MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-03 02:57:07+00:00
I remember reading an online study that listed the jobs most likely to be replaced by automation and "truck driver" was listed at the top.

For the keen eye, automation creates new jobs as it replaces others. Someone has to design, implement, and maintain these systems. There is always a higher level of abstraction where a human being is needed to oversee things.
by hxtk | 2025-05-03 02:57:30+00:00
There's a book that I encourage everyone to read called Motivational Interviewing. I've read the 3rd edition and I'm currently working my way through the 4th edition to see what's changed, because it's a textbook that they basically rewrite completely with each new edition.

Motivational Interviewing is an evidence-based clinical technique for helping people move through ambivalence during the contemplation, preparation, and action stages of change under the Transtheoretical Model.

In Chapter 2 of the 3rd Edition, they define Acceptance as one of the ingredients for change, part of the "affect" of Motivational Interviewing. Ironically, people do not tend to change when they perceive themselves as unacceptable as they are. It is when they feel accepted as they are that they are able to look at themselves without feeling defensive and see ways in which they can change and grow.

Nearly all that they describe in chapter 2 is affective—it is neither sufficient nor even necessary in the clinical context that the clinician feel a deep acceptance for the client within themselves, but the client should feel deeply accepted so that they are given an environment in which they can grow. The four components of the affect of acceptance are autonomy support, absolute worth (what Carl Rogers termed "Unconditional Positive Regard"), accurate empathy, and affirmation of strengths and efforts.

Chapters 5 and 6 of the third edition define the skills of providing the affect of acceptance defined in Chapter 2—again, not as a feeling, but as a skill. It is something that can be taught, practiced, and learned. It is a common misconception to believe that unusually accepting people become therapists, but what is actually the case is that practicing the skill of accurate empathy trains the practitioner to be unusually accepting.

The chief skill of accurate empathy is that of "reflective listening", which essentially consists of interpreting what the other person has said and saying your interpretation back to them as a statement. For an unskilled listener, this might be a literal rewording of what was said, but more skilled listeners can, when appropriate, offer reflections that read between the lines. Very skilled listeners (as measured by scales like the Therapist Empathy Scale) will occasionally offer reflections that the person being listened to did not think, but will recognize within themselves once they have heard it.

In that sense, in the way that we measure empathy in settings where it is clinically relevant, I've found that AIs are very capable with some prompting of displaying the affect of accurate empathy.
by dang | 2025-05-03 02:57:40+00:00
Recent and related (ok, maybe a bit much, but the new article looks good too!)

‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410874 - March 2025 (313 comments)

A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339206 - March 2025 (215 comments)

Also:

Bluey, and the hierarchy of distractions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510482 - Sept 2024 (14 comments)

How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875399 - Jan 2024 (430 comments)
by brookst | 2025-05-03 03:02:56+00:00
I see the argument but can’t agree. To me it feels like pining for all of the lost typist jobs when word processors appeared.

Artists aren’t entitled to a job any more than I am; to the extent they (or I) do work that is easily replaced, by AI or offshoring or anything, that’s a career risk.

Those same tools enable artists to be more productive, more creative, more capable. The people suffering are those who are attached to the tools they learned with. We in tech know that’s a bad long term idea, and it is surprising in the arts. But on the whole, human creativity and overall output of great art will benefit from this change.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-03 03:02:57+00:00
Alternative POV. I never "got" Beat Saber. It didn't "make me dance". I could stand in one spot and twist my wrists, barely moving my arms, at least as far as I played. Since it didn't hook me, I never got that far. Maybe higher levels are better.

My personal favorite VR rythym game is Audica. As for why it did poorly I can only guess that it's not that interesting on easy. On expert mode though, it requires (required) you to move your entire body as things come at you from all sides. It's got 2 basic movies, shoot and smash. When a target appears you shoot it to the beat. When a ball appears you smash it to the beat. It's also got sticky targets (you need to hold the trigger) during which it projects a beam. The beam's sound changes based on how tilt the controller which is nice touch.

When it first came out it required you to hold your hands out at arms length to get a good score. They removed that requirement and I get why but, like Beat Saber, the game is less fun the less required you are to move)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftH825-SeQ

Another one I liked was SynthRiders but it's far less polished. In particular, Audica, each track has been edited for game play, ending on a cresendo. In SynthWave, the songs are just the songs as released on the artist's CD. Many of them are too long and end really boringly compared to the edits in Audica.

Another issue with SynthRiders is they don't adjust the timing based on where you're standing so that it's pretty obvious the sounds are off the beat. The only way to fix that AFAICT is to walk forward or back and try to find the spot where the timing aligns. That's arguably just lazy design IMO because it ruins the experience when you feel like you're doing the right thing but the game's audio makes it sound like you're way behind/ahead

Still, I had a lot of run with it and it does do a good job of making you movie. Unfortuantely it didn't have many tracks I found appealing but those I did I played too many times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaUdBgAHbM

I have friends who got into Pistol Whip. Didn't do it for me though.

