MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-18 20:52:08+00:00
Remember in every system people push up to and just as far over the line as they can get away with.

'Good faith' is given when chain of custody is broken. 'Good faith' is given way too much. Either the 4th Amendment is serious enough to have power/force over law enforcement/judicial, or it doesn't. And with good faith, it doesn't.

'our side violated the law but because of the divisions of power, our side didn't violate the law and we are going to give good faith to our side that our side was acting in good faith'. It's all window dressing to say 'the fourth amendment is superseded by other factors that a judge get's to decide at their discretion and the fourth amendment is not in fact the law of the land, a judge can overrule it with 'good faith''.
by pragma_x | 2025-04-18 20:53:31+00:00
> if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo.

One of the big problems facing logistics across the board is just optimization. But at some point, you run out of intuition to uncover more efficiencies. This space is actually a really good use for AI. In fact, it's even useful for predicting what to put on that boat ahead of when it's ordered/purchased (up to a point). So yes, longer shipping times might not be that big a deal for non-perishables and frozen products.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-18 20:54:04+00:00
It is extremely convenient when filling in online forms, giving an address over the phone, or when getting into a non-app taxi.

Web forms and the in-car navigation prompt first for the postcode, then present a list of the full addresses and you pick one.

Over the phone, "W10 6TR" also avoids needing to spell anything, and I encourage you to search Google for it.

There's also some human readable part. The W means West London, people who live in West or South West London will be familiar with some numbers - W10 is Ladbrook Grove. B is Birmingham, BS is Bristol, BT is Belfast etc.
by merridew22 | 2025-04-18 20:54:06+00:00
This essay explains the leaps and bounds made by Indian mathematicians in topics like infinite series expansions well before the Western world caught hold of them, and references the desire to make Madhava more of a household name when it comes to Calculus education. I’m learning Calculus as a challenging side-hobby, and have been motivating myself with ADHD friendly micro tasks like learning about the background of trig and inverse trig functions. It’s hard to believe how much math we’ll never get to read about because of lost works from Indian mathematicians like Madhava.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-04-18 20:54:09+00:00
>Why do you speak so confidently around something you clearly know nothing about?

I know about as much as you my man. I could sit here and throw links at you, and neither of us would leave thinking any different.

I am not gonna argue about AOC. I think you might be right as it seems like the top stories now support the theory that she is not rich (despite ostentatious things like showing up in a $12k dress to a charity event) and I don't have time to research it now. But there are many members of congress that are far sketchier than her. Such as the queen of insider trading, Nancy Pelosi.

Trump is definitely rich, and has been at least since the 80s. He has done some sketchy stuff, but it's not even close to what happens routinely in Congress. He is not accepting his salary as POTUS either. Has that ever happened before? But here you are trying to spin it like he has no money, or else he owes it all to Russians who somehow have him on a leash.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-18 20:54:29+00:00
Bad analogy but I'll try it:

I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule

In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
by testing22321 | 2025-04-18 20:54:32+00:00
“Gasoline’s dirty secret: it’s toxic, expensive and using it kills the planet.”

This type of framing is utterly pointless, and tries to make out like electric propulsion shouldn’t be used for anything because it’s not ideal for everything.

Even if we never get to everyday electric planes (debatable), that has zero bearing on the fact electric cars are already excellent for many uses.
by mandevil | 2025-04-18 20:54:41+00:00
At one point they discussed jettisoning the landing stage of the LM, for less mass so that the PC+2 burn would get them home faster, but most of the batteries and O2 tanks on the LM were in the descent stage (4 of the 6 batteries, I don't remember the distribution of the tanks) so dropping the landing stage made their other problems even worse. The landing stage stayed attached to the ascent stage for the entire life of Odyssey, and was dumped into a deep trench in the Pacific Ocean because there was a nuclear RTG to power the ALSEP attached to one of the legs of the lander.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-18 20:55:04+00:00
It's a common thing in programming language design and circles where some people like to form little cults of personality around their project. Curtis Yarvin did that with his Urbit project. V-Lang is another good example. I consider Elm an example as well.

They get a few "true believer" followers, give them special privileges like beta access (this case), special arcane knowledge (see Urbit), or even special standing within the community (also Urbit, although many other languages where the true believers are given authority over community spaces like discord/mailing list/irc etc.).

I don't associate in these spaces because I find the people especially toxic. Usually they are high drama because the focus isn't around technical matters but instead around the cult leader and the drama that surrounds him, defending/attacking his decisions, rationalizing his whims, and toeing the line.

