MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-04-09 22:37:07+00:00
I have found that second hand shops tend to have a more diverse and rich selection and charity shops can have very rare gems.

Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.

Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
by walleeee | 2025-04-09 22:37:51+00:00
> Students primarily use AI systems for creating (using information to learn something new)

this is a smooth way to not say "cheat" in the first paragraph and to reframe creativity in a way that reflects positively on llm use. in fairness they then say

> This raises questions about ensuring students don’t offload critical cognitive tasks to AI systems.

and later they report

> nearly half (~47%) of student-AI conversations were Direct—that is, seeking answers or content with minimal engagement. Whereas many of these serve legitimate learning purposes (like asking conceptual questions or generating study guides), we did find concerning Direct conversation examples including: - Provide answers to machine learning multiple-choice questions - Provide direct answers to English language test questions - Rewrite marketing and business texts to avoid plagiarism detection

kudos for addressing this head on. the problem here, and the reason these are not likely to be democratizing but rather wedge technologies, is not that they make grading harder or violate principles of higher education but that they can disable people who might otherwise learn something
by Spivak | 2025-04-09 22:37:53+00:00
This makes for a good sound bite but it's just not true. The use case of "show me what is a customary solution to <problem>" plays exactly into LLMs strength as a funny kind of search engine. I used to (and still do) search public code for this use case to get a sense of the style and idioms common in a new language/library and the plausible set of tokens is doing exactly that.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-09 22:38:16+00:00
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying. I agree with what you're saying in this comment.

On the topic of:

> whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?

No, I don't believe that at all - which is why I keep saying the current situation is an anomaly, a brief moment in time. LLMs deployed in form of general-purpose chatbots/agents are giving too much power to the people, which is already becoming disruptive to many businesses, so that power will be gradually taken away. Expect less general-purpose AI agents, and more "AI powered features" that shackle LLMs behind some limited UI, to ensure you can only get as much benefit from AI as it fits the vendors' business strategies.
by immibis | 2025-04-09 22:38:53+00:00
The US appears to be trying to end the reserve dollars. Something that surprisingly few people have mentioned recently is that having the biggest trade deficit is the same thing as being the global reserve currency. Because they're the same thing, ending one of them also ends the other.

There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get human rights, then they stop being driven like slaves and coast off the accumulated power, but forget the basic principles of wealth creation in the process (see also "good times create weak men" etc) and just spend all their resources arguing about who gets the wealth that is there instead of creating more. And I'm not saying that in an individualist framework - the reason individuals can't do it is a problem with the whole society, not with those individuals.
by hermannj314 | 2025-04-09 22:40:03+00:00
The one computer system that has all my lab results, knows every doctor I have ever visited and has every summary of every medical visit I have had in the last 5 years doesn't want to use the data it is storing to suggest a follow-up?

That sounds like a quid pro quo with some trigger shy lawyers. I can't possibly imagine the long game for Epic is to never use that. It is a shame people are dying of HPV caused cancers because Epic can't use the data it has. Sad. Probably why American medical outcomes are so poor.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-09 22:40:36+00:00
Yes, project 2025[1] is our own cultural revolution/great leap forward.

The authors said: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/03/heritage-...
by bentt | 2025-04-09 22:40:50+00:00
UBI is great on an individual level, but as we saw with the Covid Stimulus payments in the US, they cannot help but be quite inflationary. That's my biggest worry about injecting huge amounts of money into a system that is truly universal.

And if it's not truly universal, then it's a bad idea. Means tested money is just an incentive to fit the criteria.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-09 22:41:34+00:00
> Length that the asset can provide power in a grid failure (multi day isn't possible at this point except incredibly small load profiles).

You gave some personal experiences, so I will match yours. We had a 6.6kW solar panels, with a 4.8kW battery. We lived in a flood zone at the time, so I got a generator after the second time I dumped the meat in the freezer after loss of power.

With all that in place had the usual episode of weeks of wet weather (the monsoons), became an island, the power is disconnected because houses around us (but not us) are inundated as the power company doesn't like being blamed for killing people. The generator was a fail because it couldn't handle the startup load from the fridge and freezer motors.

I didn't have high hopes for the battery. Boy, was I wrong. Turns out 4.8kW is enough to drive everything overnight except hot water, air-con and 2 hour roasts in the oven. And I do mean everything - lights, TV, internet, cooking (well, fast heating), washing machines using cold water, fridges and freezes. It also turns out that a 6.6kW of solar can bring that battery to full charge during the day, even with blanket cloud cover and pissing down rain.

