MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YZF | 2025-05-12 17:42:25+00:00
I think this is great as long as the speed limits are set correctly. What I worry would happen is that the speed limits would intentionally be set low to maximize revenue from the speed enforcement system.

On my way to work there is a long stretch of road with great visibility, two lanes in each direction, physical separation between directions, very wide shoulders with virtually zero pedestrian traffic, but the speed limit is 50km/hr. Nobody drives 50 on that road. The traffic generally flows at 70. Similarly there are many semi-industrial areas with wide roads, no traffic, few pedestrians with a 50km/hr limit. We also have highways with 80km/hr limits where traffic generally flows (safely) at 90-100.

Guess what, all those places are where police hangs out looking for speeders.

Contrast that with small streets in dense urban or suburban areas where despite the limit being 50 most people drive closer to 40. Or when it's foggy or raining heavily and you want to drive slower on the highway than the speed limit.

That said there is a question of balancing the somewhat improved safety of lower speeds to the improved efficiency of driving a bit faster. I'm not sure how you balance that. There are other options like moving people to mass transit or closing some city streets to car traffic completely.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 17:42:32+00:00
Windows has been shipping an up-to-date, modern CRT in the box for a decade now (Win10+), and MinGW will even dynamically link to it by default. Even on out-of-support OSes like Vista and Win7, users who have all the security updates installed will have it. So you have to unwind all the way back to WinXP for a version of Windows that doesn't have uCRT out of the box.

There's absolutely no reason to statically link CRT in a Win32 app today. Especially not if your goal is to minimize .exe size.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-12 17:42:34+00:00
I'm a fellow type 2, be sure to talk more with your doctor about these points as such comments/questions are of things they should have explained very clearly the first time they said your sugar seemed high.

Type 2 "resistance" is about the quality of the response to high glucose levels, not the complete lack of a response to them. There shouldn't be a long buildup overnight in that scenario for a person without insulin resistance/deficiency and still having a measurable insulin response is normal/expected of all but the worst Type 2 diabetics. Yes, you're still digesting, but in individuals without diabetes the blood sugar peak occurs (and ends) well before digestion is finished because influxes of carbs can still be effectively managed by the insulin alone rather than by the lack of additional carbs to digest. If it were just that one's digestion were a lot slower than a normal persons then it should still result in a lower, but still quickly managed to baseline, peak.

You may well actually be prediabetic though, it just depends on the specific numbers for A1C/average & peaks combined over time and not the presence of a response itself. The recommendations between higher side prediabetic and lower side type II diabetic shouldn't be all that different in the end anyways though.
by slg | 2025-05-12 17:42:46+00:00
I noticed that link shows the jump in fatality rate for older cyclists and pedestrians is bigger than the one for drivers. How much do your skills as a pedestrian really degrade as you get older? To me, this suggests that part of this increase in fatalities is due to the body weakening as we age. An average 30-year-old almost certainly has higher odds of surviving the same accident compared to a typical 75-year-old. Maybe looking at the fatality rate for 70+ year old automobile passengers versus passengers under 60 would be a good baseline to show this and allow us to better estimate the true danger of declining skill of a driver.
by derf_ | 2025-05-12 17:42:56+00:00
I once asked someone at a large Bay-area tech company why they did not invest more in fundamental R&D, and they told me, "We just buy the winners. 'All of Silicon Valley is our research lab'" (the last being, I believe, a quote from their CEO). You don't even need to do it with your own money. Just use debt and equity.

The economist Ha-joon Chang likes to quote the statistic than in the 1950's, companies reinvested 65% of their profits back into growing the business, and today that number stands at 5%. The stock market overall returns more cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends than it raises from investors by selling equity. It is no longer primarily a funding mechanism for companies. It's how investors cash out.

I don't even think it is about making Ph.D's write production code: I support that, as it makes them much more realistic about what is technically feasible (I say as a Ph.D who was written a lot of production code, and has had to work with Ph.D's who haven't). It is that whatever you are doing must be able to be tied directly to near-term revenue. Even just cost-savings is rarely attributed back to the people who created it, because no one wants to give you credit for money they didn't spend. And certainly no one wants to fund something that will not generate a tangible return for 5+ years, or that might not even succeed.

