MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2025-05-22 12:47:30+00:00
> As an example, it makes no sense to me that eg in audio software, volume sliders start at 0 dB and then go down to negative $MUCHO, until complete silence at -Infinity.

This one doesn’t bother me. Those sliders, and especially the real analog sliders they’re modeled after, don’t have an absolute scale — they are attenuators that reduce voltage. So 0dB is the same as no slider at all, -20dB reduces voltage by a factor of 10, etc.
by PretzelPirate | 2025-05-22 12:47:41+00:00
When I got tinnitus after months of high stress, the ENT told me that all of my jaw clenching may have changed the pressure on the muscle that's connected to the inner ear, and that could be the cause. I never got a definitive answer about the cause, and that seems pretty common.

I've heard that TMJ can cause it as well.
by basisword | 2025-05-22 12:47:54+00:00
I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-22 12:48:16+00:00
Magic is impossible. In order to encrypt a message to Bob, Alice must first have Bob's key.

That's why ECH needs DNS records, Bob publishes a key, "Here's the key for all six thousand blog.example sites we publish" and Alice can then encrypt either "Hi Bob, give me clown-porn.blog.example" or "Hi Bob, give me trans-rights.blog.example" and the middlebox can't read it.

We can't stop the middlebox from saying well, Bob publishes a trans rights blog so now all Bob's blogs are inaccessible just in case. Nor can we prevent Bob from deciding to publish separate keys, "these are for the clown porn and lynching videos, we'll use separate keys for the trans-rights stuff because the Government says that is naughty". But we can make that Bob's choice.

To do that, Alice needs Bob's key and either Alice has to magically know everybody's keys (which doesn't scale) or it is published somewhere for Alice to find, in this case DNS.

If we just say OK we'll encrypt with no particular recipient in mind, that doesn't prevent the scenario we care about, Alice encrypts the message, the middlebox decrypts it (No reason it can't, Alice can't pick Bob as the only recipient) and the middlebox gets to inspect Alice's destination.
by abraxas | 2025-05-22 12:48:18+00:00
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) was a very interesting title. It came about because Sid Meier lost his rights to the Civilization franchise for a period of time. Yet SMAC was considered the real successor to CivII rather than Civilization Call To Power because of the recognition and the genius of Sid Meier.

But SMAC was in its day quite divisive. Some Civ fans (self included) weren't able to get into the world with unfamiliar tech tree, obscure terrain features and the whole nomenclature of the game just being so... alien.

Now, granted it was likely the best sci-fi turn based title ever made but at the time us fans of Sid's work were really craving for a sequel to CivII and as a result SMAC received a somewhat lukewarm welcome. Likely undeservedly so.
by djaychela | 2025-05-22 12:48:25+00:00
As someone else alluded to, 3dB is a doubling in power, not perceived loudness. 10dB will be perceived as a doubling in loudness. This is the original unit (the Bel, rather than deciBel) which was I believe derived by testing on human subjects to measure this.

TBH I don't agree with a lot of the article - yes, dB on its own only indicates a ratio, but certainly in the field I work with this is known, and there are qualifiers (dBA, dbFS dbU) which tie the ratio to a known value so you're talking about an absolute, known quantity - even the dBa which is mentioned as if it comes out of nowhere is something which most audio engineers know about and use regularly because it's important to know the difference betweent he signal present and perception of it by the listener.
by david-gpu | 2025-05-22 12:48:33+00:00
Agreed. IMO it's always a good idea to document design choices.

The owner can write down the problem, a few solutions that were considered, why they were chosen/rejected, and a more detailed description of the final design. Stakeholders then review and provide feedback, and after some back and forth all eventually sign off the design. That not only serves to align the organization, but to document why things were done that way, so that future hires can get a sense of what is behind the code, and who was involved in case they have more questions.

This was how we did things at some $BigCorps and it paid dividends.
by bonoboTP | 2025-05-22 12:51:03+00:00
Yes, with some caveats. Sometimes people can guess where a paper comes from based on the used datasets, even graphic design style, a skew in cited papers. Also, often people upload the preprint to Arxiv and so the reviewer may have seen the non-anonymous version already. Also, the having someone within the community among the authors will help with formulating the paper in a way that this community expects it. With the right turns of phrase, citing and praising those related works that are seen highly in the community, using the tone that is usual in the community etc. People should ideally try to counteract such biases in themselves, but humans are tribal and social. Especially if you scale this to tens of thousands of people, the average won't be a saint. People have careers, graduations, promotions, visas, green cards, job prospects, friendships and generally social standing in their professional community on the line. Academics aren't any more holy than people in finance, or politics or entertainment or startups or other ruthless and social-game heavy environments.
by j00pY | 2025-05-22 12:51:17+00:00
Its the same for me. Its always been there. I've also done a lot of activities over my life that make it worse, like playing the drums, attending very loud electronic music parties, and motorcycling without earplugs. It's just a low-level background sound that is part of my life, and I'm lucky enough to be able to tune it out most times. But reading this post and going through this thread has made it a lot worse.

