MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymars | 2025-05-04 12:55:43+00:00
What about the signed executive order promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce?

https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-...

It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from.

Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?
by WalterGR | 2025-05-04 12:56:24+00:00
Sentencing was in 2009: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/sacramento/press-releases/...

"...sentenced MICHAEL LARGENT, 22, of Plumas Lake, to 15 months’ in prison and restitution of $200,073.44 for fraud and related activity in connection with computers. After release from prison, LARGENT will also face three years of strict restrictions on his use of computers and the Internet."
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-04 12:57:22+00:00
And yet… I’ve seen it done wrong so many times, resulting in either spurious inputs or lost inputs, depending on how it’s been implemented.

I agree with you, don’t let it discourage you from embedded hardware. If you want to be successful in the embedded space, though, this is a great easy example to show that you need to take into account a bunch of physical effects when you’re doing hardware. Capacitors change their value with temperature and applied voltage (!), resistors have capacitance and inductance (which may or may not matter), clock crystals change frequency with temperature, switches bounce, ADCs have sampling capacitors that need to charge, chips power themselves up from active-high TTL lines, etc.

I’ve been doing embedded for 20 years now and one of the biggest things I’ve encountered with new learners is that the Arduino platform is amazing for people to get into the field but they’ll hit a point where something mostly works and they don’t have the rest of the background necessary to debug or understand why it doesn’t work as well as they thought it would. Or works great and then “randomly” blows fuses/burns out of there isn’t a fuse.
by randomtoast | 2025-05-04 12:59:18+00:00
I find one theory regarding Planet 9 especially interesting, and that is that it could be a primordial black hole with a Schwarzschild radius on the order of just a few centimeters. So basically, just a golf ball-sized black hole. This would explain why we can see the gravitational effects on the other objects as described in many papers, and it would also explain at the same time why we have no direct observation of this object, because it's simply too tiny and black.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-04 12:59:21+00:00
Most everyone understands that this is a distraction. Why journalists are caught line, hook, sinker over and over like this is beyond me.

The question is what are they distracting from?

US military going into mexico to be police? lol what?

Russia sanctions because he failed to end the war in ukraine?

Cuts to npr and pbs? inspector generals?

united nations probably going under?

None of these seem right, i must be missing the very controversial thing.
by malmeloo | 2025-05-04 13:01:17+00:00
Open sourcing a piece of software, especially one that focuses on a broader audience like yours, can convince more people than just developers. The advantages of open source are well-known even among less techy people who aren't necessarily interested in self-hosting the application. It's a good way to quickly earn the trust of people who are initially sceptical of your product.

It shows to your potential users that, even if they decided not to trust the developer anymore in the future, they will likely still be able to use your application. Everyone praised Simple Mobile Tools until the developer sold it to an ad company. But because it was open source, people were able to fork the entire suite of apps to continue using them.

There's also a lot of growth potential. draw.io likely wouldn't be integrated into so many other products if it wasn't open source. It allows them to charge money (apparently) for specific integrations, simply because everyone is already familiar with the product.

Typst is another good example. Their compiler is free and open source, but the web app is not. Certain features of their web app require a subscription, which allows them to pay the bills. But I (and many other people) wouldn't be using and recommending it if the core wasn't open source, because if Typst ever disappears, I still want to be able to compile my documents. Currently this might not matter much for your app since PDF is a universal format anyway, but as you flesh out your product, it will become more important.

It's difficult to monetise open source software, but so much more rewarding if it does work out. And your app being targeted at the general public gives you a massive advantage, since the potential market is so much larger.
by twodave | 2025-05-04 13:02:52+00:00
This is such an understated take IMO. In our house we are constantly moving things out to reduce clutter, get rid of unneeded items and, maybe most of all, eliminate the stress of just knowing they’re there. Sometimes we get rid of something we later realize we needed. It’s pretty rare, but when it happens it’s almost never anything expensive. How do you put a price tag on your stress level, though? Just get rid of it and spend the $20-50 if you cut a bit too deep. A few “lessons” like that and you’ll be way more in tune with what you actually need. It’s been years since we had to “rebuy” anything at all.

I still think moving again would be daunting, just because we are a family of 6 and there’s no way to move that much furniture easily, much less all the things that fill that furniture. But at least if it happens we don’t have to move a bunch of trash we can’t easily discern the need for.

