MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whitehexagon | 2025-05-05 13:52:03+00:00
We awoke to power the next day, but mobile phone services only returned some hours later. Amazing how busy the banks were with people desperately seeking cash. Unfortunately the banks dont handle cash here now, and the ATMs were all offline.

The first few hours were scary, due to complete lack of information. I am not sure how people had internet access, seemed like all networks were down here. I dont follow any news (apart from HN) but from what people are saying locally, the cause is still unknown, which I guess means it can happen again at any time.

Any recommendations from preppers on a suitable portable radio? It would be nice next time to be able to distinguish rare draughty power line issues from possible start of WWIII.
by klodolph | 2025-05-05 13:52:27+00:00
You can look at stats from NYC:

https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost...

The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report.

So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
by jMyles | 2025-05-05 13:52:44+00:00
The good news is that the internet is, fundamentally and in a way that no legacy state can alter, not a place where IP is cognizable.

You are free to copy bytes as you see fit, and the internet treats them identically whether they are random noise or whether a codec can turn them into music, film, books, or whatever inspires you.

The problem is that some humans, justifying their behavior by claiming it as "official", may act out with violence against you if they (rightly or wrongly, that's important to note) perceive that your actions are causing the internet to copy bytes to which they object.

Enduring nonviolence is likely yet ahead as consensus grows over the end of the legitimacy of these legacy states.
by sillyfluke | 2025-05-05 13:52:54+00:00
>That's...a pretty strong opinion.

I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives.

In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and simple.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-05-05 13:52:54+00:00
Here is the thing about e2e encrypted messengers: They lock you and your data in and do not allow you control of your life. There is a right to data portability (at least in the eu) that they violate and there is no one fighting for it. Whenever i engage in conversation about this i get empty faces, hostility and vague references to features that are crippled or just don't work at all. There are people and institutions that have to archive the communication centrally and they don't have control over how they are contacted and cannot have conversation about the channel used in every interaction all the time. The solution is to finally force messengers to allow api access to all communication data and then show a sign similar to ssl warnings in browsers to the other side that this user is using an archival api service.
by xpe | 2025-05-05 13:53:31+00:00
They edited their post to remove the most offensive part, which I appreciate: they changed "BS skills" to "skills". (This leads to an unfortunate situation where my comment looks out of place -- a design error, in my opinion, of the forum software here.)

But there are uncharitable parts, such as:

> ... you couldn't explain what your skills are ...

... as well as:

> What do you plan to do if someone does give you a job and assign you a task? Tell your employer to prompt some tool to explain why you cannot complete that task?

This is a rhetorical question and not a charitable one. I am trying to interpret in a potentially neutral light, but this seems implausible. It seems much more likely to be snarky and mean: why does it assume "you cannot complete that task"?

Overall, the comment reflects an overall dislike of the project, which is fine. But as phrased seems to do more than that; it seems to attack the person who would do such a project. If the comment had demonstrated curiosity and/or attacked the idea clearly without attacking the person, we'd have a better experience here.

I will certainly grant there are good criticisms to be made*, but I don't think they should be done in this way nor with this particular argument.

* Both of this LLM-resume thing in particular as well as a concern that this might become more common*
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-05 13:54:04+00:00
> Any actual stats on people not brushing their teeth?

google is free - it's not anyone's responsibility to educate you and answer your naive questions. and if did google and you're still not convinced, well then i'm glad you're not an elected official wherever it is you live (though if you live in the US i guess you probably voted for the current admin)
by internetter | 2025-05-05 13:55:07+00:00
Without reading into lunch specifically, I'd very much be inclined to say yes.

The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on.

I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money.

https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
by scotty79 | 2025-05-05 13:55:27+00:00
I'm eating steaks seared/fried on a pan almost weekly for few years now. I landed on a combination of herbs and spices to make them actually tasty (rosemary, black pepper, sweet paprika and of course plenty of salt). But still they are nowhere near the tastiest of the foods that I've eaten. I eat them because they are easily (and slowly) digestible, and rich in nutrients. I don't really have to think about the rest of my diet and I can eat whatever I have a craving for without risking some serious deficiency as long as I eat occasional steak and keep an eye on my weight.

