MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by volemo | 2025-05-19 05:15:13+00:00
> at what point does electromagnetic radiation not count as light?

At the point when its wavelength is outside of visible range, roughly 380 to 750 nm. (Some experts will call (parts of) IR and UV radiation “light”, but that’s neither here nor there.)

> Because it seems obvious to me that since our bodies are warm, and heat is a form of EMR, then of course we radiate "light".

Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).

> But also, things that wouldn't be described as warm still do this - all matter in the universe emits EMR, does it not?

Yep, only things at absolute zero temperature truly do not radiate, and it’s impossible to get there.

However, afaiu, the study describes chemiluminescence, i.e. specifically radiation above thermal.
by xitang | 2025-05-19 05:16:43+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. I think the lag might have been mainly due to the page loading and rendering 400+ job rows at once and is not related to the animation, though there might also be some hydration issues with the animation. Agree that the lag isn't good UX, I will look into getting it fixed soon.

Aside from the lag, I was hoping folks might appreciate the artistic of the animations where companies are resolving around a remote coding home :)
by comex | 2025-05-19 05:21:13+00:00
We can only speculate why the employee decided to merge the PR, but my guess is that they did it as a joke — which would mean that at least one person with merge permissions does view the whole affair flippantly, and was comfortable broadcasting that view to the public.

Which doesn't really mean much, but it's not a great look in juxtaposition with the more serious problem of xAI now having two incidents where it was caught adding weird things to Grok's prompt.
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-19 05:22:37+00:00
It is true that revolutionary theories may be both true and controversial but they are rarely friendless or obviously wrong to nearly all practitioners of the relevant fields and those theories are legion and without merit.

Without being up to date in the minutia of every field one will be ill disposed to judge which of 100 piles of nonsense extant at any given time are real discoveries and which bunkum and ones work as a journalist would be so compromised by the 1000 lies one spread that none should believe the one truth they uncovered.

I wouldn't credit anyone so stupid as not to consult ones peers.
by rawgabbit | 2025-05-19 05:23:15+00:00
I usually encourage people to place all PII in a separate table. Only those who engage with customers e.g., verifying customers identities should have access. Furthermore images of customer identity cards are strictly forbidden. You can enter their passport number, name, address, birthdate etc. but copies of identity documents will make you a target of hackers and angry customers. The rep can ask the customer to show the document or in the worst case present a copy but the copy should immediately be deleted.
by lilwobbly | 2025-05-19 05:24:15+00:00
Body damage math isn’t even close. BLS puts non-fatal injuries in construction at 2.3 cases per 100 FTEs. For computer systems design it’s 0.1 – that’s a 23× gap.whole job takes a toll over time.

The median age of 42 just means a lot of sore 40-somethings can’t afford to quit yet. Age alone doesn’t tell you how their knees and backs feel after 20 years of rebar.

Not sure how many people you know in the industry but most architects, managers, etc... are 40+ years old. Not even remotely difficult to get hired as a senior engineer, way more in demand than 20 years old devs
by arbus5672 | 2025-05-19 05:24:44+00:00
Thanks for elaborating! This is definitely not ok, and the response beyond unacceptable.

I've been an active user for a couple of years now and have substantial amount of information stored in Roam. I guess I should have known better than to have sensitive data stored in someone else's servers without encryption.

Time to explore Obsidian and see what the migration path looks like.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-19 05:25:28+00:00
When a person can't do something because it exhausts their patience, we usually describe it not by saying the task is difficult but that it is tedious, repetitive, boring, etc. So this article reinforces my view that the main impact of LLMs is their abilities at the low end, not the high end: they make it very easy to do a bad-but-maybe-adequate job at something that you're too impatient to do yourself.
by schoen | 2025-05-19 05:31:12+00:00
Such a program in Python could be

python3 -c 'import ipaddress, sys; print("\n".join(sorted(ipaddress.IPv6Address(x).exploded for x in sys.argv[1:])))'

It takes the IP addresses to be sorted on the command line.