EDIT: also “getting rid of stuff” doesn’t necessarily mean throwing it away. If you’re willing to give things away there are a lot of people out there who could actually use the things you’re not. Clothes, kitchen gadgets, kids’ toys… especially toys, we have our kids pick several items before every birthday/Christmas to give away to make room for whatever the family is about to give them.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-04 13:04:48+00:00
I think the remaster may have been an experiment with Unreal Engine on top of Bethesda’s scripting / etc. I love Starfield, it is my favorite BGS game by a wide margin, but Creation Engine 2 is very difficult to work with - the Creation Kit is intolerably slow, I imagine BGS rank and file got very frustrated. Creation also lags with fancy lighting / fog effects, and might not ever support PS5[1], so I can see why Bethesda would explore the option for the next Elder Scrolls.

I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.

[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.
by rahen | 2025-05-04 13:05:36+00:00
If by any chance you're an Emacs user, check out Eshell. It blends Elisp macros with shell commands, and since it keeps the buffer model, you can use all the usual Emacs tools for searching, sorting, and more. It's a unique shell with some learning curve, but it's mature and powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xLeqwl_7n0
by api | 2025-05-04 13:06:12+00:00
I really hope this is true, because it would mean there is a black hole close enough it could be examined and studied. This might allow us to test physics ideas that can’t be tested any other way, and maybe even to “finish” physics.

It could also allow gravity and Oberth effect acceleration of small probes to meaningful fractions of the speed of light for interstellar flyby missions. Imagine the Oberth effect boost from thrusting in such a deep gravity well.
by meristohm | 2025-05-04 13:07:08+00:00
Like others have said, it is healthy to grieve. In some cultures there is a specific amount of time where everyone understands the bereaved won't be doing much other than honoring the dead by paring away all distractions and just existing. That sounds difficult as a US-ian raised on distractions, but I gave it a try several years ago when my dog died. Ended up sharing a good cry with an older lonely neighbor who was also closely bonded with their aging dog, and later I was there for them after their dog passed on- thanks to embracing grief and vulnerability we were less alone in our suffering, but not wallowing either; it felt healthy.

It took me many months before the waves of sadness and loss subsided, and a year or two to where the dominant memories are joy, love, adventure.

All that to say- especially given your fortune, I wouldn't be concerned with what's next at the expense of what's now.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-05-04 13:07:17+00:00
I wish I had an ongoing counter for the amount of times I've asked chatgpt to "generate me python code that will output x data similar to xxd".

Its a snippet I've written a few times before to debug data streams, but it's always annoying to get alignment just right.

I feel like that is the sweet spot for AI, to generate actual snippets of routine code that has no bearing on security or functionality, but lets you keep thinking about the problem at hand while it does that 10 minutes of busy work.
by mjgs | 2025-05-04 13:09:24+00:00
Location: Currently central Europe (UTC+1), very flexible with working hours, can accommodate most timezones, experienced remote worker.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Hi I’m Mark, a Web Developer, Consultant and Automation Engineer originally from the UK. I specialise in devops/system tools, workflow automation integrations, and NodeJS web development.

10+ years working in IT, experienced delivering large projects for Fortune 500 companies internationally, and working remotely.

Most recently I’ve been developing social media SaaS and statically generated (a.k.a Jamstack) websites, built using GitHub actions, deployed to Netlify.

Technologies:

NodeJS, Perl, Python, Bash, Git, Express, Eleventy, Passport, Mocha, HTML/Javascript/CSS, ES2015-2020, JQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap, AWS, Digital Ocean, Netlify, Heroku, Docker, Lambda, Serverless, Message Queues, Stripe, Mailgun, Linux, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Nginx, Letsencrypt, GitHub Actions

About me: https://markjgsmith.com/about

Portfolio: https://markjgsmith.com/portfolio

Recommendations: https://markjgsmith.com/recommendations

Résumé/CV: On request via email

Email: markjgsmith@gmail.com
by mjgs | 2025-05-04 13:10:23+00:00
SEEKING WORK, central Europe (UTC+1), remote work OK, I am very flexible with working hours and can accommodate most time zones, experienced remote worker.

Willing to relocate: Yes

Hi I’m Mark, a Web Developer, Consultant and Automation Engineer originally from the UK. I specialise in devops/system tools, workflow automation integrations, and NodeJS web development.

10+ years working in IT, experienced delivering large projects for Fortune 500 companies internationally, and working remotely.