Oh, and from the article, I agree that Until You Fall is an amazing game.
by layer8 | 2025-05-03 03:03:51+00:00
Record fields cannot be lazily initialized. The point of StableValue is lazy initialization, meaning that their value is stable if and only if they carry a non-default value (i.e. after initialization). If you don’t need lazy initialization, you can just use a regular final field. For a non-final field, without StableValue the JIT optimizer can’t tell if it is stable or not.

The implementation of a value object will be able to use StableValue internally for lazy computation and/or caching of derived values.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-03 03:04:41+00:00
A skeptic is just someone looking for real reasons besides those used in whatever propaganda suggests. That reason could be benign or not, but it doesn't mean that some secret organization/cabal is pulling the strings to make the situation what it is.

When some SaaS become unavailable due to some DNS issue, is it a conspiracy that their status page is also not updated when their status page is also affected by the outage or is it the deep state's fault trying to keep the average worker down with a cunning plan? A skeptic sees the outage and the status discrepancy as a company that just got things wrong. The conspiracy nut things the Illuminati it out to get them specifically.

Maybe it helps to have been in/around cults for more time in their youth than one would like to admit, but a skeptic and a conspiracy nut are nothing alike to me.
by dang | 2025-05-03 03:06:03+00:00
You guys should follow the site guidelines and send questions to hn@ycombinator.com, where we're actually going to see them! I only saw this randomly and several days late.

The answer is that paywalls are allowed when there are workarounds (such as archive links) which allow ordinary readers to read the article without paying or subscribing, while hardwalled domains (i.e., without such workarounds) are banned.
by stephen_g | 2025-05-03 03:07:25+00:00
Almost all of the currently automated rail systems in the world have two things:

1. Full grade separation with no level crossings (often including platform edge doors along any station platforms the trains move through too)

2. Full fencing along the corridor.

Those are two things that isn’t true for almost any freight line.

Not to say it’s not possible with extremely extensive sensor and decision making systems but we’re probably not really there yet.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-05-03 03:07:56+00:00
There is another extremely important way in which they are like the normal distribution: both are maximum entropy distributions, i.e. each is the "most generic" within their respective families of distributions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution#Maximum_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#Maximum_en...
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-03 03:07:57+00:00
> I had a discussion with GPT 4o about the memory system.

This sentence is really all i'm criticizing. Can you hypothesize how the memory system works and then probe the system to gain better or worse confidence in your hypothesis? Yes. But that's not really what that first sentence implied. It implied that you straight up asked ChatGPT and took it on faith even though you can't even get a correct answer on the training cutoff date from ChatGPT (so they clearly aren't stuffing as much information into the system prompt as you might think, or they are but there's diminishing returns on the effectiveness)
by whartung | 2025-05-03 03:08:39+00:00
> Astonishingly, these are often people that have suffered overwhelming personal tragedy.

It sounds cliche, but a pair of the most powerful people I’ve known (in terms of personality) are near death survivors.

One was in a small plane crash, the other was a SEAL that went into Grenada. He had rather long scar on his neck.

Very positive people, almost, but not quite, devil may care.

And it brings to mind a line from an early episode from “The Expanse”, where a character nearly died and, later returned on a dangerous mission. About how he should have died before, and now he was on bonus time.

I’m not convinced folks can talk themselves into the mindset that may come from experiences like that. It’s old news, we’ve all heard it. But, most of us, seemingly, are unconvinced.
by lukeschlather | 2025-05-03 03:15:12+00:00
We're talking about EU laws. The EU has inspectors, Google has EU datacenters which were built post-Snowden (and built due to the GDPR which was a response to PRISM.) I don't trust Google, but neither does the EU and if they're not fining Google I presume it's because they have more trust that Google is complying with their surveillance laws. Or possibly it's just because they are being strategic with when and how they engage. I do get a sense they have a list of concerns for each company and they are starting with fines for the largest concerns, and don't want to throw so much that the companies cannot respond.
by levihanlen | 2025-05-03 03:15:26+00:00
Hi HN, Levi (poster) here. I wrote this post detailing the “plot promise” system I’m developing at Varu AI. I found traditional outlining methods limiting for the flexible, very long-form AI stories I wanted to generate. This system uses dynamic narrative threads instead.

Curious to hear thoughts on this approach vs outlines, and especially interested in discussion around the challenges mentioned, like maintaining long-range coherence with current LLM context limits. Happy to answer any questions!
by icedchai | 2025-05-03 03:16:10+00:00
No, you're right.

