 2025-04-28 18:54:39+00:00
- "[Portugese electric network Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN)] said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”"

- "The risks posed to electrical systems by big variations in atmospheric temperatures are well known in the industry, even if it is rare for problems to manifest on this scale."

- "“Due to the variation of the temperature, the parameters of the conductor change slightly,” said Taco Engelaar, managing director at Neara, a software provider to energy utilities. “It creates an imbalance in the frequency.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p... ("Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?")
by kube-system | 2025-04-28 18:55:00+00:00
Don't make the mistake of presuming that levying a legal penalty equates to perfect compliance. When faced with a choice between compliance and survival, people will choose the latter.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsure...

If policies continue to push more people to operate vehicles extralegally, problems caused by these drivers may get worse instead of better.
by fmajid | 2025-04-28 18:55:00+00:00
I have that omnibus edition. Bought it for my then newborn daughter when it came out (and have them all in eBook format as well), but have yet to convince her to read it, or The Hobbit.

It is available as an eBook in the UK for a ridiculously cheap £5.99.

https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-books-of-earthsea-the-co...

https://www.gollancz.co.uk/news/2018/10/17/the-books-of-eart...
by mightyham | 2025-04-28 18:55:19+00:00
This is definitely not true from a philosophical level. Contemplation of an infinite god/cosmos, and the seemingly infinite nature of time are core aspects of early Greek philosophy, which heavily influenced the philosophy of each of the Abrahamic religions.

As you started alluding to, the reason the west may seem more fearful of the infinite is likely because of widespread secularism, not western religion. An infinite cosmos is not nearly as scary to someone whose life purpose is appeasing an all good/infinite/timeless/immutable being, as it is for someone whose life purpose is managing their dopamine levels.

Somewhat related: being someone who grew up in the west, I've always wondered how Hindus and Buddhists deal with evidence of the big bang. It fits fairly naturally into Abrahamic traditions that believe in a beginning to the universe. Though, it is fairly important to the philosophy of those eastern traditions that time and space (samsara) has no beginning or end.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-28 18:55:23+00:00
The data center where I work has large diesel generators for power cuts. They are electric (battery) start. There is no capability to start them manually. The batteries are on maintenance chargers that keep them in good condition. The generators are started and tested every two weeks.

Could the batteries be dead and the generators not start? I guess but it's very unlikely. I get that on an oil rig it might be a matter of life and death and you need some kind of manual way to bootstrap but there's not much that's more reliable than a 12V lead-acid battery and a diesel engine in good condition.
by serial_dev | 2025-04-28 18:55:38+00:00
Congrats on the launch! I really would have thought it’s already part of the iOS built in apps!

You mentioned it’s your first app. Did you vibe code your way through it or did you heavily use AI?

I played around with Swift SwiftUI and I felt that AI helped me a lot in contrast to my day to day job, humongous code base, I can’t get AI to get those mythical 100x productivity gains, more like 0.37x, but for new projects it’s been great, so I was wondering…
by cowanon2222 | 2025-04-28 18:55:41+00:00
The internet bubble is probably a good analogy. It took almost 20 years and several rounds of failed businesses for the internet to have the impact that was originally promised. The big internet companies of the 90s are not where the money was ultimately made.

Similarly, the current LLM vendors and cloud providers are likely not where the money will ultimately be made. Some startup 10-15 years from now will likely stack a cheaply hosted or distributed LLM with several other technologies, and create a whole new category of use cases we haven't even thought of yet, and that will actually create the new value.

It's basically the Gartner hype cycle in action.
by rpgbr | 2025-04-28 18:55:52+00:00
I'm amazed how bad DHH's takes can get and his incredible capacity of having only bad takes.

>First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet.

Remember when Google force fed everyone with a nag to install Chrome on the most popular web site ever? Such a great experience… I mean.

>Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works.

That's precisely the issue here, my man.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-04-28 18:55:57+00:00
>That said, you don't get the point

I understand the point you are making, I just don't agree with it.

>it's arbitrary and there is no way to prove that it's true

You aren't going to get a record on hearsay.

>Yet, it will still be recorded.

I don't think you understand how policing works in the UK.
by runarberg | 2025-04-28 18:56:21+00:00
I think our disagreement stems from this belief:

> Remember, laws can only be made after harm has been done.

This simply isn’t true. Plenty of regulation is done proactively. You just don’t hear about it as often because, harm prevented is not as good of a story as harm stopped.