Like this thread, where a large proportion is discussion about Blow as a personality rather than the technical merit of his work. He wants it that way, not so say that his work doesn't have technical merit, but that he'd rather we be talking about him.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-18 20:55:21+00:00
The point is clear.

Normally we try to avoid damage - which frequently cannot be fully repaired.

And cleaning up mess is not an efficient use of resources.

Incentive is there to find non-damaging solutions first (Carlo Cipolla warns us about the amount of damage introduced in the system - the balance can be tricky). Cost-Risk-Benefit are due diligence.

...If a NN comes up with better solutions, it has won (the battle)...
by philipkglass | 2025-04-18 20:55:40+00:00
I believe that by 2050 synthetic hydrocarbons made from carbon dioxide and clean electricity will be deliverable at a real (inflation adjusted) cost less than than 3x current oil prices, on an equivalent-energy-content basis. That could more than double the costs of a transatlantic flight, but still wouldn't price it out of reach of the upper middle class.

Synthetic methanol made with renewable energy has already been commercialized on a modest scale:

https://carbonrecycling.com/technology

Methanol can be reformed to kerosene as a drop-in replacement for oil derived jet fuel:

"Fischer-Tropsch & Methanol-based Kerosene"

https://aireg.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/airegWebinar_FT_...
by heisenbit | 2025-04-18 20:55:44+00:00
Numbers are thrown around without making sure like is compared with like. The central argument is energy density and is supported by handwaving and a broken link to https://www.technologyreview.com/energy which does not exist and likly moved to https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/climate-change/ but that is not even an article but just a section there.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-18 20:55:55+00:00
You would think that Cursor's leadership would be aware of other cases where LLM customer support went awry - e.g. that Canadian airline whose chatbot promised a bereavement discount, ending with a judge ordering them to honor the chatbot's BS.

I suspect Cursor told themselves that they are super-smart AI experts who would never make an amateur mistake like the airline, they will use prompt engineering + RAG. With this, it will be unpossible that the LLM could make a mistake.
by vel0city | 2025-04-18 20:55:57+00:00
Maybe I'm being less charitable to Catholic churches on that. Truly a lot of Christian churches have failed on their messaging to others from what I've seen, and it's probably not just a Catholic thing. It's not like Joel Osteen is really sharing a truly Christian life and theology.

The fact there's a lot of people in this thread with this understanding should point to a lot of people not getting it though. I mean this is a whole thread of people not getting why it's "Good Friday" yet the Catholic Church has supposedly been preaching this point for over a thousand years.

I'm truly not anti-Catholic. I do think Catholics are unfairly painted by a lot of Protestants. As someone who walks between both worlds on a daily basis there's a lot of untruths and misunderstandings about Catholics out there.
by CPLX | 2025-04-18 20:55:58+00:00
Monopoly, and the degree to which Google obtained a monopoly in the defined market examined in this case, is a legal question. So indeed it does matter what a judge decides after a trial where the evidence was examined and a conclusion reached.

You might even argue that there’s no other definition less abitrary than this one, and it’s your understanding of what the word means that needs revision.
by estebank | 2025-04-18 20:56:19+00:00
> Don’t be put off by the memelord persona

One can be put off by whatever one is put off by. I've gotten to the point where I realized that I don't need to listen to everyone's opinion. Everyone's got some. If one opinion is important, it will like the shared by more than one person. From that it follows that there's no need to subject oneself to specific people one is put off by. Or put another way: if there's an actionable critique, and two people are stating it, and one is a dick and the other isn't, I'll pay attention to the one who isn't a dick. Life's to short to waste it with abrasive people, regardless of whether that is "what is in their heart" or a constructed persona. The worst effect of the "asshole genius" trope is that it makes a lot of assholes think they are geniuses.
by baq | 2025-04-18 20:56:33+00:00
You don’t need to rant when it’s enough to show that a few dozen airliners consume a day’s worth of a nuclear reactor power production (for some size of an airplane and a nuclear reactor; we should be accurate within an order of magnitude). Imagine every single airport needing its own huge ass power plant and you get your point across in an HN comment.

Not sure what’s the point in attacking physicists, either. They should be the first ones pointing this out and I can’t imagine one not nodding in agreement.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-18 20:57:00+00:00
'Your constitutional rights were violated but tough luck, nothing can be done about it because the court is extending special 'good faith' courtesy to the police that you don't get (some animals are more equal than others in court decisions/considerations when minor laws (the fourth amendment) are broken)'.