Most recently I’ve been developing social media SaaS and statically generated (a.k.a Jamstack) websites, built using GitHub Actions, deployed to Netlify.

Technologies:

NodeJS, Perl, Python, Bash, Git, Express, Eleventy, Passport, Mocha, HTML/Javascript/CSS, ES2015-2020, JQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap, AWS, Digital Ocean, Netlify, Heroku, Docker, Lambda, Serverless, Message Queues, Stripe, Mailgun, Linux, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Nginx, Letsencrypt, GitHub Actions

About me: https://markjgsmith.com/about

Portfolio: https://markjgsmith.com/portfolio

Recommendations: https://markjgsmith.com/recommendations

Résumé/CV: On request via email

Email: markjgsmith@gmail.com
by elmerfud | 2025-05-04 13:11:11+00:00
I can assure you journalists don't believe this either. Journalism, left leaning or right leaning or centerist, isn't about reporting things that matter It's about making money. What's going to be the most profitable to them in the short term and what's going to be more profitable to them in the long term.

None of those other things you listed will make them money. Just like the fact they are failing to report that fully documented immigrants are being picked up by immigration thrown into detention centers and being coerced into signing voluntary deportation papers.

I read a story by a largely liberal news outlet about Democrat Congress people going to review one of these immigration detention centers. They were reviewing it because of the poor conditions but even in that article they mentioned that these were undocumented immigrants that were going to be deported because they lacked proper documentation. I'm sure some are but the fact of the matter is there is a huge number of correctly documented immigrants that have also been swept up thrown into these detention centers and no one is talking about it. It doesn't make for good news, it doesn't make for profitable news.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-04 13:11:43+00:00
Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like. I think this is how basically every player with a library function works? Like jellyfin loads my library in the same structure I've had it for 20 years, and it gives me various ways to view by name, artist, release date, rating, etc. and builds search indexes. I just point it to the roots of my libraries.

I said it needs a place to write playlists (or write access to your playlist folder(s)).

I wouldn't do it this way, but there can be more than one folder containing the same file (hardlinks).
by AIPedant | 2025-05-04 13:13:47+00:00
My controversial opinion is that Fallout 2 is by far the worst mainline Fallout game: it was obviously written by sexist 90s teenagers, the humor is plain awful, and most of the game is incredibly tedious, especially the dungeons. It’s also by far the buggiest Fallout. I think people give it points for ambition + a desire to take Bethesda down a peg, without actually playing it. Alternatively, they last played when they themselves were 90s teenagers so they’re looking through 30 years of rose-tinted glasses, and never noticed how misogynistic the script is.

Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.
by charrondev | 2025-05-04 13:15:19+00:00
The worst part of frames is scrolling.

You have to give an iframe a specific height in pixels. There is no “make this iframe the height its content wants to be (like normal HTML).

This leads to two options:

- your page has nested vertical scroll bars (awful UX) - you have to write JavaScript inside and outside the frame to constantly measure and communicate how tall the frame wants to be.

Or you could just not use frames.
by shayonj | 2025-05-04 13:15:20+00:00
That's correct, if you want to keep using CTE, the gurantee can be achieved via something like this

WITH deleted_tasks AS MATERIALIZED (

SELECT id FROM task_queue WHERE queue_group_id = 5 AND status = 'pending' LIMIT 1 FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED

)

DELETE FROM task_queue WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM deleted_tasks) RETURNING item_id, id;
by phoronixrly | 2025-05-04 13:16:06+00:00
DELETE with an overly-broad operator in the WHERE clause and no explicit limit: check, non-trivial subquery in the WEHERE: check. This should not have passed code review, let alone have been caught in production.

I will give OP the benefit of the doubt and say that automated testing did not catch this because the optimisations depend on table statistics, and not because it was not appropriately covered.
by pwg | 2025-05-04 13:16:27+00:00
What happens with that "absolute position relative to some arbitrary 0,0 picked by the mouse" when the user picks the mouse up off the table/pad/etc. and repositions it (i.e., they hit the edge of the pad and now "re-center" to continue moving left (or right) on screen). The mouse loses its 0,0 point reference as soon as it is picked up.