For example we have no stories of exporting encryption algorithms to different countries causing harm, yet it is heavily regulated under the belief it will cause harm to national security. Similarly there is no stories of swearing on the radio causing harm, yet foul language is regulated by the FCC. A more meaningful examples are in the regulatory framework in the field of medicine, and if you want scale, the intellectual property of fashion design.

But even so, it can be argued that LLMs are already causing harm, it is mass producing and distributing bad information and stolen art. Consumers are harmed by the bad information, and artists are harmed by their art being stolen. A regulation—even if only reactionary—is still apt at this point.

The series of law-suits you mention only proves my point. We expect companies that break the law to be punished for their action, although I would argue that the regulator is generally far too lazy in pursuing legal actions against companies that break the law.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-28 18:58:16+00:00
I genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me.

I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?

Just my 0.02.
by n_ary | 2025-04-28 18:58:19+00:00
Same could be said about all the hype and trend that died, blockchain(ignore cryptocurrency part), IoT(not sure what happened), bigData(foundation of current AI regardless of whag anyone says) , app for everything(we indeed have more apps now and everything is junk) were also considered the new water/air/electricity/revolution/disruption.

We in aggregate seem to have developed a collective amnesia due to how fast these trends move and how much is burned in keeping the hype machine going to keep us on the edge. We also need to stop calling LLMs different just like every kid wants to claim mark zuck was diff or bill gates was diff so dropping out like them would make these kids owner of next infinite riches.

After a long decade of fast moving “this will truly revolutionize everything” speech every so often, we need to keep some skepticism. Additionally, the AI bubble is more devastating than the previous as previous money was being spread into multiple hypes from which some emerged silent victors of current trends but now everything is consolidated into one thing, all eggs in one basket. If the eggs break, a large population and industry will metaphorically starve and suffer.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-28 18:58:35+00:00
> Holy cow, is that really how many interviews it takes to get hired these days?

I’m 50 and have been working as a software developer or closely adjacent for almost 30 years. I’ve never seen a job market like this.

Even back in 2000-2001 as a regular old enterprise dev with 3 years of experience, jobs were plentiful in Atlanta doing corporate dev. I got my third job late 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis relatively quickly and had two offers.

Fast forward to 2023. I was looking for regular old enterprise dev jobs where they wanted C# developers with AWS experience as a Plan B. I had 15+ years of C# experience, 7 leading projects and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS (Professional Services).

I heard crickets sending out hundreds of resumes looking for remote opportunities. Every single opening had hundreds of applicants (LinkedIn shows you).

The same happened in 2024 when I was looking again.

I was able to get offers quickly both times for my “Plan A” jobs based on my network and in 2023, I found a couple of companies where the “nice to have” was implementing and modifying an open source “AWS Solution” for which I was a major contributor.

My “Plan A” was a full time job at a third party AWS consulting company where I would be leading cloud + app dev projects.

But, most people don’t have my share of “unfair advantages”.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 18:58:55+00:00
I read the study, the author is much less affirmative than you and spends a lot of time explaining that the data is really subpar:

"A dearth of high-quality studies that evaluate outcomes in suicide following gender-affirming treatment poses severe limitations on the extent of claims made during the informed consent process for gender-affirming treatment. An abundance of claims that are not backed by evidence does not represent quality empirical evidence but rather guidelines endorsed by various medical organizations."

Another way of saying that what doctor associations is groupthink rather than evidence-based medicine. Also, you use a classic motte-and-bailey tactic here, to limit treatments to hormonal ones, excluding surgical. Of course, some hormonal treatment symptoms are not reversible.

Regarding young girls, we didn't have problems before. So I don't see why you're looking for a special "method" for this. And whatever the status of trans people, a pervert could well say that he is one to enter in safe spaces for women. We see this already well in sports, and with the obvious, and sometimes dangerous problems associated.
by const_cast | 2025-04-28 18:58:57+00:00
Yes, this is exactly my problem with this type of reasoning.

You can make these arguments for anything. If we can't even get the most obvious low-hanging fruit because "aww it's slightly inconvenient" then we can't even DREAM of solving complex problems.

This new "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" mentality towards policy is so toxic. That's the only guaranteed way to not solve a problem! It's an anti-solution!
by freshfunk | 2025-04-28 18:59:05+00:00
Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world.

And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.
by rolfvanroot | 2025-04-28 18:59:19+00:00
I wrote a detailed review about the Rize app. Google Search and even Google's new AI Overview barely show it, but Gemini and ChatGPT Deep Research modes ranked it as a top review.

Wondering: Are traditional SEO factors like backlinks becoming less important? Are we heading towards AI-driven content discovery?