And people wonder why American's are apathetic to it all. A judge can just wave away constitutional violations all day/every day because 'good faith'.
by 0x20cowboy | 2025-04-18 20:57:34+00:00
I’ve written a pure C Mac desktop app in 2024 that called the objective-c bindings directly. It is using a modified version of this library https://github.com/ColleagueRiley/RGFW

While I don’t think that library does iOS specifically, you can have a look at the code to see how you can call objective-c from c. Spoiler: doing so kind of sucks, and also the library code isn’t the most elegant thing I’ve seen.
by leereeves | 2025-04-18 20:58:47+00:00
> Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others

In theory, perhaps, but in practice nothing is being done to help boys. In fact, DEI programs in universities continue to favor young women even as they approach 60% of students.

We're all familiar with Girls Who Code, Women in STEM, and similar organizations. Where are equivalent organizations for young men?

Would it even be possible to start such an organization without being ostracized as a bigot?
by toast0 | 2025-04-18 20:59:30+00:00
I suspect that there's niches where battery electric boats and maybe planes do make sense.

My state's ferry system is investing in electrifying, because they project it reduce operating costs. The 'easy' part is moving towards hybrid systems that can move with diesel or battery; this is projected to save fuel even without shore charging. The hard part will be making shore charging work. Our grid is mostly hydro, so switching from diesel to electric should be better for emissions and the operating budget.

If the routes were longer, shore charging wouldn't be very relevant, but they're short enough that many routes could work without diesel most of the time.
by dcminter | 2025-04-18 20:59:39+00:00
I'm kind of hazy about where the boundaries between bona fide UML and PlantUML are, but PlantUML is in pretty common use in my world - more for sequence diagrams and state diagrams than class diagrams though. Of course PlantUML has competition from things like Mermaid, but they're all much of a muchness.

My very non-scientific impression is that tools like Rational were mostly used for drawing class diagrams and ... that just turned out not to be that useful because the tooling didn't exist to round-trip changes in the code back into the diagrams meaning the diagrams lost parity with the code rather quickly. It was sort of useful in the linear design/code/deliver world, but we're a lot more iterative now.
by epicureanideal | 2025-04-18 21:00:42+00:00
Why is there a segment of the population that wants to live in poverty and squalor?

How much pollution is okay? Why not argue for efficiency standards rather than bans?

Everything could be said to “harm people”. Banning travel could make some people depressed and who knows what that could lead to? Or it might lead to a less connected world and less familiarity with people in other places, and maybe makes wars more likely?
by mertleee | 2025-04-18 21:01:00+00:00
I think the author here maliciously ascribed "all companies being evil" with mega-corp HR practices and working for a dysfunctional "family business" run by awful people.

I've had startups in the past with co-founders like this. Seemingly nice sales-guy types who turn out just to be awful people with no real respect for others or class.

I always mark the people more than the org. Do your best to work with honest good people and dividends will always be paid.
by neilv | 2025-04-18 21:01:34+00:00
I used to work heavily in this kind of system modeling (developing tools for it, and dogfooding), and still use it when high-value for figuring out or communicating an aspect of a system.

Here's a challenge, to help appreciate the nature of these: try to find an error in the diagrams.

It's usually harder than you might think, since, even when you know the notation and metamodel semantics, it's information-dense talking about a domain.

You usually have to know or learn a lot about the domain, and/or have an domain expert you can walk through it exhaustively, before you can find errors.

And an error can be whopper: a single graph edge missing, or between the wrong vertices, or with the wrong adornments can have huge implications.

For example, large amounts of work that have to be redone, or a project abandoned, or a mess that takes 10x longer than it should to write, and 10x the tech debt going forward with a bad architecture, or a fundamental security flaw.

One of the mistakes many people make is treating formalized diagrams as "marketecture" visuals, like they only need for handwaving sales presentation slides, where there's some kind of visual for every concept they want to be able to literally point to.

Nope, if you have software engineers and domain experts communicating and reasoning about your system in only the fuzzy terms of sales/exec presentations, you're really stabbing yourself in the face.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-18 21:01:44+00:00
False positives are acceptable if the goal is to generate leads to follow up on. If the detection was due to chance then it won't hold up to further measurement. There's few enough hits that we don't need to worry about being more rigorous (and potentially introducing false negatives) at an earlier stage.

Given the context, a publication seems appropriate. A high profile similar example is when neutrinos supposedly broke the light speed barrier. If the mass media misrepresents things that's hardly the fault of the scientists.
by trhway | 2025-04-18 21:02:55+00:00
Current lithium batteries Tesla - 270+Wh/kg, cheap AliBaba - 250+Wh/kg. Gasoline/jet fuel - 12KWh/kg, with 30% thermodynamic efficiency - 3.6KWh/kg. If one takes into account piston engines weight and their expensive maintenance or how expensive jet engines overall, the electric seems to have a very good niche of short range planes, and for multi-rotor VTOL it is unbeatable.
by darth_avocado | 2025-04-18 21:03:25+00:00
Just build more nuclear power plants. There’s absolutely no reason why modern civilization still needs to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Unlimited electric energy, with a electrified rail network, public transportation and EVs for commuting, should take care of most use cases, except maybe a few where the energy density doesn’t make sense.