And to your point - it will happily do that for years, without fuel or maintenance. As for costs - a few days ago I saw 10kW hour battery advertised on Alibaba for $1,200, with 90 day returns. At that price, it will pay for itself in power costs. If you add in an electric car, it's a complete no-brainer as while electricity costs may be very cheap where you live, car fuel costs won't be. If that car is a BYD (it has a 3.6kW household power outlet), you don't need a house battery just for emergencies.
by fluidwizard | 2025-04-09 22:42:00+00:00
Networking is the most OP "soft skill" one can learn in the long run, takes time to properly have enough people who trust you (and that you trust as well), but its definitely worth it specially in bad times (like the ones we're having right now).

You can also "start small" and network via FOSS communities, I met one of my best friends while contributing to niche projects and we ended up working together because of it.
by 627467 | 2025-04-09 22:42:29+00:00
> we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology

As you state they haven't been "only" copying for a while and my problem with people keep repeating this "logic" (mea culpa) is precisely what's at stake right now: designing and "creating" is critical, but I'd argue that civilization is not made my design or one-off (or limited) editions. Civilization is the ability to innovate in mass production, in doing so, consistently in lower and lower costs. China excels (and will continue to excel) while they continue to appreciate this. The "service sector" world stopped caring about this.
by kranke155 | 2025-04-09 22:42:30+00:00
It’s seems to me that the current “alcohol is bad” messaging coming from health podcasters and influencers (including Andrew Huberman) will be proven wrong in the long term.

Virtually nothing that humans have consumed for thousands of years has been proven to be bad for you after further research. Virtually nothing. The idea that we invented alcohol then consumed it for thousands of years by mistake is ridiculous. It’s like when eggs were bad for you because of cholesterol.

It’s preposterous, and it comes from the excessive focus on measurable outcomes coming from medical testing.

It’s like my neurologist once told me, after a scare, that I was a victim of VOMIT. I asked him what the heck was that - he said Victim of Modern Imaging Technology.

Huberman (etc) are likely following the same pattern. They saw a pattern in the data saying “alcohol is bad”.

What could be better for a health obsessed person? We know alcohol has bad effects, we know alcoholism is a problem. Let’s just say it’s all a problem.

But… Living in a Southern European country, it’s ridiculous. We don’t have the same rates of alcoholism as northern countries, and from that pov, Huberman’s Puritanism just sounds absurd. From that perspective, alcohol is just a mild sedative, with wonderful antidepressant effects.

Seems silly.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-04-09 22:42:33+00:00
Coreboot seems like such a great project. Until you actually try to use the damn thing

I wanted to set up some old Optiplexes with Coreboot for a Windows XP LAN party. I ended up going through several motherboards with bad flashes, both of Core and Libreboot

Eventually I rolled up in their IRC and basically asked what the hell I was doing wrong.

"oh yeah we disabled [some feature]. You need to dump a bunch of firmware blobs first and then add those to the build"

Even after doing that though I found I was able to boot SeaBIOS (but nothing else!) and Windows would similarly just immediately crash and burn trying to load in any capacity. Linux worked "fine"

More annoyingly it was both slower than the vendor firmware and SeaBIOS would also hang on an LSI SAS card I had inserted (I guess it was trying to run the card OptROM?) which was annoying because I wanted to use the machine to flash the card to "IT mode" (aka JBOD mode)
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-04-09 22:42:46+00:00
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.

I often liked the notes people left.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-09 22:42:54+00:00
I mean, even that's something of a misconception. Let's start with an axiom: there are enough people and resources, both locally and universally, to provide every human being with enough to eat every day and a safe place to sleep every night (acts of God notwithstanding). That's an objective truth; technologically and logistically, we are there as a civilization. So a guarantee of access to something that already exists is a matter of policy, not economy. The doomsayers are just wrong on this one, unless the first act of UBI recipients would be to burn farms, blow up the rail network, and release pests into vacant housing, or something (though I don't doubt that this scenario is precisely what they expect; after so many studies, it's safe to call anti-UBI rhetoric a rationalization of unsubstantiated class hysteria).
by Symbiote | 2025-04-09 22:43:43+00:00
Proportionate to the size of each company and the amount of toys they produce, I'll bet there's significantly more variety in Warhammer.

Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.

Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)
by notahacker | 2025-04-09 22:44:01+00:00
> The EU quotas didn't impair them from catching fish, it allowed them to catch fish.