Interestingly, my five-year-old was complaining about ringing in her ears being distracting at bed time, so I wonder if it is genetic too.
by rmccue | 2025-05-22 12:51:39+00:00
As someone who maintained a (PHP) library that Debian distributed, it fucking sucked that they made source modifications. There were a number of times where they broke the library in subtle ways, and there was little to no indication to users of the library that they were running a forked version. I also never had any contact from them about the supposed "bugs" they were patching.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-22 12:52:10+00:00
dB is always relative, even when it appears to be an absolute unit. The 0 dB marking at the top of the volume slider on pro audio gear (more likely +3 or +6 or something similar to leave some headroom) means "0 dB relative to the maximum rated power level." In pro gear this will be an absolute industry standard of some sort, likely one where the load impedance is also defined. 1 milliwatt into 600 ohms or something like that. The distinction between voltage and power is always going to confuse people, but that's not the dB's fault.

A major reason decibels are used is to make it easy to assess the overall gain or loss of an entire chain of processing stages: you simply add the numbers. The equipment's output can only go down from 0 dB, so the rest of the scale is negative.

As for sound pressure levels in dB, those are given relative to a 0-dB point that corresponded originally to the faintest sound people were generally considered capable of perceiving. These days "0 dB" refers to a specific amount of acoustic power, which I don't know off the top of my head, and that might or might not be near the threshold of perception for a given listener. But the reasoning still applies: amplification or attenuation of power levels is a simple matter of addition when expressed in dB. Arbitrarily defining a system's reference level to be 100 dB instead of 0 dB would be of no use to anyone.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-22 12:52:17+00:00
It's extremely difficult to accurately hit buttons floating in free space with any type of speed or consistency.

By anchoring virtual buttons to your physical hand, your proprioception kicks in and you can rapidly and accurately hit keys. It's pretty much trivial for most humans to tap the same spot on their palm without even looking, but most people can't do this with an arbitrary spot in free air.

The VR/XR industry has tried floating virtual keyboard many times in basically every form you can imagine. All attempts have been abandoned because they suck really bad. This is an idea that is fundamentally incompatible with human psychology and physiology.
by tetris11 | 2025-05-22 12:52:22+00:00
I like it as a curiousity, but it only makes sense to me if I think of it 2D scene to 3D sphere.

Is 4D sphere the upper limit on this method, or can you project say 3D scene onto 5D sphere? (e.g a 1D line onto a 3D sphere analog)
by lolinder | 2025-05-22 12:52:52+00:00
Here are the top articles for the month of May 2023 on HN with "agent" in the title [0]. Looks like early days for the term but with a few large hits (like the HuggingFace announcement), which suggests OP was surprisingly precise in their citation of two years as the time window.

Also, since you're implicitly questioning OP's claim to have been saying this all along, here's a comment from September 2023 where they first said the same quote and said they'd been building agents for 3 months by that point [1]. That's close enough to 2 years in my book.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1685491200&dateRange=custom&...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37626877
by krapp | 2025-05-22 12:53:03+00:00
I don't believe humans are stochastic parrots, at least not in any way that makes drawing equivalence between human congnition and LLMs meaningful. Your own comment here would appear to be an example of something other than you "regurgitating the most likely relevant portions of your knowledge in the way you're guessing is most pleasing for others to perceive," since it contradicts the implied assumptions of the parent poster, who is in essence providing the prompt for your response.

That said, Voltaire was a philosopher. Posting him as an appeal to authority for what amounts to an argument about neuroscience is specious. Posting actual research demonstrating that human cognition works in the same way as LLM token matching and, more so, that it is limited in the same ways such that the phrase "humans are stochastic parrots" should be considered a statement of fact rather than belief would make your argument stronger.
by t312227 | 2025-05-22 12:53:42+00:00
hello,

as always: imho (!)

i remember this incident - if my memory doesn't trick me:

it was openssl which accessed memory it didn't allocated to collect randomness / entropy for key-generation.

and valgrind complained about a possible memory-leak - its a profiling-tool with the focus on detecting memory-mgmt problems.