And don’t even get me started with the “our grid cannot handle it” nonsense. If it cannot, then make it so that it can. When this country started off, we didn’t say “our roads cannot handle the cars”, instead we built them, quite a lot of them. We can do that again.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-18 21:03:36+00:00
You're conflating "holding accountable" and "letting benefit".

The question isn't whether the police officers who initiated the tower dump should go to jail or be fired, but whether the evidence they obtained would be admissible. It shouldn't be.

Also, a cell tower dump is not an act in good faith - neither in 2020 nor in 2025, regardless of whether the court lets it slide or not.
by ggreer | 2025-04-18 21:03:42+00:00
Why do you say that? Typical fuel consumption values for passenger aircraft are 2.5-4 liters per 100km per passenger. So if you fly 1,000km, you'll use 25-40 liters of fuel. At current prices (around 60 cents per liter), that's $15-25 worth of fuel.

A liter of jet fuel contains 35-38 megajoules of energy, which is around 10 kilowatt-hours. Assuming 5% efficiency of using CO2, water, and cheap solar electricity (3 cents per kwh) to synthesize fuel, the cost of input energy per liter would be around 60 cents, which is the same as current fuel prices. The actual cost would be higher because you need to pay for the plant, workers, consumable catalysts, transporting the fuel to airports, etc. But real world efficiency would likely be higher than 5%. Also solar panels are still getting cheaper and more efficient, so 3 cents per kWh may be considered expensive in a decade.

Even without electric aircraft, there's no reason in principle why aviation needs to be expensive or bad for the environment. If demand for petroleum causes prices to increase enough, synthesized fuels will become economically competitive.
by scoofy | 2025-04-18 21:04:15+00:00
>Because racism is ongoing and negatively impacts people of color, it makes sense to focus where harm is being done.

My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways. When we take a flat reductionist view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities, as the folks of a certain race with a privileged background fill the rolls that ought to be set aside for folks who are still dealing with the significant economic after-effects of a discriminatory past.

>It is a fallacy to think we can’t focus on multiple things at once. Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others.

The point and the problem is that there is no coordination, so if everyone is trying to make a positive impact, it is very likely that we will overshoot. This is always the case when you have an uncoordinated approach to dealing with a lagging indicator.
by dodslaser | 2025-04-18 21:04:26+00:00
>So does a card trick to a chimpanzee (there are videos of them freaking out when a card disappears).

FYI, the reactions in those videos is most likely not to a cool magic trick, but rather a response to an observed threat. Could be the person filming/performing smiling (showing teeth), or someone behind the camera purposely startling it at the "right" moment.
by m463 | 2025-04-18 21:04:42+00:00
I think a better question is - could people practically write macos/ios apps without xcode.

I remember the feeling I first got (decades ago) when moving from C to objective C.

Having an xcodeproj was like the camel's nose under the tent, and then you couldn't go back. And you frequently had a big mess going forward when the next xcode version came out and it wouldn't work.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-18 21:04:42+00:00
Or much more malevolent as well. Just because something novel and fun/entertaining can be done does not mean assholes will not use the same techniques for their gain.

PoCs like this are neat and definitely shows some skillz by the author, but now I'm hoping security types take a look at this to see how vulnerable this could be from asshats.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-18 21:04:55+00:00
Interesting, they've softened their stance. Today, it reads

> In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.

But it used to read

> In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from unknown persons.

(I randomly picked a date and found https://web.archive.org/web/20200111071813/https://sqlite.or... )
by robocat | 2025-04-18 21:06:05+00:00
> the reason is that the pensioners refused to have enough kids

I thought they did have enough kids but that the next generation(s) need to breed faster.

In New Zealand and Australia ~30% of population were born in another country. I suspect our government will try and fix the working-age population hole by more immigration? New Zealand is building houses (necessary when increasing population by 50% through immigration). You can see both higher density and new suburban growth (replacing farmland) in my city of Christchurch.

It is silly to plan your retirement by looking at the situation right now. The economics of demographics will require grim changes. I'm sceptical of retirement funding, superannuation, and house sales. Even preppers seem like they have some sense. There's little information on potential solutions - everything is based on the presumption that decades away will be just like it is today.

New Zealand property market is weird: https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/