I've also been to some steakhouses few times and what they serve ranges between terrible and passable.

I guess my tastes aren't typical.
by neolefty | 2025-05-05 13:55:33+00:00
> When the school's debt ...

It's not the school's debt, it's individual families. If they fall behind on lunch fees, their children have to eat cold meals.

> Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes?

Depends. US schools are run by the states, so it varies from place to place. As other commenters have said, some states just fund lunch so debt isn't an issue. I'm sure some accommodate dietary requirements & preferences more than others.

My experience was that if you have specific requirements that the school can't meet, you just bring your own lunch. If you're lucky enough to have organized parents.
by xz18r | 2025-05-05 13:55:47+00:00
I'll say that I am less offended than some of my fellow commenters in this thread. I can hardly name 5 Belgian movies that I would suggest anyone to watch; Belgium has 1/30th of the US' population, but certainly a much, much smaller percentage of good movies.

Also, none of them are of the same 'appeal' as the American movies you cited, which are mostly action movies. The general populace wants to see big stunts and explosions, which require budget, local movies don't gross because they rely on local audiences, repeat ad infinitum. Most European movies that try to _look American_ in that sense fail horribly imo.

However, the ones I can name all have something in common: they wouldn't appeal to an international audience because there is something inherently 'local' to them. Not only language barriers (imagine reading subtitles) but also a certain 'European film aesthetic/tone' just like American blockbusters have theirs. American movies don't have the same 'local barrier' for Europeans because they are the norm and we're getting them force-fed by the 100bio Hollywood industrial complex: it's a movie, or it's a local movie.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-05-05 13:55:49+00:00
Firstly, no kidding, of course it's "illegal" and "Piracy".

Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.

In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.
by Xunjin | 2025-05-05 13:56:07+00:00
Ahhhh it wasn't nice, but we at Echo54[0] had a plan/execution (6 months before the due date) to migrate to RabbitMQ (with MQTT Plugin) works way better and cheaper than GCP IoT service. We did all of that in less than 2 months.

0. https://www.echo54.com/
by neolefty | 2025-05-05 13:56:57+00:00
Do you mean you always have to bring your lunch to school with you, in Australia?

I went to a weird high school in the US where that was the case. They just didn't have a lunch room, so everybody sat in the hallways at lunch time. But yeah, all the other schools I've heard of provide lunch. Most offer breakfast as well, as an option.
by SebastianKra | 2025-05-05 13:57:00+00:00
That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control away from the writer?

But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format. Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible, fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on anything but an iPad Pro.
by phkahler | 2025-05-05 13:57:02+00:00
>> But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
by phamilton | 2025-05-05 13:57:06+00:00
My LLM workflow involves a back-and-forth clarification (verbose input -> LLM asks questions) that results in a rich context representing my intent. Generating comments/docs from this feels lossy.

What if we could persist this final LLM context state? Think of it like a queryable snapshot of the 'why' behind code or docs. Instead of just reading a comment, you could load the associated context and ask an LLM questions based on the original author's reasoning state.

Yes, context is model-specific, a major hurdle. And there are many other challenges. But ignoring the technical implementation for a moment, is this concept – capturing intent via persistent, queryable LLM context – a valuable problem to solve? I feel it would be.
by hk__2 | 2025-05-05 13:57:11+00:00
> Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to create, but easy to verify.

Doesn’t this match pretty much all human creation? It’s easier to judge a book that to write it, it’s easier to watch a rocket going up in the space than to build it, it’s easier to appreciate some Renaissance painting or sculpture than to actually make it.
by Funes- | 2025-05-05 13:57:45+00:00
>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.

