MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duped | 2025-05-24 00:20:44+00:00
There are a number of studies on this but this one has a good summary (1). The TL;DR is that over 256 kbps for MP3 there's no significant data that listeners could perceive a difference to CD quality audio. Lower than that you can perceive artifacts.

I'm too lazy for finding this but I recall this study or similar repeated for trained listeners (musicians and mastering engineers) with the same results.

Note that MP3 is 30 years old and newer perceptual audio codecs can beat it.

YouTube picking lower bitrates is a problem but the qualifier here is "at sufficient bandwidths."

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068576_Subjectiv...
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-24 00:21:52+00:00
pure HN comedy that the article is about the disgust of running acme tools that cram all buzzwords just for the lulz, and most comments are pushing even worse tools with even more buzzwords ("still the torment Nexus, but in elixir!")

sigh. anyway. i had the same reaction to acme. but I'm lazier. i just ran ngix and the acme client in qemu and picked the certs out. i applaud the author for her tenacity.
by philwelch | 2025-05-24 00:22:27+00:00
Construction Physics has a good discussion of this as well: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...

One thing that really hurt US commercial shipbuilding after WW2 was the glut of surplus Liberty and Victory ships in circulation. Nobody was buying new ships for a long enough time that the shipyards couldn’t stay in business even if they tried.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-24 00:22:33+00:00
I know, and that's how I feel too. Thanks for the reminder. It's just tough right now.

I'm looking forward to simply being able to play literally any kind of game with him where he will actually adhere to the rules and understands why the rules make it more fun. And construction toys that don't just make him frustrated because his detailed manual dexterity still needs some work.
by ju8aka | 2025-05-24 00:22:53+00:00
I use it every day, I feel like I'm managing a team, I no longer do boring tasks, I control the result, I refine, I correct, the thing must do 80% of my work, their only limit is memory, it's quite exhausting to compensate. My timeline pours me a torrent of news every week that no longer seems to say only one thing: "we will replace you" and astronomical MRRs that tell me hurry up, it's the same FOMO as crypto except that crypto has given nothing compared to this storm, the transformation is massive, we are beyond good and evil, the contradictions are at their peak, the bubble will burst, it heats up too much
by thealistra | 2025-05-24 00:24:07+00:00
I wouldn’t say you’re at fault for delivering. You are at fault of not delivering a concise solution that uses least elements possible and has a nice clean fast-to-read readme, one setup script or docker file or whatever.

And tbh the result is just a solution (ignoring all the issues of is this terminal inspired and is email backend as a service acceptable choice) - looks generic, nothing interesting besides a super long proposal and super long readme to achieve nothing special honestly. Just a solution checking the boxes. Probably one of many. That’s why probably wasn’t selected.

TL;DR

1. Be more concise in messaging and documentation 2. Do something more than just the working solution esp if they mention brownie points for cool stuff in the task description
by kimmk | 2025-05-24 00:24:17+00:00
From an European view who has accustomed to imperial units, these discussions are so tiring. The metric vs imperial debates almost always come down to just personally preferring what you're familiar with. I've had the exact same feelings about imperial units as Americans express of metric. I really don't have a problem estimating what 10 cm or 1 kg or 1 kilometer or 2 degrees of Celsius difference in the weather is.

And the division issue is almost trivial in my view; you can just take 120 cm or 12 gram quantity. You don't magically lose the ability to divide things by other than 10 or 5 or 2 when using metric. Its not like decimal fractions disappear in imperial systems either. The metric system is there for making it easy to scale things between orders of magnitude and have sane conversions between units.
by rchaud | 2025-05-24 00:24:52+00:00
We definitely need a "slow news" type of publication that analyzes developments in AI with a critical eye:

- Who does this move the needle for? How does it compare to how things are done now?

- How does the regular person benefit, if at all?

- What's likely to happen to pricing after the initial investor subsidization end? What does the price history of other 'unicorns' tell us? Airbnb and Uber used to be cheap once too.

- What is the valuation of "AI-first Company X" based on? Who are the insiders and what is their work background?

Too much AI news today is just parroting corporate press releases and CEO keynotes.
by drewg123 | 2025-05-24 00:25:20+00:00
The problem is that its across an international border from the Montreal airport. So you'd need to cross a border twice to fly to a domestic US destination and twice more on your return. Crossing a border is always an unknown in terms of delays, so I question the practicality. I'd personally feel like I needed to leave way more than 90 minutes to ge to the airport.

FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed. Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.
by ngcc_hk | 2025-05-24 00:26:26+00:00
So far only collect 2 Casio one basic and one, well, lisp (!) calculators … interesting artefacts. Still try to get a national those tube-like display scientific calendars used during my senior secondary school.

This is a total different genre. So hard level …. In 1980s just thought it was a j model to be … wonder any simulation would see as collecting one just have a look is impossible.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-24 00:28:27+00:00
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:D0552B1CBC3490758386AE5079195EB4AB8BFF74&dn=Vyzov.%D0%92%D1%8B%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2.2023.1080p.WEB.AV1
by cozzyd | 2025-05-24 00:28:39+00:00
Huh? I'm not in great shape but I get 2km of walking a day just with my commute. According to my watch I've averaged 13k steps a day this week (something like 9-10 km a day, I think?). Ironically the days I walk the least are when I decide to bike to work instead of taking the train...
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-24 00:29:54+00:00
It’s got three elementary schools, one junior high and one high school. My hometown had two public elementary schools, few pre K options, two religious options for K-8, one middle school and one high school at 25k residents. And we don’t have an international airport (we do one hour away and in the same county though)

Massena is small but not that desolate/small
by thor_molecules | 2025-05-24 00:30:06+00:00
I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance that comes with trying to build stuff with LLM technology.

LLM’s are inherently non-deterministic. In my anecdotal experience, most software boils down to an attempt to codify some sort of descision tree into automation that can produce a reliable result. So the “reliable” part isn’t there yet (and may never be?).

Then you have the problem of motivation. Where is the motivation to get better at what you do when your manager just wants you to babysit copilot and skim over diffs as quickly as possible?

Not a great epoch for being a tech worker right imo.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-05-24 00:30:21+00:00
As not to take up another top-level post: I am also quite bored of people sharing anything created with AI. I remember when I first saw the AI Jerry Seinfeld video; I was genuinely surprised/amused at what AI was capable of. It's all completely uninteresting now, though. I have friends (some in IT..) sending me scores that ChatGPT awarded them based on what ChatGPT 'thinks' their moral value is. It seems some are completely taken by the appearance of intelligence.

It has at least been interesting to me to reflect on how I can still appreciate media that humans make when I find AI media so repulsive. I did not think I cared so much about what was behind the picture or video I was watching, or that someone spent real effort to make something. To be honest I still don't understand it - maybe it's none of those things.
by spankibalt | 2025-05-24 00:31:59+00:00
> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

I always have to laugh when that one comes up. But yeah, many Japanese dot/pixel art graphics packages (e. g. Multi Paint System) have brushes for those characteristic dithering patterns. Fast work! And I don't think they did pixel-blending (as on Western home computers) either; the art was done on machines with computer monitors for customers with pretty much the same systems (e. g. PC-98). Manual corrections, analog/digital "transkriptions" (from raster paper for example), etc. are another story...
Ask HN: Work on a human only internet? Are you involved/know of anything?
by t0lo | 2025-05-24 00:32:18+00:00
Hi HN, it has been patently obvious that the internet isn't going back to the place of free expression it once was for a while now. I'm wondering if there's been any progress made on a new alternative which reduces bots and the id/human verification that facilitates this.
by ww520 | 2025-05-24 00:33:45+00:00
Yes. dired-find-file-other-window is the one I found annoying. It moves the cursor/focus to the other window, and it keeps opening new split windows. If I ran the cmd 3 times, it would open 3 new split windows. Really annoying.

I want the cursor/focus to remain on the dired window so that I can go down the file list and see the file content on the other window. Ctrl-n and ctrl-o are all I need to do.
by nkrisc | 2025-05-24 00:34:12+00:00
> I think most of your points are fair ones. I also feel that it's rather cynical to drop out of the "rat race" by relying on the participation of lots of other people to pay for your Medicaid expense and so on. However, on average, there are just so few people doing this type of thing that I don't think we have to worry about free riders damaging the system.

It's one of those cases where the "freeloading" is more miserable than just working, which is why abuse isn't rampant.
by ngcc_hk | 2025-05-24 00:34:50+00:00
This emulation seems to say pc98 is msdos based and hence can run on dosbox-x

https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3APC%E2%80%9098-emulation-in...

Seeing some yt even more confused as pointed out by wiki it is a 16/32 bit …
by lapcat | 2025-05-24 00:34:58+00:00
> So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty.

What you mean is that you know MacIntyre better than Rorty. To be famous is literally to be known about by many people, so there's no such thing as "famous to me".

I don't judge fame by my own familiarity, otherwise many obscure people would be "famous" and many famous people "unknown".

> But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.