The quotas were a specific limit on how much they could catch, including in domestic waters. A specific gripe with the inshore fleet was that cod quotas were set so low they could in some cases barely avoid hitting their quota limits very quickly fishing off the UK coast. And cod of course, is something they could actually sell to Brits if they were allowed to catch more of it. Of course, the tradeoff was that larger, longer range vessels wanted to be able to fish in other waters, and fish markets wanted to at least be able to attempt to export what we don't eat, so an agreement with the EU was reached. Now it's not unpredictable this agreement didn't involve dismissing DG Mare's views on sustainable fishing levels or denying foreign vessels reciprocal access to British waters, but I wouldn't call the fishermen's hope for considerably fewer restrictions on what they could catch irrational, especially not compared with some of the other rationales...
by rat87 | 2025-04-09 22:44:58+00:00
I think only thing likely to make US go broke is Trump's actions.

DOGE doesn't save any money. Not only because it's created many legal messes that will take forever to work out in court but because most of those jobs are important and will eventually need to be replaced at great cost and with worse results. Also some of those jobs are for auditing inefficiency and prosecuting corruption resulting in more money spent. And on top of it all they'll be using these non existent savings to justify much larger tax cuts for the rich.

The reason it looks stupid is because it is. It's not that Trump is purely dumb he's just intellectually lazy and doesn't care about policy. He long ago decided he likes tarrifs on instinct so he put massive tarrifs despite the warnings that they would be disastrous
by didericis | 2025-04-09 22:45:33+00:00
Likewise. I enjoy commenting here because it’s one of the few places online where there’s actually discourse, and I like to think conversations like these have trickle effects/lead to more cross pollination and rational outcomes. Your pushback is valid; there’s a very real danger of getting too much in bed with Trump’s base and letting dumb populism overrule any need for strategic pivots if this doesn’t end up working. There was also some interesting pushback about European market demand for US weapons being more important than supply chain security which I hadn’t considered from the strategic angle; I don’t think I agree that it’s more important than eliminating foreign chokepoints in US military supply chains, but that’s a point in favor of these tariffs being too blunt and extreme an instrument for addressing the need to boost domestic industrial capacity for the defense industry.

I’ll keep an open mind as well. I hope things eventually work out for the best, but we’ll see what happens.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-09 22:46:58+00:00
I don't even think the market manipulation argument stands. That gives them too much credit.

Trump's hand was forced and he had to retreat. Like the market kept having little bursts before this, based simply on the core reality that this is a trade war that the US cannot stomach without extraordinary financial damage, so everyone just kept waiting for the out. It is far more exposed and doesn't have the "cards", as Trump says, that they think they have.

The guy really, really wants his tariffs, so who knows where we even are now. He will not, under any circumstance, back down. We saw that with Canada -- various pauses, then steel and aluminum tariffs, then car tariffs, then a 25% across the board tariff for non USMCA compliant goods. First he even targeted USMCA. Based upon a lie. He desperately wants these tariffs, and as the very special person he is, he has learned absolutely nothing from today and will be back at the trough when he thinks he gets another go.

The most amazing thing are the Trump faithful who hold this as a win. This is quite possibly the most disastrous outcome of all -- the uncertainty. It is going to be economic calamity for the US.

But maybe Trump can announce that Uganda has removed a tariff or something.
by whstl | 2025-04-09 22:47:12+00:00
Entity Framework is in a completely different class from pretty much every ORM out there, with only a handful of exceptions. Even ActiveRecord in Rails is a toy compared to it.

Even back when it was launched EF was miles ahead of most mature ORMs of today, and I believe your 95% number. But other than EF plus a handful of other mature ORMs, the 95% number looks more like 50%.

I would even argue that new-ish ORMs are virtually useless for anything that's not CRUD, and that the CRUD part can be 100% replaced seamlessly by something like PostgREST/Supabase or Hasura without losing much.

I don't disagree with the feeling in general, but I feel like we are making mistakes by having as much faith in modern ORMs and even libraries in general. Veeeeeeery few things even come close to being 1% as good as Entity Framework, ASP.NET, Rails, Postgres or SQLite.
by jwrallie | 2025-04-09 22:47:21+00:00
I did it with my X220 last year, it was almost painless because there are several tutorials that I could reference.

There were two downsides, Windows 11 cannot sleep, or rather it sleeps but cannot wake up anymore, and you cannot adjust permanently the default drive (I believe you can if you reflash).

For people using Linux it works perfectly, and accessing the chip is quite easy, you don’t need a full disassemble.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-09 22:47:41+00:00
Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits?