This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous. What the author is describing there would better fit what we tend to do during weekends, where "sobremesa" (coffee and drinks after we're done with the main dishes) can admittedly get a bit out of hand, but absolutely not on working days.
by AppleBananaPie | 2025-05-05 13:57:56+00:00
And then one of the iterations was asking additional ways llms could be used and then adding some of those as content which seems odd but plausibly helpful brainstorming. Just the phrasing of the original question makes it sound like things the user isn't actually doing but wants in their comment if that makes sense.

Thanks for the example chat it was a valuable learning for me!
by gabriel666smith | 2025-05-05 13:58:29+00:00
I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)

We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.

I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.

> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.

and from the article:

> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.

Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?

The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.

Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-05 13:58:49+00:00
> (The whole idea seems a bit crazy too, there are a thousand things which can go wrong with a rocket, so let's look for snipers.)

If I didn't know any better, I'd say some guy who both roasted his brain with drugs and spends a lot of time in the company of a person who was sniped at is in charge of the company.
by mingus88 | 2025-05-05 13:59:03+00:00
This is the first time I’ve heard of this incident and I’m not ashamed to admit that with everything we now know about Musk, it seems totally plausible that he would have internally squashed any other theories.

He has convinced his shareholders that FSD will ship by the end of every year for the past decade, so why wouldn’t he believe he could convince the FBI that the only way his super fueling process could have gone wrong is via an action movie sniper plot?
by maskros | 2025-05-05 14:00:50+00:00
Well so I glanced at what that project does.

Congratulations, you've managed to "compress" PDF files by rasterizing every page to JPEG, while destroying all the vector and textual information in it.

The resulting PDF is nothing like the input -- it's just a bunch of blurry JPEG images wrapped in a PDF format.

You can't search or copy the text, and trying to print it will just make a blurry mess of the text.
by alwa | 2025-05-05 14:00:52+00:00
It frustrates me when advocates get righteous about something that they only imagine and don’t take the time to see for themselves (while claiming it’s widespread and easy to observe):

“I never actually witnessed this scene myself, but I’ve interviewed enough lunch ladies, principals and kids to construct a sort of composite mental image that now plays on an endless loop between my ears. It’s become my own personal film of educational injustice, frame by frame, in high-definition slow motion: the momentary confusion on the child’s face, the hushed explanation from the cashier, the sudden understanding dawning in the kid’s eyes, the burning shame that follows.”

And from that, cooking up an opening paragraph precipitated on “witnessing” it, and Nuremberg-like somber intonations about the banality of “the ritual humiliation of second graders. It’s watching the adults in the room — ordinary, decent people who’d never dream of snatching food from a child in any other context — perform this strange ceremony with the mechanical resignation of DMV employees, while around them life continues uninterrupted, because this is just How Things Are.”

==

He didn’t witness this. He talked to people who were heartsick about it happening at all. Even in his imagined example, the kid doesn’t go hungry, the kid gets a sandwich instead of an institutional pizza slice.

The adults I remember from situations like this would absolutely go out of their way to treat kids with dignity—I remember foodservice workers seeking out any kids who still looked hungry to slip them leftover hot food from the line, and in some cases workers or counselors or teachers covering kids’ meals themselves.

Dunning lunch debt is probably a silly way to run a program, but there’s no honest policy assessment here. I don’t see why school lunch shouldn’t be free at the point of service, but I also don’t know why it isn’t under the status quo. I bet it’s not raw sadism. The pearl-clutching seems to focus on behaviors that are unsubstantiated at best.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-05-05 14:00:55+00:00
>The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market.

I'm not even sure if people are aware of inflation/housing as a completely solvable issue by the govt. I guess it's because people most people are clueless on how it is to be solved.

>We are a society of ladder-pullers.

It's by design, to serve the rulers. It's an assembly line of slaves who are given some freedoms and are put through various stages of school, university, work and retirement. When most people retire they are left with little to nothing.
by klodolph | 2025-05-05 14:01:09+00:00
If Moldova were a US state, it would be the 35th largest state, by population.