Curious how others see this.
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-28 18:59:47+00:00
I can't tell from reading the listing if this is a feature or not, but if not, you should add the ability to set custom targets that match your real heart rate zones rather than relying on the naive population estimators that Apple gives you, along with more important metrics like LT1 and LT2 thresholds and VO2 max. Ideally, this would be a feature of the exercise tracker itself, but getting it in a data rollup app is better than nothing.
by sponaugle | 2025-04-28 18:59:57+00:00
"Grid tied solar won't put power into the grid when the grid is down. It's the one reason I didn't grid tie."

Why would that prevent you from being grid-tie? I have 53 panels (~21kw) grid tied and pushing to the grid, but in the event of grid failure my panels will still operate and push into my 42kwh battery array which will power the entire house. ( The batteries take over as the 'virtual grid source). I can then augment the batteries with generator and run fully off grid for an extended amount of time ( weeks in my case ).
by Hydrocarb0n | 2025-04-28 18:59:57+00:00
Harder mostly, See the frequency is set by huge rotating masses in the form of generators, and when the supply and demand is matched the frequency and voltage are stable, when demand dramatically increases it pulls the frequency and voltage down, which is effectively slowing the generators down as load / magnetic drag increases with current drawn. Having large inertial masses spinning actually helps smooth out frequency changes. whilst large solar farms can and do syncronise with the grid, they are reactive and do not add the same smoothing effect as humungous spinning masses.

Low Grid frequency & voltage can cause an increase in current & heating of transmission lines and conductors and can damage the expensive things, this is why these systems trip out automatically at low frequency or low voltage, and why load shedding is necessary
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-04-28 19:00:06+00:00
What caused it? The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.

REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p...
by toast0 | 2025-04-28 19:00:31+00:00
The more batteries available for that arbitrage, the less effective it is. As a grid user, I'd rather the grid own and operate those batteries. Certainly some of my outages are due to line issues between me and the substation, but I think more of them are due to line issues between the substation and its upstream. Having storage at the substation could potentially help all the customers and centralize the maintenance and safety burdens. They could do some energy cost arbitrage (although I live in the PNW and we generally don't have time of use cost distinctions, because hydro doesn't care)

I do have a 35 kWh propane fired generator onsite though, which does provide for outages regardless of where the break in the line is.
by masto | 2025-04-28 19:00:49+00:00
Ran it and it crapped out with a huge backtrace. I spotted `./build_bundled.sh: line 21: cmake: command not found` in it, so I guessed I needed cmake installed. `brew install cmake` and try again. Then it crapped out with `Compatibility with CMake < 3.5 has been removed from CMake.`. Then I give up.

This is typical of what happens any time I try to run something written in Python. It may be easier than setting up an NVIDIA GPU, but that's a low bar.
by rangerelf | 2025-04-28 19:01:01+00:00
> I'm interested to see whether the final feature set will be larger than what you'd get by creating a type-safe language with a pythonic syntax and compiling that to native, rather than building custom hardware.

It almost sounds like you're asking for Nim ( https://nim-lang.org/ ); and there are some projects using it for microcontroller programming, since it compiles down to C (for ESP32, last I saw).
by ebiester | 2025-04-28 19:01:27+00:00
I don't think about it in lines of code, but let me say that there are some efficiencies being left on the table.

It helps because I am quicker to run to a script to automate a process instead of handling it manually, because I can bang it out in 15 minutes rather than an hour.

I am more likely to try a quick prototype of a refactor because I can throw it at the idea and just see what it looks like in ten minutes. If it has good testing and I tell it not to change, it can do a reasonable job getting 80% done and I can think through it.

It generates mock data quicker than I can, and can write good enough tests through chat. I can throw it to legacy code and it does a good job writing characterization tests and sometimes catches things I don't.

Sometimes, when I'm tired, I can throw easy tasks at it that require minimal thought and can get through "it would be nice if" issues.

It's not great at writing documentation, but it's pretty good at taking a slack chat and writing up a howto that I won't have the time or motivation to do.

All of those are small, but they definitely add up.

That's today and being compared to 5% improvement. I think the real improvements come as we learn more.
by jklinger410 | 2025-04-28 19:01:54+00:00
I don't see any actual problems in your list.

1. This is not a problem but a feature request that initially is not covered by the proposal (ie no pseudonyms)

2. This is not a relevant problem (red herring) because stealing an identity is already illegal

3. The same password or identity recovering steps as usual (see: FSAID)