Or, re-abbreviating them by removing zeroes and attempting to use :: where possible:

python3 -c 'import ipaddress, sys; print("\n".join(str(ipaddress.IPv6Address(y)) for y in sorted(ipaddress.IPv6Address(x).exploded for x in sys.argv[1:])))'

Both of these versions will crash if given input that isn't syntactically valid as an IPv6 address.
by ccgreg | 2025-05-19 05:32:19+00:00
In my most recent trip through academic astronomy, not only do they say "visible light" early and often, radio astronomers refer to "optics" and "photons" and VLBI images are called "images" and not "maps".

It's not that wildly different from the 1980s -- even then I never heard anyone say something like:

> Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).

Like, literally, in an undergraduate class that I taught, one of the short-answer questions on the midterm was to ask what kind of light the teacher's hair emitted. The answer is, of course, infra-red light.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-05-19 05:32:58+00:00
There was a previous incident where Grok would say that Elon was the biggest spreader of misinformation on Twitter, which caused someone to add a line in the prompt so it would stop saying that. It was eventually claimed that it had been a new employee that made that change.

The newer incident was related to White Genocide in South Africa. Another employee added a line about the topic, which caused Grok to randomly start talking about this even with unrelated questions.

This latest incident ultimately caused the xAI team to decide to publish their prompts on GitHub. Even if their processes around this are a bit undercooked, they'll probably just keep iterating on it until landing in a good spot. It would be great if we could get a stronger guarantee that the prompt that is tagged on GitHub matches what is actually deployed to production.

Something to look out for is whether this repo will actually be treated as a source of truth, or if it'll end up being a one-time dump that never gets updated. Previously, Elon made a lot of noise about open sourcing the recommendation algorithm for Twitter, but after the initial release the repo was never updated again, despite it being clear that there were changes being made to the recommendation algorithm. When I last saw someone ask Elon about this, he claimed that he would release the updated algorithm changes, but it hasn't happened.

I think releasing the prompts for major LLMs is generally a good thing, and I'm hopeful that this might push other companies to follow along. At a minimum, platforms should disclose when they make changes to system prompts. Ideally, they would also release the prompt itself, but goodness exists on a scale and I try to be pragmatic.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-19 05:32:58+00:00
I'd argue that better graphical genai is a solution for this.

It's a fact of life that creative production companies will always attempt to optimize costs -- which means most efficiently using any human labor.

In the 00s/10s, animation studios especially tried to do this with... mixed results (coughToeicough)

More capable models should allow better keyframe-to-keyframe animation.
by keeda | 2025-05-19 05:37:02+00:00
Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because:

1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.

2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)
by kmarc | 2025-05-19 05:37:25+00:00
> how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd

FWIW, the fake smiles and hidden gazes, to me the least, were always a North American thing.

In fact, in Switzerland we have its opposite, the infamous "Swiss stare" :-)

https://www.newlyswissed.com/about-the-swiss-stare/
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-05-19 05:38:51+00:00
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-19 05:39:34+00:00
> These things are very well and precisely defined in just about every jurisdiction.

Yes, we have lots of wording attempting to be precise. And legal uses of terms are certainly more precise by definition and precedent than normal language.

But ambiguities about facts are only half of it. Even when all the facts appear to be clear, human juries have to use their subjective human judgement to pair up what the law says, which may be clear in theory, but is often subjective at the borders, vs. the facts. And reasonable people often differ on how they match the two up in many borderline cases.

We resolve both types of ambiguities case-by-case by having a jury decide, which is not going to be consistent from jury to jury but it is the best system we have. Attorneys vetting prospective jurors are very much aware that the law comes down to humans interpreting human language and concepts, none of which are truly precise, unless we are talking about objective measures (like frequency band use).

---

> it is the question of what constitutes a derivative

Yes, the legal side can adapt.

And the technical side can adapt too.

The problem isn't that material was trained on, but that the resulting model facilitates reproducing individual works (or close variations), and repurposing individual's unique styles.

I.e. they violate fair use by using what they learn in a way that devalues other's creative efforts. Being exposed to copyrighted works available to the public is not the violation. (Even though it is the way training currently happens that produces models that violate fair use.)

We need models that one way or another, stay within fair use once trained. Either by not training on copyrighted material, or by training on copyrighted material in a way that doesn't create models that facilitate specific reproduction and repurposing of creative works and styles.