At one point I was asked, as a research Ph.D focused on very low-level software, to come up with subscription-revenue generating product ideas, because "subscription revenue" was the latest buzzword among upper management. They wanted me to build the next TikTok for them. And all I could think was, even if I had the product design talents to be able to do that, in a ZIRP era, why would I build it for you? We are not in that era any longer, but it lasted a long time, and its passing has only made people more near-term focused.
by SigmundA | 2025-05-12 17:44:22+00:00
Doesn't matter that much if you have excess solar available, beyond that many who do solar also tend to go to a heat pump water heater which is 400% efficient bringing photovoltaics in line with solar hot water without running plumbing up to the roof and now that roof space can be used to power many things rather than just hot water.

https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-water-heaters
by like_any_other | 2025-05-12 17:44:25+00:00
Is everyone in the US expected to drive at least the speed limit on motorways? Here in Europe, there are always vehicles going slower - buses, trucks, vans, or just older cars or drivers not in a hurry. If the limit is 130 km/h, you routinely encounter vehicles going 90-110.

The menace are drivers not adjusting to the realities of the road.
by jas8425 | 2025-05-12 17:44:34+00:00
If embeddings are roughly the equivalent of a hash at least insofar as they transform a large input into some kind of "content-addressed distillation" (ignoring the major difference that a hash is opaque whereas an embedding has intrinsic meaning), has there been any research done on "cracking" them? That is, starting from an embedding and working backwards to generate a piece of text that is semantically close by?

I could imagine an LLM inference pipeline where the next token ranking includes its similarity to the target embedding, or perhaps instead the change in direction towards/away from the desired embedding that adding it would introduce.

Put another way, the author gives the example:

> embedding("king") - embedding("man") + embedding("woman") ≈ embedding("queen")

What if you could do that but for whole bodies of text?

I'm imagining being able to do "semantic algebra" with whole paragraphs/articles/books. Instead of just prompting an LLM to "adjust the tone to be more friendly", you could have the core concept of "friendly" (or some more nuanced variant thereof) and "add" it to your existing text, etc.
by flax | 2025-05-12 17:44:50+00:00
I love Dart and Flutter, it's my go-to when starting a new app idea. I want to learn Kotlin, but something about it just keeps me bouncing right off. It's ugly to me. It does not look like a serious language. I know that it IS, but I just hate reading/writing kotlin. Dart fits right into the well-worn grooves in my brain established from decades of Java, AS3, JavaScript and Typescript.
by BlaecBejarano | 2025-05-12 17:44:57+00:00
Here is CoCalc by SageMath, Inc.'s latest open-source contribution!

http-proxy is one of the oldest and most famous nodejs modules, and it gets downloaded around 15 million times a week. (And we've loved using it for years.)

Unfortunately, it is unmaintained, it has significant leaks that regularly crash production servers, and is written in ancient untyped JavaScript. The maintainers have long since stopped responding, so there is no choice but to fork and start over. This version is currently being used in production on cocalc.com.

We wanted to do our part to help maintain the open-source ecosystem, hence this library. We hope you find it useful!
by koverstreet | 2025-05-12 17:45:04+00:00
> I've heard more than one co-worker or family member refer to buying pre-owned goods as "buying someone else's problem."

Well, there are lots of people with more money than intelligence. Knowing how to evaluate purchases for quality is a basic life skill, if you always buy whatever's available brand new you'll get taken.

People like that tend to be fairly helpless as soon as they're outside of where they feel comfortable.
by pc86 | 2025-05-12 17:45:11+00:00
Each one of these has a knee-jerk European response that either completely ignores reality or violates a half dozen or more laws.

Two examples:

1. "Police violence." What violence? Against whom? In a year approximately 50 million people have a police interaction (not the total number of all interactions). About 75,000 people are taken to a hospital following police use of force and about 600 people (0.001%) are killed. Of course the ideal number is zero but 0.001% doesn't seem like there is an epidemic of police violence sweeping through the country.

2. "Alternative (public) transportation." Again you're not being particularly clear on what the fix is here. Most major cities have some form of transit, be it busses, subways, or above-ground rail. If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.

What's more likely? That the US with ~350 million people just decides to ignore these "issues," or that there's something the average person who doesn't live here is misunderstanding?
by buzer | 2025-05-12 17:45:32+00:00
Thanks. I tried to look into this a bit more and it sounds quite a few places are interpreting "be made available on the market without known exploitable vulnerabilities" as that there cannot be any known vulnerability at the release date. Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI, https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publicat...) seems to be even looser with the definition, on 5.3.2.3 they actually say it's just "SHOULD", not "MUST". No clue what they are basing that on.

