MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by remarkEon | 2025-04-20 04:55:46+00:00
I'm applying the same logic, I'm not simplifying anything. You are using the word "humanity" to mean something different from what the rest of the thread is talking about. To address what I think your point is, many wish to expand the malleability of basic biological concepts based on edge cases. Edge cases for which we already have definitions and categories. You are doing so now, by attempting to entrench ambiguity on the entire concept of "woman" by observing that the woman in TFA was born with a specific, heritable, abnormality that prevented the nominal development of a uterus.
by Natsu | 2025-04-20 04:55:46+00:00
Someone is either guessing the passwords, which may well be the same all over the city given the number of these devices out there, or cities could just be using the default password of 1234. Yes, really:

https://www.polara.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Polara-iN2...

> PASSWORD ISSUES: The iCCU can be connected to thru Wi-Fi. The buttons can be connected to thru Bluetooth. A. Once Wi-Fi is turned on at the iCCU, the Wi-Fi password is DEFAULT1 (ALL CAPS). B. Following power up, each button will say “change password” every 30 seconds, until the default password is changed. There is one shared password for logging into an iCCU and all PBS connected to it. The factory default password is 1234. Using a Field Service app, use 1234 to log into the iCCU or any PBS the first time, and change the password. This changes the password for all PBS and the iCCU. See Section 5.2 in the Manual for details. C. If the password is unknown, a Password Reset requires a call to Polara Tech Support.
by sublinear | 2025-04-20 04:55:55+00:00
I agree. I think the actual problem is that the student is trying to comprehend what it means for anything to have mathematical value other than explicit numbers.

Numbers and letters are taught together, but not as symbols. Letters are taught with sounds and numbers are taught with counting. The notion of a symbol isn't really emphasized much.

I would explain it more like after

[ ] + 2 = 5

what happens if you need more than one box for a complicated problem? Teach the idea that saying box #3 is equivalent to assigning an arbitrary letter for whatever reason you want, but that people more familiar with math prefer letters because they stand in for words that describe what the number is for. You might want to use 'c' for the number of cats you're trying to figure out.

In a room of five animals two are dogs. How many cats?

a = 5, c = ?, d = 2

a = c + d

so... 5 = c + 2

what is c?

Light bulb goes off: "You can do that?" Yes, you can do whatever you want and it's not all about carrying the one or whatever other rote teaching they've been given. They can get creative and be engaged, and then you let them know that actually there are some conventions people like to use for what they're trying to do. They might even believe they've invented a new idea. At least they're having fun.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-20 04:57:24+00:00
The biggest advantage of VSCode is that it "just works". The UI is very intuitive, you can just install it and start coding. Meanwhile you can make a whole academic career out of "how to set up vim and Emacs", which is indeed fun in its own way, but it's not what most people need.

To give some kind of comparison, I love getting lost in C++ documentation and writing complex templates. It's a form of art. But when I want to actually write a program that does something, I do it in python, because it allows me to focus on the problem, rather than the tool.

I don't see this problem being resolved in near future. The core philosophy being vim and Emacs is incompatible with the idea of IDE that "just works".
by XorNot | 2025-04-20 05:00:30+00:00
This is a naive view of propaganda: everyone always says "well, they're not trying to achieve <overtly obvious goal>" therefore there could be no benefit!

Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a startup but with much broader success criteria.

Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.
by sagarpatil | 2025-04-20 05:01:05+00:00
If I have to be so cautious while using a tool might as well write the code myself lol. I’ve used Claude Code extensively and it is one of the best AI IDE. It just gets things done. The only downside is the cost. I was averaging $35-$40/day. At this cost, I’d rather just use Cursor/Windsurf.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-20 05:01:31+00:00
I think it should be possible to build something that generalises the idea of Web of Trust so that it's more flexible, and less prone to catastrophic breakdown past some scaling limit.

Binary "X trusts Y" statements, plus transitive closure, can lead to long trust paths that we probably shouldn't actually trust the endpoints of. Could we not instead assign probabilities like "X trusts Y 95%", multiply probabilities along paths starting from our own identity, and take the max at each vertex? We could then decide whether to finally trust some Z if its percentage is more than some threshold T%. (Other ways of combining in-edges may be more suitable than max(); it's just a simple and conservative choice.)

Perhaps a variant of backprop could be used to automatically update either (a) all or (b) just our own weights, given new information ("V has been discovered to be fraudulent").
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-20 05:01:46+00:00
And remember kids: there's hundreds of CAs, they all implement validation independently, and you just need one to do one of the three validation methods wrong to make any cert you want. And there's two dozen different attacks that work aside from bugs in validation. Cert validation is swiss cheese.