This has already been solved for simple data problems, where memorization of particular samples can be precluded by adding noise to a dataset. Important generalities are learned, but specific samples don't leave their mark.

Obviously something more sophisticated would need to be done to preclude memorization of rich creative works and styles, but a lot of people are motivated to solve this problem.
by cyberax | 2025-05-19 05:42:21+00:00
Solar flares consist of protons and electrons, that are pretty slow-moving by nuclear standards. So they get absorbed by the atmosphere completely.

What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.

After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
by 124123124 | 2025-05-19 05:43:57+00:00
The answer is out-of-topic because the question ask what is something that ordinary people do not know.They go on a tangent about perspective and power over society, but nothing listed was a thing that I do not know.

like

>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.

Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.

>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.

For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.

At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.
by chthonicdaemon | 2025-05-19 05:44:03+00:00
I have found being able to sight read relatively easily to unlock a vast trove of music I'd like to be able to play which would have been harder to pick up purely by ear. It's definitely worth learning the things you're talking about. I found the surest way to get good at that kind of playing is to play with other people. The time dependence of having to keep up with everyone makes the feedback really tight.

Playing with other people also highlights other perhaps unexpected skills. I played in a band for a while and I still retain the skill of reading chords off other player's hands. You also need to be able to respond to someone just shouting "OK, let's go to C minor" in ways that only matter in that context. When you're listening or sight reading, you don't need names.
by mmooss | 2025-05-19 05:46:15+00:00
> Burn out and body damage from trades is not really factually based, especially not compared to something like software.

Your assertion isn't factually based - it's just another baseless claim on the Internet.

I don't know the factual basis about the harm labor does - it's one of those things that generally don't need it for most people - but basic knowledge and reasoning is that hard, and repetitive, physical labor daily for decades is going to cause some real physical problems. Most white-collar workers I know over 40 have bad backs. I know college kids who didn't last a summer on a worksite.

And as much better evidence, we have generations of reporting on it from the people who do physical labor. Those people have also long said they worked so their kids to do something different. I've never heard one who agreed with you - I've never heard anyone who agreed with you.

If it's so great, do you think many developers in SV would take construction jobs if they paid more? Managers? Other white-collar workers? Out in the cold and rain? No remote working for those jobs. :)

> There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22.

There are many other injuries - losing fingers and toes, serious traumatic injuries to every part of the body. I knew a painter who fell off a ladder, fell three stories and landed in the splits. But they had a family and they were back at it as soon as they healed; it wasn't without pain. If you do it every day for decades, how do you never fall from the ladder?

> the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50.

Many have no choice.
by john01dav | 2025-05-19 05:46:25+00:00
LLMs should only be used where hallucinations can be tolerated (either low stakes, like a video game; or where competent human review exists). What you describe is neither of these scenarios. You may be trying to memorize something that's not low stakes (and if it's low stakes why bother memorizing? Just make it up as you go), and if you're using study tools you're probably not (yet) competent enough to check for mistakes.
by monster_truck | 2025-05-19 05:46:30+00:00
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.

There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-19 05:46:57+00:00
> will absolutely swear that there will never be two people with the same national ID...

I suddenly got flash-backs.

There are duplicate ISBN numbers for books, despite the system being carefully designed to avoid this.

There are ISBN numbers that have invalid checksums, but are valid ISBNs with the invalid number in the barcode and everything. Either the calculation was incorrectly done, or it was simply a mis-print.

The same book can have hundreds of ISBNs.

There is no sane way to determine if two such ISBNs are truly the same (page numbers and everything), or a reprint that has renumbered pages or even subtly different content with corrected typos, missing or added illustrations, etc...

Our federal government publishes a master database of "job id" numbers for each profession one could have. This is critical for legislation related to skilled migrants, collective workplace agreements, etc...

The states decided to add one digit to these numbers to further subdivide them. They did it differently, of course, and some didn't subdivide at all. Some of them have typos with "O" in place of "0" in a few places. Some states dropped the leading zeroes, and then added a suffix digit, which is fun.

On and on and on...

The real world is messy.