And don't forget about the vendor lock in. Once you're dependent on proprietary managed services, it will become increasingly more difficult (and expensive) to migrate out.

My advice is unless it's based on something open source (like RDS Postgres, etc.) be very, very wary. S3 has so many clones it may as well be "standard." But when you start storing everything in DynamoDB and using Lambda handlers all over the place... be careful.

The complexity can be over whelming. I've seen applications with more IaC / Terraform than actual real application code. VPC, API Gateway, Lambdas, IAM roles, permissions, security group rules, autoscaling, S3 buckets on-and-on all for a simple app that serves maybe 5 requests/sec max and could run on a small VPS. Don't worry, it's scalable though. WTF.
by Trasmatta | 2025-05-03 03:16:32+00:00
> If you’re optimistic then you don’t have negative emotions

You cannot totally rid yourself of these emotions.

Jung's point is that the negative emotions are there, just hidden from view. I actually think that "negative" is inaccurate, to be honest. Jung referring to it as the Shadow works better. These emotions aren't evil demons that should be expunged at the altar of optimism. They're parts of ourselves that need to be integrated.
by kgwxd | 2025-05-03 03:19:09+00:00
> Choosing optimism may feel cheesy, even embarrassing, at first.

Just go on the hike. Tell others you're going if you'd like, maybe they'll go too, but saying "it might be fun..." feels something like a complaint. "I pride myself on being optimistic, so of course I have to mention how everyone else is being pessimistic." That's why it feels embarrassing.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-03 03:19:17+00:00
Not surprising if you've ever had a good look at the Milky Way from the wilderness or countryside. Growing up in well-lit suburbs, I didn't see the Milky Way until I went backpacking in the granite domes of the Sierra Nevadas.

This is an experience that I'd recommend everyone to experience at least once if you haven't. The memory is still burned in my lind, a canvas full of stars and the hazy stream of the galaxy stretching from horizon to horizon.

Here is a nifty tool for finding areas with low light pollution near you, which coincidentally are typically home to observatories.

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
by ahazred8ta | 2025-05-03 03:19:34+00:00
That's an urban legend. There were never any plans to capture a satellite in a single orbit. It was supposed to be capable of making an emergency landing after one orbit, but not while releasing or capturing a satellite. The 1950s Air Force X-20 Dyna-Soar was intended to launch a recon satellite and land in one orbit, but not recover a foreign satellite in one orbit.
by tatersolid | 2025-05-03 03:21:43+00:00
According to current docs all business-oriented Microsoft Entra ID accounts support only device-bound passkeys. So the Microsoft Authenticator app isn’t absolutely required, a FIDO2 hardware token like a Yubikey or even TPM-backed Windows Hello is supposed to work for these passkeys too.

Software-based “syncable” passkeys (such as Bitwarden) have been on the roadmap for 18+ months but are still not available for business MSFT Entra ID accounts for some reason.
by dcassett | 2025-05-03 03:22:38+00:00
The article didn't mention the Mark-8 "kit" featured in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics [1]. My dad built the Mark-8 that year and showed me how he could play the Star-Spangled Banner on the AM radio by taking advantage of the RFI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-03 03:23:52+00:00
Going to have to disagree with the chronology. Fedora and RHL isn't a substantial divergence and it belongs with SuSE based on its 1995 roots.

Fedora DID diverge substantially but not when they slapped a new label on the same tin.

Arguably Ubuntu/Mint Make up a 4th generation and Nix/Qubes/and Silverblue are 5th
by esperent | 2025-05-03 03:25:03+00:00
Yes, people are dumb and will use dangerous things without fully understanding them. All household devices like toasters and washing machines already have a warning section in their manual, why shouldn't a potentially far more dangerous device also be expected to have it?

The saw analogy isn't a good one - saws work within the range of physics that humans have instinctual understanding of. We instinctively know what causes a table to wobble. We do not instinctively know the physical behaviors of electricity.

You might counter that people should know this before messing with electricity, and I'll agree. But what people should know and what they actually know are often very different.

A warning in the manual might prevent some overeager teenager who got their hands on this device from learning this particular law of physics the hard way.
by layer8 | 2025-05-03 03:26:54+00:00
Both tabs and spaces can in principle behave any way a user would want in editors, at least for whitespace at the start of a line. In particular, an editor could have (suitable ranges of) spaces behave like tabs, or vice versa. However, almost no editor provides the full range of desired behaviors for both. For example, one thing I don’t like about tabs is that cursoring over them makes the cursor jump, and not proceed at constant speed horizontally. An editor could in principle have an option to not do those jumps, but barely any editor has.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-03 03:26:54+00:00
Your little credit union lacks the capital to have automated systems handle more complicated stuff... for now.