Indeed.
by II2II | 2025-05-24 00:35:16+00:00
That would depend upon the roads and, given that winter was mentioned as a feature, maintenance during the winter months.

I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-24 00:35:56+00:00
>> But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then.

If he is on medicaid then he isn't "living" on 432/month. That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.

Then the kids need schooling, either in-person or remote. that is another 10k/year/kid. And you need some sort of local police/justice system to ensure nobody boots you off your homestead. But even once you account for all those local costs, there are things like national security. Living a peaceful life on a remote farm is only possible because the country is ringed by police and armed forces. Those things may be a thousand miles away, but someone still has to pay for them.
by shermantanktop | 2025-05-24 00:35:57+00:00
Just had a friend leave their company. They had formed a really strong network of people within that company who were in constant contact. This helped them succeed in a lot of ways.

Sounds good? It was, except...most of that bonding was based on lowkey negativity by a set of people who felt powerless, complaining about how others were terrible. Some in this network went down a rabbithole of resentment and are still there. The reality is that yes, there was lots of stuff to be grumpy about.

Rooting for your friends is great. But people sometimes bond over wishing harm for their foes. Shared trauma does that. I personally try to avoid that mindset.
by dmurray | 2025-05-24 00:35:59+00:00
15 acres? It should take far less than an acre. The house isn't well insulated, but it's also small. A few big trees, say 40-year Sitka spruce, should last the whole winter, and you can plant a thousand of those on an acre.

Of course it depends on the land and the house. But here's some Reddit comments also estimating the need at < 1 acre

https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/comments/1jnpbug/how_much...
by roca | 2025-05-24 00:36:19+00:00
[rr developer here]

Undo has cool features like Live Recording that we don't have in rr. They don't need access to the hardware PMU which is a big advantage in some situations. They can handle accesses to shared memory in cases where rr can't. https://undo.io/resources/undo-vs-rr/ is a good resource.
by hbartab | 2025-05-24 00:37:37+00:00
You could ask: What can I do to better support you?

But it is possible they won't say anything because you are in a position of power and therefore they may not trust you with very personal details. It also put the onus on them to "educate" you on their condition, which makes people even more self-conscious.

An alternative is to offer options ahead of time. But make sure they can think about it before answering. Not everyone enjoys being put on the spot.

Read up on various types of neurodivergence and learn how to use each person's strengths best. Figure out what might trigger them and try to avoid such situations by providing your support. You can even use an LLM to role play.

Be careful: everyone is different, so don't overgeneralize from what an AI blurts out or what one person on your team does or prefers.

The most important thing is to be empathetic.

P.S. Managers with knowledge of (organizational) psychology are surprisingly rare. Most haven't a clue, and it shows.
by teleforce | 2025-05-24 00:37:42+00:00
A tiny amount of alcohol produced through natural fermentation, especially less than 1%, is generally considered permissible or halal.

The main verses from the Quran for alcohol intoxicant prohibition come from this verse [1]:

O believers! Intoxicants, gambling, idols, and drawing lots for decisions are all evil of Satan’s handiwork. So shun them so you may be successful.

And another [2]:

They ask you O Prophet about intoxicants and gambling. Say, “There is great evil in both, as well as some benefit for people - but the evil outweighs the benefit. They also ask you O Prophet what they should donate. Say, Whatever you can spare. This is how Allah makes His revelations clear to you believers, so perhaps you may reflect.

Fun facts, Surah Al-Maidah name literal meaning is The Table Spread with Food, in reference to the event of the Jesus apostles were asking for ready foods directly from heavens, from God (not Jesus since Islam consider him as one of the prophets sent by God similar to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Muhammad). This particular event is famously known as The Last Supper [3].

[1] Surah Al-Maidah (The Table Spread with Food), verse 90:

https://quran.com/al-maidah/90

[2] Surah Al-Baqarah (The Cow), verse 219:

https://quran.com/ms/al-baqarah/219

[3] Last Supper (Section: In Islam):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper
by Xmd5a | 2025-05-24 00:38:44+00:00
>Who this guide is NOT for: [...] People that are okay with becoming a lens design zombie.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230914035459/https://caoyuan.s...

A $500 DIY near-IR spectrometer that would sell for $10,000, Yuan Cao

>The placement of the cylindrical lens (position & angle) affects the focal point for different wavelength. I did not do a rigorous calculation here —— I simply resorted to a trial-and-error method to figure out the optimal placement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37498142
by RajT88 | 2025-05-24 00:39:07+00:00
You read articles like this every so often, sure. Maybe ~13 years back I read about an indie game dev who lived in a carbon neutral home in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something. Beautiful house, hand built. Talked about how you really don't need all that much money to live - they were living on less than 20k a year from his game sales.

Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy.

It's an extreme example, but this is a good read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family
by alephnerd | 2025-05-24 00:39:45+00:00
That's based on the premise that we were a major blue water shipbuilder.

We weren't, as data from the mid-20th century showed [0]

Japan had a larger blue water shipbuilding capacity than the US by 1910 in both sail and steam. We were on par with newly independent and much poorer Greece (Greece's developmental indicators didn't catch up with Western Europe until the last 3-5 years).

[0] - https://www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/288698.pdf
by bumby | 2025-05-24 00:40:40+00:00
The book “Excellent Sheep” has an interesting portion on this. At one point someone from a non-traditional background is bemoaning the mentality of his colleagues at a prestigious university. He says they are so used to following a template of moving from point A to point B that they are completely rudderless when put in a situation where there is no template defining “success”.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-05-24 00:41:06+00:00
It often is, but the schema might be written against a language-specific ORM.

That code might in turn have plugins or feature flags that mean you don't know the concrete sql schema until runtime.

Same for seed data and migrations.

So it depends on the use-case how useful this format is for tooling and discovery vs an actual connection to the database.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-24 00:43:17+00:00
> That allows already for self discovery etc.

The problem is usually not with listing the APIs. Almost all services have OpenAPI specs, and you can (often too) complain about lack of documentation.

Orchestrating these APIs is the annoying "fuzzy" challenge. Imagine you have a VM service, and you provide a set of APIs. Someone comes asking "How do I create a copy of a VM we have in the US region to EU region but with half the CPU/RAM?"

You might point to your OpenAPI spec and say you can:

var s1 = takeSnapshot(vm1); var s2 = copySnapshot(s1, 'EU'); var vm2 = createVmFromSnapShopt(s2, sizeOverride).

Ok... but is there a makeACopyOfVmWithHalfCPUAndHalfMemoryInEurope(vm1) API? I don't want to copy that code. In 3 months it'll break because `vm1` is of a type that can't be snapshoted and you'll tell me that I should check `vm1.snapshotable`, or that the new size is invalid in the new region because I should be calling `isSizeAvailable()`

If this were an MCP, then it would either orchestrate these APIs "correctly" for me checking as corner cases as possible as (presumably from examples it saw on github). When it misses, it's "oh well, even AI couldn't get it. We can all blame AI everybody" As oppose to when a Human misses and someone is like "how amateurish is the implementation that you're not checking if the vm is `snapshotable` or not?
by hodgehog11 | 2025-05-24 00:43:28+00:00
I agree that this is a sensible judgement for practical use, but my point is that the vibes likely will change, it's just a matter of when. You can't draw a trendline on a nonlinear metric especially when you have no knowledge of the inflection point. Individual benchmarks are certainly fallible, and we always need better ones, but the aggregate of all of the benchmarks together (and other theoretical metrics not based on test data) is correlating reasonably well with opinion polling and these are all improving at a consistent rate. It's just that it's unclear when these model improvements will lead to the outcomes that you're looking for. When it happens, it will appear like a massive leap in performance, but really it's just a threshold being hit.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-24 00:43:56+00:00
most things have two codes. dr visit. dr visit extra expensive. blood work blood work extra expensive.

i kid you not. everyone in health care knows this. and a patient have no way of knowing.

if it goes to your plan, they just pay the cheap code and the provider doesn't even say anything. if it's on your copay only, the plan will not help you and will laugh at your face. and it's all legal.
by adrianwaj | 2025-05-24 00:44:03+00:00
I made a site called Hackerbrain a while back. #13 here: https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/

One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly.

Try it here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra....

Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each.

Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors.

I would definitely use that feature. :)

Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-05-24 00:45:33+00:00
New primary care doctor did the same to me recently.

Made me wait 30 minutes for a 60 minute new patient appointment (based on the billing code) when the actual time with them was 10-15 minutes (and spent discussing history).

They didn’t even possess an Otoscope for looking inside the ear.

Charged >$400 and still cost me over $250.

I’ve seen other specialists that charge $100 for a visit.
by wussboy | 2025-05-24 00:47:46+00:00
I have lived in Alberta for the last thirty years, but I see myself as a Canadian. The “us vs them” you embrace makes no sense to me because that’s not where I draw my circles. Alberta is not being robbed by Canada in the same way that me moving funds from checking to savings isn’t robbing my checking account.

Everyone can draw a circle such that they feel aggrieved. But that’s no great feat, nor is it commendable.