Any ID you don't generate yourself is fraught with risk. Even then there are issues such as what happens if the database is rolled back to a backup and then IDs are generated again for the missed data!
by femto | 2025-05-19 05:47:20+00:00
> Money can solve all problems for someone, so you offer it, because there is so much else to do.

Anthony Pratt is worth a few billion dollars and acknowledges the above with his quote "being rich is my superpower".

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/being-rich-is-my-...
by cyberax | 2025-05-19 05:47:53+00:00
You need at least hundreds of kilometers for the effects to become significant (as in "tens of volts"). Nothing on the small scale will be affected.

Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
by pretoriusdre | 2025-05-19 05:48:22+00:00
I really don't like using natural keys as primary keys.

Natural keys sometimes need to change for unforeseen reasons, such as identity theft, and this is really tricky to manage if those keys are cascaded into many tables as foreign keys.

Natural keys are often not unique either. Using the national ID example, there are millions of duplicate SSNs issued within USA. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1687803/not-so-unique....

So, don't use natural keys as primary keys. Put them in as surrogate keys, ideally with a unique constraint.
by e28eta | 2025-05-19 05:49:01+00:00
Thanks for the reply. I do agree with sibling comment from tasuki that I think you’re missing the simpler solution of plain git repos to solve “owning your own data in a future-proof manner”.

If you’re not trying to coordinate work among multiple people, and aren’t trying to enforce a single source of truth with code, you don’t _need_ “git server” software. You just need a git repository (folder & file structure) in a location that you consider to be your source of truth.

I’m not trying to convince you to change it now, especially if you’re happy with what you have, but I would suggest reading some (or all) of https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

I think the first ~4 subsections of chapter 4 cover what I & tasuki were suggesting could be sufficient for you. If you’re the type of engineer to read through the code of your data storage layer, I think you’d find Chapter 10 (Git Internals) interesting, because it can demystify git. I enjoyed the whole book.

As with any engineering project, I see lots of questions about your choices, and I applaud you for sticking around. I would make very different decisions than you, based on your stated priorities, but that’s okay.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-19 05:50:08+00:00
FWIW, I don't write Rust, and this is why I said "not limited to". Honestly, Swift might be an interesting one. I gather Zig can provide a more safety than C++. There are a bunch of other options too.

Performance is often a concern, but a slow secure browser is better than a fast insecure one. Perhaps I'm a security troll, but writing this stuff in C++ has been shown over the last 30+ years to be functionally impossible, and yet security is one of the most important things for a browser.

If the answer is that there are more possible contributors, or even that this is a hobby project and it's what the author knows, those are reasonable answers, but I'm interested anyway because perhaps the author has a different way of thinking about these tradeoffs to me, and maybe that's something I can learn from.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-19 05:50:13+00:00
South Korea probably already has immigration reform ready to go. They’ll just do everything else before letting people meaningfully immigrate.

A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry.

In fact the way things are going Africa will probably end up as the nursery of the world for a few decades. Then birth rates will collapse there too.

The robots should be ready then
by benrutter | 2025-05-19 05:51:01+00:00
Elm's a great example of a language that's fully statically typed, but where the language doesn't result in long complex types.

In my mind Rust is one of the nicest, most ergonomic type systems. People say it's highly complex, but I think that's really because its type system also includes reference and lifetime annotation.

As a culture, I think Rust developers do a great job of designing well for a simpler type signature.
Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
by aspizu | 2025-05-19 05:51:02+00:00
goboscript is a text-based programming language which compiles to Scratch. It allows you to write Scratch projects in text, and compile it into a .sb3 file - which can be opened in the Scratch editor, TurboWarp or be uploaded to the Scratch website.

goboscript allows you to create advanced Scratch projects with ease, you can use any text editor, use a version control system such as git. You can refactor your code using search and replace. Text code can be copy pasted, which allows you to easily reuse code or share it with others. goboscript syntax is concise and easy to read.

goboscript allows you to integrate external tooling and workflows, such as using a script to generate costumes for a text rendering engine. Or loading in images into lists.

goboscript has a powerful macro system - similar to Rust's macro system. This allows you to write macros to generate code.

goboscript is more than just an 1:1 mapping of Scratch blocks to text, it also has additional features like local variables for procedures (custom blocks).

goboscript also performs optimizations, detects problems and unused code.