It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.
by pncnmnp | 2025-05-04 13:16:55+00:00
Author here. TTS and script generation can be a bit of an overhead for now, which is why I've worked with metric aggregates - 30+ bounces rather than exactly 33, for example. For this game, one might ideally want this overhead to be less than the time it takes for the ball to bounce from one paddle to another, which can be around 1–2 seconds. However, there may be another strategy to (maybe?) overcome this: start synthesizing numbers (ignoring the fractional part) using TTS and cache them for both commentators. Then, patch those audio clips together after core part is synthesized. It should be doable, I think - I just haven't gotten to it yet. Note that matching the excitement and tempo of core commentary with those numbers is key - otherwise, it will feel janky.
by shayonj | 2025-05-04 13:18:29+00:00
That is correct and our curiosities are very much aligned here. I wrote this post in passing on a bus, so it def lacks some critical detail :D. I can very much solve this with a AS MATERIALIZED like you pointed, and as also mentioned in - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43886522

I will look into a more thought out post perhaps. Thanks for sharing all the comments and feedback. Really enjoying the discussions.
by ben_w | 2025-05-04 13:18:53+00:00
> Runaway AGI requires that we _have_ AGI and I’d posit we’re still decades away from that.

There's several famous examples of people expecting a problem to be as hard as AGI, only for someone to make an AI which can do that without being able to do everything else. Natural language conversation, for one.

Most diseases that are treatment-resistant — be they viruses, bacteria, fungal infections, parasites, cancers — are, in a sense, "runaway", even though they're definitely not high up on the IQ charts, and they're not at all general.

With regards to timelines:

2027 is the headline, but it's the absolute earliest possible case if absolutely everything goes to plan, and a relevant government helps out maximally. Both of these are unrealistic, but it does at least say "so absolutely not less than 2 years", which is useful to know.

Recursive self-improvement, I'm of the opinion that at some point we're going to get diminishing returns, and that even an AGI that's got full-human-generality and an IQ of 160 (four sigma above average) is unlikely to be able to make much of a difference to researching improvements to AI — research isn't usually done by an individual but by a team, and as teams grow, the interpersonal connections become limiting factors. And an AI that makes a team just by running copies of itself is going to be a memetic monoculture, the pinnacle of group-think.

Even to the extent that recursive self-improvement is going to be a thing, the current timeline graph being shared around is 7 months between doublings of the difficulty, measured by time horizon needed for an expert to complete and the probability of an AI to get the answer right*. At that, we're still 2-3 years away from AI that can reliably do just a day-sized task on a sprint board, let alone serious help with self-improvement.

There's also the electrical power required. People are talking about adding 60 GW of demand to the US power grid in the next five years. That's way too fast, and was never going to happen — China might, but the US won't, because the US doesn't make all the components it needs to grow the grid that fast (ditto the factories to make the components) and just put a lot of tariffs on the places that do.

With regards to risks, especially given the Ultron clip:

Fortunately, an AGI that knows about our discussions about AGI, will know about the alignment problem, and will want to make sue that any better AI that it invents will reflect its own value function, which will in turn help us make AI which reflect our values. It's not likely to be perfect, but it's unlikely to be Ultron/Skynet/AM/Lore etc.

My main expectations for downside risk are (1) AI being used by evil people to do evil, and (2) AI being used by lazy people before it's competent. Historians are still arguing over if the Holomodor was an act of evil or an act of incompetence, but the people starved to death either way.

* https://youtu.be/evSFeqTZdqs?feature=shared
by znpy | 2025-05-04 13:19:03+00:00
> Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work.

Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work.

> Connecting over radio requires pairing

This is a solved problem, plagued by technology fragmentation. You could very well save the necessary information for discovery and pairing onto an NFC tag and use that to access the network (further authentication might happen, if configured).

This is basically never done on WiFi because you cannot assume a client host has a NFC reader (let alone proper code handling the tag and the information).

But it's done in the world of bluetooth: some big-name headsets (Sony IIRC) can do bluetooth connection negotiation via NFC. You activate the feature (dedicated button), tap your phone and off you go. No pin, no pairing annoyances.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-04 13:20:13+00:00
My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-05-04 13:22:08+00:00
This is my biggest fear of technologies like these.

The whole point of a speed bump, for example, is to ensure that behaviour that puts others at risk will, at the very least make the driver uncomfortable. If we then deploy technologies that make speed bumps “disappear” from the perspective of vehicle occupants, it’s going to enable people to comfortably drive a lot more aggressively at the expense the people on the other side of the windshield.

Conversely, if we were to deploy technologies like speed governors, then we could do away with the speed bumps and the need for fancy suspension.