The "including the possibility to reset the product to its original state" is interesting one, would that prevent manufacturers from not allowing user to downgrade to original version (via eFuses)? 5.3.3.1 on those guidelines does say "initial or newest version", but that doesn't really sound like original state.
by taylodl | 2025-05-12 17:45:42+00:00
I don’t care what an adult chooses to believe, they’re free to make their own poor decisions. But imposing those decisions on young children and exposing them to serious health risks is potentially child endangerment. If this situation doesn’t prompt a serious re-evaluation of RFK Jr's misguided beliefs about modern medicine and germ theory, I don’t know what will.
by arwhatever | 2025-05-12 17:45:49+00:00
I'm listening to hold music right now, 30 minutes into my attempt at cancelling 3mbps home DSL service (not a typo), for which the price has crept up to $71 USD/mo.

I first spoke with a customer service agent whose accent I couldn't understand very well. I have him ALL my account information. He mumbled something about being unable to forward me to the actual customer service agent (then what is your role, dude?), then came back on and said he couldn't forward me and so I would have to call them myself.

He gave me the same number I had already called. I pointed this out to him and he gave me some other number, which is where I'm listening to on-hold music now.

Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
by mindslight | 2025-05-12 17:46:21+00:00
It's a fundamental driver of centralization and moral hazard, which steps in to directly support both legs of the heads-they-win tails-you-lose dynamic of our overfinancialized economy.

As I've gotten older I've softened on the criticism. Perhaps inflationary currency is inevitable due to Gresham's law, and we just have to accept it like we have to accept the centralization from manufacturing economies of scale. And I'd most certainly rather have the US maintain the world reserve currency than say China.

But still, this populist anger is coming from somewhere. I see legitimacy in many of the fundamental complaints of Trumpists. They just don't realize they're being conned by the same old trick of politicians acknowledging a problem to gain support while pushing a "solution" that will make the problem worse (but succeed at lining the politicians' pockets) - yet again. (similar to how they've been getting conned all along with this narrative of fake "fiscal responsibility" where just as much new money is printed, but it's dumped into the financial industry instead)

And I will say, aggressive assertions like "you owe nearly everything you have ... to the Fed" really harm the discourse. Preaching to the choir while alienating everyone else does nobody any favors.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-12 17:46:29+00:00
> If the user publishes the output without attribution, NOW you have a problem.

I didn't meant to imply that the AI can't quote Shakespeare in Context, just that it shouldn't try to pass off Shakespeare as it's own or plagiarize huge swathes of the source text.

> People are being so rabid and unreasonable here.

People here are more reasonable than average. Wait until mainstream society starts to really feel the impact of all this.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-05-12 17:47:04+00:00
It would be good if folks actually read the FTC letter rather than having a visceral negative reaction.

The Biden admin had put the May 14 deadline for certain things even though the rule as a whole went into effect in Jan 2025. Trump's commish is defending that by another 60 days.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/negative-option...
by raufakdemir | 2025-05-12 17:47:09+00:00
n8n is a good example of a tool that Airweave can enhance. n8n allows (no-code) developers to set up pre-determined automations but as soon as you want to process non-deterministic text into action on an app, you will still need a way to search the app. Example: you have a n8n workflow that gets you on track with Linear tickets. You hook it into a text-based human interface in which the user says: "I just created a task about database migration on Linear, can you start doing the preparations for it?". Airweave can 1. find that damn ticket, 2. give additional context on database migrations based on what else it finds in the integrated systems.
by vladms | 2025-05-12 17:47:42+00:00
For me the last 20 years showed the opposite. You should plan infrastructure considering current tech and adjust if required. There were so many promises not fulfilled and surprises where there were no promises that I don't see the point planning based on assumptions.

I lived in the Netherlands and infrastructure was great now and I am sure it will be great in 10 years, because they constantly think on how to improve given the situation. It will not be perfect in 10 years (and neither is now) but that's just life.
by computerex | 2025-05-12 17:48:10+00:00
This article really rubbed me the wrong way.

> I could tell you exactly how I think we might advance the state of the art in technical writing with embeddings, but where’s the fun in that? You now know why they’re such an interesting and useful new tool in the technical writer toolbox… go connect the rest of the dots yourself!

I read the article because of the title, only to find the above.
by hermitShell | 2025-05-12 17:48:15+00:00
It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger. In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done.

But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar.

So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?
by moralestapia | 2025-05-12 17:48:21+00:00
Agree. It feels a bit like earlier days in Bitcoin world. Eventually the courts decided how it was going to be and people like CZ had to pay a visit to jail, but there is now clear jurisdiction on that.