* https://valgrind.org/

instead of taking a closer look / trying to understand what exactly went on there / causes the problem, the maintainer simply commented out / disabled those accesses...

mistakes happen, but the debian-community handled this problem very well - as in my impression they always do and did.

idk ... i prefere the open and community-driven approach from debian anytime over distributions which are associated to companies.

last but not least, the have a social contract.

long story short: at least for me this was an argument for the debian gnu/linux distribution, not against :))

just my 0.02€
by grumbelbart2 | 2025-05-22 12:55:23+00:00
> What contributed more towards success in my opinion are "shortcut connections" through layers which enable more influence on early layers during learning.

For those who don't know, that is the idea behind ResNet (He et al., Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition, https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385), one of the most influential papers in deep learning of all time.

Residual connections make it possible to train networks that are arbitrarily deep. Before ResNet, networks that were too deep were essentially not trainable due to vanishing or exploding gradients.
by Majromax | 2025-05-22 12:55:36+00:00
Looking at the differences between the rejected and accepted papers, I don't think it's quite a matter of 'avoiding citations'. The changes seem to break along two lines.

1. Avoid overly general citations. The rejected paper leads with references to image captioning tasks in general and visual question-answering, neither of which is directly advanced by the described study. The accepted paper avoids these general citations in favour of more specific literature that works directly on the image-comparison task.

2. Don't lead with citations. The accepted paper has its citations at the end of the introduction, on page 2.

I think that each change is reasonably justified.

In avoiding overly-general citations, the common practice in machine learning literature is to publish short papers (10 pages or fewer for the main body), and column inches spent in an exhaustive literature review are inches not spent clearly describing the new study.

Placing citations towards the end of the introduction is consistent with the "inverted pyramid" school of writing, most commonly seen in journalism. Leaving the review process out of it for the moment, an ordinary researcher reading the article probably would rather know what the paper is claiming more than what the paper is citing. A page-one that can tell a reader whether they'll be interested in the rest of the article does readers a service.
by keybpo | 2025-05-22 12:55:38+00:00
Same with me. It usually happens when I've been reading in bed for long and I unconsciouly get in a bad posture (neck). Correcting it, doing some shoulder and neck light exercices help but I've never associated it with pressure caused by lower body, mainly legs. Which it might as it also happens when I'm cross legged (and somewhat torso twisted) at the computer desk for too long.
by 7thaccount | 2025-05-22 12:55:43+00:00
Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.
by qwertox | 2025-05-22 12:55:49+00:00
These projections, how do they make sense?

I can project a 3D item onto a 2D plane, but only observe it because I'm outside of that 2D plane. This is like expecting the 2D plane to see itself and deduce 3D-dimensionality from what it sees. Like a stickman. It would only be able to raycast from its eye in a circle. It could do so from multiple points on the plane, but still, how would it know that it is looking at the projection of a sphere?
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-22 12:56:09+00:00
99% of concert performers use Monitors to hear their own performance over the crowds and have nothing to do with the loudness of the audience speakers. Stage Monitors can be just speakers at the front edge of the stage pointed directly at the band [1] or they can be sound isolating earpieces so artists can hear exactly the sound mix they want [2].

[1] https://audioinstallations.co.uk/blog/stage-monitors-how-do-... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/taylor-swift-eras-tour-cruel-summer...
by zmgsabst | 2025-05-22 12:56:14+00:00
Sure — but the arithmetic mean also captures that case: if you only halve the time, it also will report that change accurately.

What we’re handling is the case where you have split outcomes — and there the arithmetic and geometric mean disagree, so we can ask which better reflects reality.

I’m not saying the geometric mean is always wrong — but it is in this case.

A case where it makes sense is what happens when your stock halves in value then doubles in value?

In general, geometric mean is appropriate where effects are compounding (eg, two price changes to the same stock) but not when we’re combining (requests are handled differently). Two benchmarks is more combining (do task A then task B), rather than compounding.
by osigurdson | 2025-05-22 12:56:53+00:00
So all EVs on a 400km+ trip will be at the charging station 1/4 of the time. I don't think that works at scale. Charging stations would be like event parking at a Taylor Swift concert.

Gas cars are still objectively better which is sad and unexpected. I never would have predicted this insanely low rate of improvement 10 years ago. In terms of trucks / tow vehicles, it is even further off. The Cybertruck laughably has 250km of tow range. Disconnecting every 2 hours to charge for an hour is absurd. Until we see a step change in battery technology, EVs are grocery getters in my books. So, might as well double down and make them super cheap with 100km range.
by elfrinjo | 2025-05-22 12:57:16+00:00
I'll summarize: It's annoying that dB is often used as a physical unit without the necessary suffix. It's annoying that the suffix seems quite random for most units It's annoying that the factor for power differs from the factor for voltage, etc. It's slightly annoying that it's usually decibel instead of Bel.