But there's a fix: have the registrars confirm authority to issue certs using a public key uploaded by the domain owner. The CSR contains a request signed by the same domain owner key. The CA sends the CSR to the registrar, the registrar verifies it was signed by the same key they have, then they send back a newly signed object (that the eventual-https-end-user can later confirm was signed by the registrar, so everybody knows that every step of the way was confirmed cryptographically). This ensures a single secure authorization by the actual domain owner, verified by the registrar of the domain. All you have to change is how the CA validates, and the registrar needs to handle an extra step or two. Solves 95% of the vulnerabilities.

....but nobody's going to do that, because the fact that Web PKI is swiss cheese hasn't threatened a big enough business yet. Once money or politics is threatened, they'll fix it.
by paradite | 2025-04-20 05:02:58+00:00
I think you should try more tools and use cases.

Yes some of the current AI coding tools will fail at some use cases and tasks, but some others tools might give you good results. For example, Devin is pretty bad at some trivial frontend tasks in my testing, but cursor is way better.

I have good success with web development and JavaScript in particular, on several large codebases.

I also built my own AI coding and eval tools that suits my needs, though cursor has largely replaced the AI coding tool that I built.
by dahart | 2025-04-20 05:03:01+00:00
> They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias.

Why would they? With Wikipedia being freely and always available and up to date, and most/all for-profit encyclopedias being online now, who goes to the library to use a paper encyclopedia? Have you used a paper encyclopedia recently? I haven’t for decades, but I still visit the library. Google tells me World Book is the only encyclopedia left doing print runs, and it’s more geared toward students, so maybe only purchased by schools. I wouldn’t hold up paper encyclopedias as evidence of what the library has or doesn’t have.
by sublinear | 2025-04-20 05:03:11+00:00
The semantic meaning of a blank is much better understood to everyone than an arbitrary letter like 'x'.

People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value. They might even think how can 24 + 2 = 5? They just want something to grab onto and nobody is really teaching the concept of a symbol in a math class.
by Centigonal | 2025-04-20 05:03:15+00:00
yeah, but you can't, that's the problem. Plenty of service operators would like to block every scraper that doesn't obey their robots.txt, but there's no good way to do that without blocking human traffic too (Anubis et al are okay, but they are half-measures).

On a separate note, I believe open web scraping has been a massive benefit to the internet on net, and almost entirely positive pre-2021. Web scraping & crawling enables search engines, services like Internet Archive, walled-garden-busting (like Invidious, yt-dlp, and Nitter), mashups (Spotube, IFTT, and Plaid would have been impossible to bootstrap without web scraping), and all kinds of interesting data science projects (e.g. scraping COVID-19 stats from local health departments to patch together a picture of viral spread for epidemiologists).
by ChiperSoft | 2025-04-20 05:03:39+00:00
It probably isn’t burnout, but if you keep pushing against it then you will burnout.

I felt the exact same way in pretty much the same timeline, and then burned out hard last year from trying to force myself to work when all the joy had already fled.

Personally, I think it’s a systemic problem with the industry as a whole, which has been made even worse by the rapid pivot towards LLMs. Somewhere around 2018 I realized that I don’t actually like writing software for other people any more. The projects no longer excite or challenge me, it’s just more of the same.
by nine_k | 2025-04-20 05:04:20+00:00
Certainly, having a mother and a father is pretty traditional!

But past a toddler age, in a large clan-like structure, if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

This question is moot in a nuclear-family society, with relatives beside father and mother minding their own children, and not more.
by sazimi13 | 2025-04-20 05:05:57+00:00
Thanks for sharing this video, I am also interested in this exact thing. However from my understanding with an approach like this you are limited by the size of the image sensor, meaning if my surface has a bump that is larger than the size of the image sensor it would not get measured. Any idea on how to make something like this work if the goal was to measure slightly larger topographical changes at a less granular resolution like in the 100mm range?
by mikhailfranco | 2025-04-20 05:07:51+00:00
Reminds me of Feynman Checkerboard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_checkerboard

and the work of David Hestenes:

Zitterbewegung in Quantum Mechanics

https://davidhestenes.net/geocalc/pdf/ZBWinQM15**.pdf

Zitterbewegung structure in electrons and photons

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11085

Zitterbewegung Modeling

https://davidhestenes.net/geocalc/pdf/ZBW_mod.pdf
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-20 05:10:00+00:00
I agree, but the harm done to the users is only one part of the total harm. I think it's quite plausible that many users wouldn't mind some small amount of their bandwidth being used, if it meant being able to use a handy browser extension that they would otherwise have to pay actual dollars for -- but the harm done to those running the servers remains.
by tianqi | 2025-04-20 05:12:05+00:00
This story makes me remember that I had heard a fun fact a long time ago that many people have never actually seen the colour "violet" which is a single wavelength of visible light. Because there are very few things that reflect only this wavelength in reality. The purple colour we see is formed from a mixture of red and blue, whether it's something in nature, screen displaying or printing. I was so intrigued that I bought a 405nm laser torch and invited some friends to a home party to ‘See the real violet’. That single wavelength of purple really made a different experience, and with good friends, we had a great day.