Used to work at a bank that had a few local branches as a teller when I was a senior in HS. Had old, antiquated technology but had a "person on the phone whenever you needed help".

I'm going to guess that the bank that bought them out was quite a bit more advanced, and the banks that do the same will be buying out the less advanced ones.
by caseyy | 2025-05-03 03:27:47+00:00
"A cynic is never wrong, but an optimist is always right" is a saying my friends and I have. Chronic pessimists and cynics often see and say much truth about the world. But the optimists will succeed much more in their goals, business, relationships, and many other parts of life. They have a deeper set of values and philosophy that is more right, even if they get the particulars wrong sometimes.

There are tons of comments online that claim emotionally secure and mature people are ignorant or even irresponsible if they're not in perpetual anxiety about the world. The "you should be scared with the way the world is" type. Obviously, what they claim is not true, and it's very unhealthy. But someone who is emotionally secure understands they gain nothing from a neurotic debate online, so they don't call these opinions out. The opinions remain there, unchallenged, seemingly agreeable and prevalent.

Life entrenched in pessimism is also a bit contagious. Though I don't want to be unkind, I have to be honest: there is a limit to how much I can try to help someone with that mindset before they drag me down with them. Something I learned studying field medicine (and this isn't some secret in the first responder world or just general knowledge) is that you protect your safety first. If you arrive in a situation and add yourself to the casualty list, you are just not helping anyone: you get hurt, and you create more work. I think this applies not only to physical hazards, but also to emotional ones. One more depressed person in the world does not make it a better place for anyone.

It makes sense to exercise some caution, and most of our emotional brains understand that. This brings me back to the original point — it's hard for one to succeed anywhere if everyone's avoiding them (best case scenario) or being turned negative themselves (worst case scenario). Much remains to be said about the internet's role in this epidemic of negativity and various depressive disorder crises.
by jebarker | 2025-05-03 03:29:17+00:00
I appreciate the spirit of this essay, but I think it overstates the idea that intellectual pursuits are an escape from modern dissatisfaction. I've spent most of my life driven by curiosity, forming my identity around being someone who seeks knowledge. But over time I’ve come to see how that, too, can become a kind of consumerism—chasing ideas for the dopamine hit of a new insight, then feeling the letdown and scrambling for the next one.

The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.

This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
by musicale | 2025-05-03 03:29:38+00:00
> All thanks to Epic for spearheading this effort. We do not want 30% cut takers in the age of digital distribution.

I can see why Epic would not want to pay a 30% platform fee to Apple's game store, much like the 30% which they pay to Google Play, Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store for Xbox, Sony PSN Store, etc.

https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees
by LPisGood | 2025-05-03 03:30:50+00:00
Me and many of my friends were children when Fortnite came out. We still play, and we now have full time jobs. When fun new skins or dances come out, it’s not uncommon for us to get them.

They’re fun and entertaining. I hardly feel addicted or preyed on moreso than when I buy any other entertainment product.
by getpost | 2025-05-03 03:35:46+00:00
Being optimistic is normally a good strategy for success, but it doesn't feel appropriate in dire circumstances, such as at the onset of World War 2. 70+ million people died, not to mention all the injuries, crimes, and environmental destruction. Saying "Think positive, the Allies will win!" in 1939 would have rung hollow. Instead of optimism, there needs to be a grim determination.

I put that statement to ChatGPT, and it reminded me of Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches"[0] speech, which is defiant, rather than optimistic.

Once again we seem to be in dire circumstances, on the brink of colossal ruin, owing the the whims of a handful toxic people, and the ignorance of so many who put them into power. I'm not at all optimistic, but I can try for grim determination.

[0] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-fin...
by labrador | 2025-05-03 03:37:26+00:00
We're in different modes. I'm still feeling the glow of the thing coming alive and riffing on how perhaps its the memory change and you're interested in a different conversation.

Part of my process is to imagine I'm having a conversation like Hanks and Wilson, or a coderand a rubber duck, but you want to tell me Wilson is just a volleyball and the duck can't be trusted.
by tstrimple | 2025-05-03 03:37:55+00:00
I think it's both. I do believe the politicians and Republican voters with education fully understand what is going on and are lying about it. I also believe the majority of the conservative movement is ignorant as fuck and honestly believe the lies that they are told. When my father ranted at me about all Muslims wanting to kill or convert us, I don't think he was lying. He was deeply misguided by decades of conservative propaganda (AM radio + over the road truck driver) and honestly believed it. It's gotten so bad that the conservative party is now electing the true believers. You can see it in folks like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene and RFK Jr. The right wing strategy to control their base and ensure they could never be at real risk of impeachment like Nixon has infected their leadership and it's willful ignorance from top to bottom now with grifters spread throughout.