The same will happen with AI, no one will go to jail but perhaps it is ruled out that LLMs infringe copyright.

(Same thing happened in the early days of YouTube as well, the solution was stuff like MusicDNA, etc...)
by mjburgess | 2025-05-12 17:48:43+00:00
In your case, it isnt the output that matters. Your saying "I'm conscious" isn't why we attribute consciousness to you. We would do so regardless of your ability to verbalise anything in particular.

Your radical behaviourism seems an advantage to you when you want to delete one disfavoured part of copyright law, but I assure you, it isn't in your interest. It doesnt universalise well at all. You do not want to be defined by how you happen to verbalise anything, unmoored from your intention, goals, and so on.

The law, and society, imparts much to you that is never measured and much that is unmeasurable. What can be measured is, at least, extremely ambiguous with respect to those mental states which are being attributed. Because we do not attribute mental states by what people say -- this plays very little role (consider what a mess this would make of watching movies). And none of course in the large number of animals which share relevant mental states.

Nothing of relevance is measured by an LLM's output. It is highly unambigious: the LLM has no mental states, and thus is irrelevant to the law, morality, society and everything else.

It's a obcene sort of self-injury to assume that whatever kind of radical behaviourism is necessary to hype the LLM is the right sort. Hype for LLMs does not lead to a credible theory of minds.
by dmonitor | 2025-05-12 17:48:44+00:00
People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc.

The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).
by engine_y | 2025-05-12 17:49:27+00:00
The article starts with statistics. Quoting deaths / person. Is this the right metric?

Since the US is huge and sprawling - it'd probably be better to use Death / km driven.

I checked this: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/road-accidents.html?...

Which paints a very different picture than what's stated in the article.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-12 17:49:30+00:00
Any low heat solution is going to have a very difficult time competing economically with heat pumps, which often have an efficiency > 300%.

The most economical solution for reducing our carbon emissions by 95% is doing these two steps in parallel:

1. Use electricity instead of fossil fuel 2. Generate electricity in carbon free manner

Yes, there are some use cases this doesn't work well at yet: steel & ocean transport are two you listed. But it does cover the 4 biggest sources of carbon emissions: ground transport, heating, electricity generation and agriculture. The big 4 are 95% of our carbon emissions.
by imiric | 2025-05-12 17:49:45+00:00
> why not replace it with 100% all-natural Emacs?

Eh, mainly because all native Emacs shells and terminal emulators are absolute garbage. It's been a few years since I tried this setup, but I remember quickly running into basic issues like corrupt output, shell keybindings not working, weirdness with apps that use Readline, and of course general slowness compared to any modern terminal and shell combination.

Additionally, I don't want my terminal to stop working because of some weird Elisp configuration issue, or experience the random crash or hang that can happen with Emacs.

So, no, thanks. I'll stick to using Emacs as an editor, and use other purpose-built tools that do one thing well. I've been happy with st, zsh, and tmux for many years, and don't have a need to change them.

I get the appeal, though. But I can easily pipe terminal output in and out of Emacs by other means. My entire workflow doesn't need to depend on a single tool. On a related note, exwm is also a dumb idea.

(Hey, Mickey!)
by manmal | 2025-05-12 17:50:00+00:00
This video explains the direction-encodes-trait topic very well IMO: https://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M

It’s the first in a series of three that I can very highly recommend.

> there's no way that there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between concepts and dimensions.

I don’t know about that! Once you go very high dimensional, there is a lot of direction vectors that are almost perfectly perpendicular to each other (meaning they can cleanly encode a trait). Maybe they don’t even need to be perfectly perpendicular, the dot product just needs to be very close to zero.
by econ | 2025-05-12 17:50:11+00:00
My theory is that it is counterproductive to have a difference between employees and entrepreneurs. There should be a shall we say type A minimum wage for employees who have full time contracts for unlimited duration, healthcare, unemployment savings, paid sick leave, vacations, pension and are members of a union etc etc. This would be the lowest minimum wage available. Employers should be free to drop any of the above for a fee. You might for example want to hire someone for only 6 months or for the duration of a project. This would both require a considerably higher salary and payments into some unemployment fund. The difference should be such that it is financially exciting for an employer to replace the 6 month contract with one for unlimited time.

The main idea is that you need help right now and shouldn't be obstructed with pensions and healthcare puzzles. I just want you to mow my lawn. Maybe mow it at all my 700 properties. What is the difference?