The olo experiment was very interesting, and it told me that today we even have the technology to stimulate a single cone cell one by one in time. I know that we can't accurately display the olo on screen right now, which also prevents any of these articles from actually containing a picture of the olo. I think it's very close to #00FFEE, and I'm making it the colour of my Hacker News's top bar.
by sitkack | 2025-04-20 05:12:08+00:00
We overfocus on brain volume, when we should be calculating the number of neurons and neuron size varies wildly.

I can't find the original video, but Suzana Herculano-Houzel developed a technique to measure total neuron counts by liquefying the brain and then counting the cell nucleus density / volume.

WSU Master Class: Big Brains, Small Brains with Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3TcfGoBY

(nice short popsci intro) The woman who turns brains into soup: Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://youtu.be/d2Uhv0_Ji1k?t=362 (talks about racoon and bird brains)

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/09/07/brainiac-with-her-inn...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This paper is really fun, "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: the case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Brains-matter%2C-bodie...
by hubraumhugo | 2025-04-20 05:13:24+00:00
We all agree that AI crawlers are a big issue as they don't respect any established best practices, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was mostly fine. There are many very legitimate use cases for browser automation and data extraction (I work in this space).

So what are potential solutions? We're somehow still stuck with CAPTCHAS, a 25 years old concept that wastes millions of human hours and billions in infra costs [0].

How can enable beneficial automation while protecting against abusive AI crawlers?

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-20 05:13:38+00:00
> because if you knew what it was you wanted, then you would already have stored it.

"Content-addressable" has a broader meaning than what you seem to be thinking of -- roughly speaking, it applies if any function of the data is used as the "address". E.g., git commits are content-addressable by their SHA1 hashes.
by xp84 | 2025-04-20 05:14:35+00:00
Most cities and towns were built hundreds of years before most cities and towns in America were, so they're dense (because people needed to walk everywhere), which is perfect for rail.

Take a look at a satellite view of the suburban areas where most Americans actually live. They're mostly post-1950 and were built with basically the opposite assumptions as Europe:

1. Homes spaced generously with residential districts stretching out tens of miles in every direction from the dense-ish core.

2. Homes fully isolated from business districts (i.e. anywhere anyone would want to go)

3. High-speed arterial stroads or, in tonier suburbs, basically expressways, which serve as the connection between neighborhoods.

4. Offices and other workplaces dispersed into strip malls, long stroads, and industrial parks throughout an area, rather than concentrated in a primary central business district.

Turning all that into a cool Dutch city or town where people are going to bike or take trains everywhere pretty much requires bulldozing and starting again. Again I say this with no judgment, I think 'Not Just Bikes,' for instance, makes a perfectly good case that our way is lame and the Dutch are doing great. But realistically I would never hold my breath expecting the US to transform even 1/10 of the way to the Europe style of transport.
by croes | 2025-04-20 05:17:11+00:00
Exactly, kudos to the author because AI didn’t came up with that.

But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI.

The question is, is it worth to put all that money and energy in AI. MS sacrificed its CO2 goals for email summaries and better autocomplete not to mention all the useless things we do with AI
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-04-20 05:21:04+00:00
Uh...no...

It would be completely bonkers for an antiemetic to commonly induce an emetic urge in any but rare exceptional cases.

Most seasickness drugs are just first-generation antihistamines sometimes combined with a caffeine analogue to counteract the sleepiness.

Dramamine/Gravol (dimenhydrinate) is just benadryl (diphenhydramine) plus the caffeine analogue theophylline.

Bonine/DramamineII (meclizine) is also a first-generation antihistamine.

Promethazine is also a first-generation antihistamine.

Non-antihistamine antiemetics like ondansetron or scopolamine transdermal patches require a prescription from a doctor and therefore aren't commonly used for motion sickness except for occupational seafarers. And it would still be absolutely stupid if the drugs given to prevent nausea commonly caused nausea.
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-20 05:21:25+00:00
> You claimed both that the books available to you at your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year old self

I did not.

I said "I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7", and I also said "the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it". This does not imply that at 6/7 the books weren't cutting it. This conversation was about the role of the library throughout my schooling, and as I got older, I wanted more than the library could offer.

> I will say that looking at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books your elementary school actually made available to students.