Most of these programs are done state-by-state in the US. Because the US is so large, it takes a large amount of political willpower to push programs out at the federal level. Education is mostly handled on a state-by-state basis. The funding split is around 90%/10%, with 90% handled by the state and 10% federal. (That may be changing.)

As a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to compare countries in Europe against individual states in the US, rather than comparing countries to countries.
by aurareturn | 2025-05-05 14:01:31+00:00
Rivian IPOed at $66 billion and shot up to $100 billion on first day of trading. In the same quarter as its IPO, it sold 1,000 cars.

Tesla and Rivian gave us the impression that electric cars were very difficult and expensive to make. When I was in Shenzhen in 2023, I saw that Huawei was selling electric cars. Every car on the road was basically an EV. I wondered why Tesla and Rivian had such troubles making EVs when everyone and their grandmas were mass producing them in China.

I think Rivian being worth as much as $100b is laughable with hindsight. They'll never be able to compete selling $100k SUVs.
by jajko | 2025-05-05 14:01:48+00:00
If you want to shoot 1 mile ammo, you need anti-material stuff like .50 BMG or at least .338 with some very hot loads. Probably even bigger if you want to have better chance, wind can easily carry the round 10 meters aside even in calmer conditions. Plus bullet would leave very distinct entry and exit points that couldn't be mismatched with some random shrapnel or other damage, or get lodged in more solid parts of rocket body and it would still be identifiable as bullet.

Such shot would be heard for a mile in quieter conditions. Not joking. Even during distant launch, a perimeter of few 100s of meters of shooter anybody there would hear it clearly.

I never owned or operated seriously any gun, just followed few gun channels + you have all the info on wikis and elsewhere, its just rather basic physics.

Anybody with similar or better knowledge would quickly debunk such theory as bs and focus more on known facts (but we talk about elon's ego here, not the most rational entity, he ie prefers pedophilia accusations when things don't roll as he wants). If they stated some very powerful laser gun, mkay more reasonable but then no visible flashes outside target itself. And such gun would require massive installation, preparation, testing etc.
by george87 | 2025-05-05 14:02:12+00:00
Location: Europe Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Java (Spring, Swing, JavaFX), JavaScript (Node, React, D3), Python, various SQL & NoSQL data stores, ETL platforms, UI/UX design tools, AI/LLM tools, Git, AWS, etc. Résumé/CV: www.linkedin.com/in/georgetanev Email: geotanjazz@gmail.com

Multifaceted software engineer with a master's degree in computer science and 15 years of experience in tech. Developed complete solutions from design to deployment, including web and desktop applications, data pipelines, interactive data visualizations, etc. Worked solo and in small teams. Provided expert advice, oversight, and mentorship on a couple of projects. Consulted for clients such as MIT, Triplebyte, and Rollbar; published research with IEEE, OEIS, and Springer. Open to consulting, contract work, or a full-time role given the right circumstances.
by ziml77 | 2025-05-05 14:02:19+00:00
Is price the only negative about them? I know the sentiment around Gandi here is negative, but the one time I needed to handle a domain issue recently they were super quick on the support. The problem was even my fault for messing up the ID info I'd provided (requirement of the registry for that TLD), but they got me back up and running 20 minutes after I sent their legal team the corrected info.
by jdeibele | 2025-05-05 14:02:21+00:00
"this weekend"

Presumably it's a rental.

I rented a Toyota Camry for a week. I didn't like the implementation of radar cruise control - we were driving in the hills around San Luis Obispo and the car ahead would go around a bend, the car would speed up, we'd go around the bend and the car would slam on the brakes.

I guess that if it'd been a hybrid that things would have been better since it could use regeneration rather than braking. I love adaptive cruise control in my Bolt.
by lynndotpy | 2025-05-05 14:02:23+00:00
I don't think you should be getting downvoted, you are right. I don't think it's "100x more", but more complicated rules require more resources dedicated to their management.

It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.

The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.