However, we all agree that dBs are really useful.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-22 12:57:58+00:00
"At some point" I do realise it. What I don't have is an intuitive feel for why a number can be three digits 000 to 999 and each place has ten choices, but it's not 10 x 3 possibles. I tried to ask ChatGPT to give me an intuition for it, but all it does is go into an explanation of combinations. I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation again, what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3.

> "if there were only 78 million possible pictures, how could that portrait be so recongizably one specific person? wouldnt that mean that your entire picture space wouldnt even be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany?"

It's not intuitive that "a 640x480 computer picture must be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany"; A human couldn't check it, a human couldn't remember 78 million distinct pictures, look through them, and see that they all look sufficiently distinct and at no point is it representing 50k people with one picture; human attention and memory isn't enough for that.
by Nickydigit | 2025-05-22 12:58:34+00:00
I like that approach of tagging files to create meaningful filtering and organization a lot. How many times did I fail to find what I was looking for in a file tree only because I was off by one branch at one part of my pathing, when the file would have been "fine" being available in both paths...

In a knowledge base approach that also mean that information should not be bound to a file but available through tagging and references to a lot more workspaces / subjects.

Ex : a technical documentation that would be filled with all the relevant code extracts / third party documentation / custom notes available in the knowledge base, automatically fetched based on the tags and information entered in the tech stack or the header of the documentation.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-22 12:59:45+00:00
All right, but there's a real point: Competency actually matters. You can say it's threatened by hiring based on DEI rather than competence. You can say that it's threatened by hiring for political alignment rather than competence. In fact, it can be threatened by several things, including nepotism.

But to the degree the article is correct in showing that this is already happening, it probably can't be due to Trump and his band of merry fellow-travelers. He's only had four months. The problems set in before that.

You can argue about the cause. (Others have said that the article didn't do enough to establish the cause.) But even if you don't accept their cause, the article still has a point: Competence really matters, and we seem to be failing at getting it in the people who run a number of our important systems.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-22 12:59:52+00:00
So, fresh from angering virtually every government in the world, Musk will move on to introducing a service that utterly requires government approval and licensing, while costing a lot of jobs. To do this he'll have to get approval from politicians that are taking a leftist turn just to avoid being associated with either him or Trump (or didn't and are very angry at him and Trump for costing them a LOT of votes) ...

Makes you want to ask, "say, Elon, how's that full-self-driving going?"
by mrbigbob | 2025-05-22 13:00:20+00:00
For those who have tinnitus there are two sites i like to visit. one is a site that tracks new/experimental treatments for tinnitus (gives me a little hope on bad days) https://www.tinnitustreatmentreport.com/

the other is tinnitustalk support https://www.tinnitustalk.com/. it also covers upcoming possible tinnitus treatments and ways of coping with it
by Majromax | 2025-05-22 13:00:31+00:00
> The reason could be that clever titles add "novelty", but not much substance.

Another reason might be that clever titles stand out as bold claims, working counter to the common practice of academic humility. If a paper seems to be downplaying its own significance, then why should a casual reader (or reviewer, at first impression) give it the benefit of the doubt?

That's not to say that papers should over-claim, and I suspect that doing so might lead to a harsh counter-reaction from reviewers who feel like they've been set up to have their time wasted. Nonetheless, "project confidence" might be good practice in academia as well as one's social life.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-22 13:00:45+00:00
I’m not new to the space, I’ve been working in tech for a very long time. I was into ontologies since the late 90s. And I agree they were in general a colossal failure, or at least didn’t live up to the general hype, they did find success in various niches and did have a big impact on the world. Tim Bernes-Lee was coming out with the semantic web stuff in 99, OWL ontologies is 2004. I did some interesting things with Freebase. I built out huge entity models and created an entirety extraction system to a help power a search engine for large scale cataloging which saw real world use. While not my work Bing and Wolfram Alpha did use such systems to improve their search/utility. Google bought Freebase and incorporated its functionality. The DoD did have success with it, and for a while Boeing had an interesting system but AFAIK they lost a lot of expertise and it atrophied somewhat.

It was in general a library science thing, like search engines were, even today I wish I could disambiguate my search queries to be able to specify which word overloading I’m referring to, be it Java the language, the city, or the coffee.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time trying to introduce these concepts to regular people and have long considered it generally hopeless. I went on to work in ML and I’ve long thought it would be easier to teach a computer to use these systems than regular people. At least AI is at a point now where it can act as a bridge.