Look again, with more precise reading comprehension.
by 5- | 2025-04-20 05:24:34+00:00
most likely this very unfortunate misnomer started with fortran, where it was deemed lucrative to point out "how much programs look like mathematic formulas!".

not only is this overloading a symbol (equality) with a completely different meaning (assignment), it is also a poor choice typographically, as it represents a directional operation with a directionless symbol.

using an arrow for assignment is much better.

it's also worth pointing out that unlike most others, logic programming languages (e.g. prolog) have actual variables, not references to mutable or immutable memory cells.
by sema4hacker | 2025-04-20 05:26:21+00:00
In the 80's I wrote a program for the Macintosh that had a customer base of a few thousand users. The "about" dialog featured the program's desktop icon magnified 8 times and doing a simple animation, but if you clicked on that giant moving icon all the magnified bits would individually fall to the bottom of the dialog and eventually bounce away.

Over the roughly 10 year distribution period for that software, one user reported finding the Easter egg.
by mathattack | 2025-04-20 05:27:48+00:00
The power of referrals is going through the roof. It solves both the "1800 resumes and AI generated cover letters" problem, as well as "LLMs during the interview." It helps the HR screener who can justify the interview if it doesn't go well, and gives a lot of data that doesn't appear in interview.

2 impacts to people looking for a job:

1 - The first job just got a lot harder to find.

2 - You have to be proactive about finding someone in the company you want to work for.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-20 05:28:02+00:00
That's a fair point, but what is surprising is that - unlike 99% of exploits one has heard about, over the years - these hackers:

• had some civic-mindedness - enough to leave in the initial 'wait!' audio

• chose messages that, while falling short of comedy genius, are amusing and above the level of an adolescent

• didn't include any extremist nonsense

Grading on a curve, that's a lot to be thankful for.
by udev4096 | 2025-04-20 05:29:00+00:00
Android is so fucking anti-privacy that they still don't have an INTERNET access revoke toggle. The one they have currently is broken and can easily be bypassed with google play services (another highly privileged process running for no reason other than to sell your soul to google). GrapheneOS has this toggle luckily. Whenever you install an app, you can revoke the INTERNET access at the install screen and there is no way that app can bypass it
by foota | 2025-04-20 05:29:50+00:00
My shitpost is that they're lucky they didn't trigger a buffer overflow :-) but really, it doesn't seem completely out of question to me that it's possible that some unintended and serious consequence could occur from your brain receiving some stimulus that it doesn't naturally receive. I guess maybe there's no biological analog, but obviously bad things can happen in circuits, computers, etc., when this happens.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-20 05:31:44+00:00
Assuming the right incentives can be found to prevent widespread leeching, a distributed content-addressed model indeed solves this problem, but introduces the problem of how to control your own content over time. How do you get rid of a piece of content? How do you modify the content at a given URL?

I know, as far as possible it's a good idea to have content-immutable URLs. But at some point, I need to make www.myexamplebusiness.com show new content. How would that work?
by pjmlp | 2025-04-20 05:31:58+00:00
There are COBOL compilers that target JVM and .NET for as long as these technologies exist.

There are also modern compilers to IBM mainframes, including Go, C++, Java, PHP,..

Also outside DevOps and CNCF application space very few people bother with Go, specially not the kind of customers that buy IBM mainframes.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-20 05:32:21+00:00
If a hundred kids throw themselves off the cliff and one learns to fly, it's not oppressive to the one who did learn to fly to prevent other kids from throwing themselves off that same cliff and probably end up like the 99 that didn't.

Now, of course, if 99 kids learned to fly, then the opposite conclusion should be drawn - so, as in all things, we need nuance and a good understanding of the situation, not first principles thinking and anecdotes.
by foota | 2025-04-20 05:34:07+00:00
This is really fascinating to me. I'm amazed they're able to image the cells of the eye with sufficient resolution and speed to achieve this. From the paper, "and targeting 10^5 visible-wavelength laser microdoses per second to each cone cell.".

If I understand correctly, they first use one type of spectroscopy (AO-OCT) to image the eye and build a map classifying the type of cells, and then use AO-SLO to find the positions of cells in real time. I assume that AO-OCT can't image at a sufficient rate for the second part (or they would just use one type?) so they need to first build this classification map, and then use it to match the position of cells to their type (e g., by overlaying the positions of cells with the classifications and making them line up).
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-20 05:34:38+00:00
> which is why they refuse to hold elections

They don't hold elections because it's a war outside.

> China owns Chinese media. Russia owns Russian media.

And china owns russia.

> USAID was funding 90% of Ukrainian media [0].

Good stuff, it still should.

> Don't you think this can be a problem in situations where interests of the two countries don't align?

Why? Funding is money. Funding of free press is supporting a democracy. For comparison Russia instead of funding press funded hired guns and separatists.

One of those "two countries" is a corrupt to the core gas stop. Any country whose interests align with it is going the same way. Ukraine is better than that.

> Was this war good for the Ukraine?

What war? Surely you should say "special military operation" comrade?

Why "was"? The war is ongoing. Russia can't win in.

Wars are bad and that's why people starting wars should eat shit.