But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-09 22:48:49+00:00
Hitler for one always bragged about eradicating all unemployment in a stroke by ordering the autobahn projects.

The core of the problem today is this: With modern tools, a modern worker gets 100 times more work done than a worker without modern tools. And you need to hire people who can use those modern tools and are trustable. Now, for most jobs you can train anybody to do it, but you cannot train people to be trustable and not destroy or steal your modern tools.

The massive infrastructure projects and massive industrial projects of the past could swallow all the workers you could throw at them. And it didn't matter much at all if a worker was any combination of a drunk, a brawler, somebody who didn't speak the language, involved with organized crime at his spare time. As long as he did his job. But today, the very specialized and efficient tools are too sensitive and you want to be careful who gets near them and operates them.

Putting the unemployed to do big infrastructure projects or similar is still better than them doing nothing – but mostly for their own development and spirits, rather than the actual work being done.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-09 22:49:21+00:00
The things that break in C if /proc/self or the terminfo DB are missing will break in Go and Zig too.

What I think you might mean is something like: "in modern statically linked applications written with languages like Go and Zig, it is much less likely for the them to call on OS services that require these sorts of resources".
by whiterook6 | 2025-04-09 22:49:38+00:00
I'm on my phone, trying this. It's a question about how many people are in the air right now.

- when I tap on a factor, I can edit the slider, but it doesn't do anything.

- when I tap another factor, the previous editor stays in place.

- how do I choose my factor?

- where do I actually do the multiplication?

- where do I check my answer?

- why do the factors have "grab icons" (the six dots)? Why would I drag one?

https://imgur.com/a/QSRBbYR

Etc.
by userbinator | 2025-04-09 22:50:03+00:00
Took one look at Coreboot/Libreboot a while back, and decided I'll go the "classic" BIOS-modding route (which I have a lot more experience with) instead.

I DO NOT WANT TO ONLY HAVE MBR BOOTING

Incidentally, I'd consider MBR boot an advantage compared to UEFI. As Linus says, it's "this other Intel brain-damage".
by colechristensen | 2025-04-09 22:50:32+00:00
Either the vaccine has notable safety issues or it should be at least fine to get the vaccine at an older age.

The reason many people don't trust the CDC's advice is they don't really tell you why or why not.

If you're over 26 you're pretty likely to already be exposed to HPV but not necessarily every strain which would be protected by the vaccine (as it says in the article).

So this pushes the question: why shouldn't I get it even if there's only a small chance it will be beneficial at my age? Is there really a risk they're not telling me about or are they giving bullshit answers? There isn't a third direction.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-09 22:50:56+00:00
That's fine, but "Brexit voters were generally irrational or misinformed" does not change the fact that this particular case features Brexiters who voted cynically for an outcome that they were assured would happen by the very people who were seeking to prevent Brexit, who were then justifiably upset when those predictions didn't come to pass. It's not a good example of the irrationality of Brexit. Maybe of the futility of attempted revenge.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-09 22:51:53+00:00
Medical ethics focus on the benefit to a specific individual - your patient.

This defuses the "Should I kill one to save ten?" moral dilemma - the individual is your patient, even if the other ten are also your patients, you must not harm the one. But for vaccines it also means that the wider societal implications are not ethically relevant

So, medics won't recommend that you give patient A an intervention which is of no benefit to A but is really helpful for everybody else. For example, that you vaccinate teenage boys in the expectation that this way they won't infect teenage girls (with whom statistically many of them will have sex) with an STI that harms those girls.

As a result, the guidance cared about proven benefits to you even though taken neutrally you might have been enthusiastic about a vaccine that might or might not protect you but is definitely a good idea for the wider population. The initial studies understandably focused on the numerically larger problem: If we vaccine young female patients does that prevent relevant HPV infections, and then, as a proxy we might assume they also won't get cancer. Such studies can't tell you whether it prevents men getting cancer because that wasn't measured.

So the recommendation to vaccinate boys was delayed because first somebody has to study what might seem obvious - does the vaccine also prevent HPV related cancers in males? It is, after all, possible that some subtle mechanism means the vaccine isn't effective for this purpose, and it would not be ethical to give schools full of boys a vaccine that they personally do not benefit from having - even if societally maybe that's a good choice.

Beyond the female/ male differential, for adults and older, it's basically a stats game. Most adults have sex. Having sex means you're likely to contract HPV, more sex, more exposure. Is it worth getting vaccinated when there's a 50% chance it's useless? How about 95%? 99.5%? Do you always wait for the crossing lights? Did you ever drink beer or eat bacon ?