MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-05-05 01:08:28+00:00
This is a problem:

> Regulatory action cannot solve the problem, because the Clean Water Act excludes agricultural sources, and the Safe Drinking Water Act does not cover private wells. Although some states do regulate nitrogen, voluntary action is the primary approach nationwide. [...]

> Kenneth Cassman, Ph.D., from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, said that progressive growers optimize 10 to 20 different crop and soil management practices, such as tillage, rotation, irrigation, pest management, and nutrients. “To come up with the impact of one factor out of everything else is almost impossible,” he said.

This is an opportunity:

> Cassman imagined a database to which every grower could anonymously report their yields and management practices. The potential payoff from such data, in terms of identifying what practices work best to improve both yields and efficiency of nitrogen use, would be comparable to that from thousands of field experiments every year, he explained.

An (open source agtech) database with crop yield, soil, and runoff optimization and open data and reports?

/? inurl:awesome site:github.com "FarmOS" : https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aawesome%20site%3Agit...
by jjmarr | 2025-05-05 01:08:31+00:00
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides.

Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process and are upset when students automate themselves out of the learning process.

I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of something challenging.

To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the school doesn't want high failure rates.

We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see value moving paperweights all day.

edit:

My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of a five-paragraph hamburger essay.

The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving students plush barbells.

For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem that AI cannot.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.h...
by lotyrin | 2025-05-05 01:09:30+00:00
I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.
by dangus | 2025-05-05 01:09:38+00:00
This is a great way to put it.

Some more annoying personas in the AI space:

- AI CEOs lying to investors and claiming their AIs will one day be impossibly smart.

- Companies that are consumers of AI products having CEOs pushing AI onto their employees as a quick fix thinking that they will get magic productivity gains and be able to cut staff if they just force employees to use it (I have even seen some real examples of companies adding AI usage to performance reviews)

- Companies claiming to be AI-first without launching any significant AI-powered product

But I do think it’s a very measured way to read the situation to refrain from joining the knee-jerk into being an AI-hater. That sentiment is basically just a counter-culture reaction to dislike AI, especially since it seems to most negatively impact creatives such as illustrators.

I think that some professionals who refrain from leveraging it from an ethical standpoint will legitimately fall behind their labor competition.
by alpinisme | 2025-05-05 01:10:46+00:00
> Academia put itself as a gateway

How did academia do that? It doesn’t seem like universities would have the power to do that. More likely, either employers put academia as a gateway. Or even: the culture at large misunderstood what pathways existed to middle class life. Or even: pathways to middle class life became scarcer and more insecure, and the real gatekeepers (hiring managers) had no good ways to select which of the many people at the door to let through.
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-05 01:11:00+00:00
This is one of the things I think Elixir is really smart in handling. I'm not very experienced in it, but it seems to me that having your processes designed around tiny VM processes that are meant to panic, quit and get respawned eliminates the need to have to intentionally create graceful shutdown routines, because this is already embedded in the application architecture.
by krisoft | 2025-05-05 01:11:50+00:00
> Did you think my post was illustrating that camera based self driving cars were infeasible?

You said this line: “The car is traveling 1.5 feet between each frame interval” As I said before, this is a true statement. What I’m asking is what do you think is the significance of this value. You wrote it. It does indeed sound like you were saying this is an impediment, or at least a complication for implementing a camera based system. But I don’t know because you didn’t spelled it out, and I can’t read your mind. Hence I asked why do you feel that number is a problem. (If you don’t think it is a problem, just an interesting fact you wanted to share of course you can say that too.)

> it appears you are mistaking framerate for latency

I’m not. If you are measuring latency from “something is happening in the world” to “robot is reacting to it” then a component of that end-to-end latency is the time delay before your sensor captures a new measurement. That delay is a function of your framerate. This delay is only part of the full end-to-end latency. It appeared to me you were concerned about this delay and that is why you calculated how much the vehicle travels during this time.

> I don't really know what to say here.

I asked specific questions. If you would care to answer them we would be ahead. When i wrote “I can’t quite understand your comment.” that is not a retorical snipe. It literally means what i wrote: I do not understand your comment and I’m asking for clarification. I even quoted the bits which I don’t understand and asked my specific questions about them.

> This is would be pretty tangential to the discussion so not sure why you are bringing it up?

Because it seemed to me you were bringing it up in your comment. Or at least that is how i could interpret those few lines in your comment I was talking about.
by azemetre | 2025-05-05 01:12:35+00:00
You should check out the book Palo Alto if you haven't. Malcom Harris should write an epilogue of this era in tech history.

You'd probably like how the book's author structures his thesis to what the "Palo Alto" system is.

Feels like OpenAI + friends, and the equivalent government take overs by Musk + goons, have more in common than you might think. It's also nothing new either, some story of this variant has been coming out of California for a good 200+ years now.

You write in a similar manner as the author.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-05 01:12:50+00:00
At times there is value in that kind of approach, especially when the learning is specifically about those kinds of lower layers instead of higher concepts. As such, it's not that certain tools should be used in every assignment or never ever used, just whether they should be used commonly.

For most continued learning it's better if the university uses calculators, compilers, prepared learning materials, and other things that do stuff on behalf of the students instead of setting the bar permanently to "the student should want to engage everything at a base level or they must not be here to learn". It allows much more advanced learning to be done in the long run.
by viraptor | 2025-05-05 01:12:57+00:00
In August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall."

Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.
by watusername | 2025-05-05 01:14:22+00:00
According to the new 404 Media article [0] about the app's archive server actually being hacked, TeleMessage does have contracts with several governmental agencies. Still not a direct answer to the question, I know, but it tilts the answer overwhelmingly towards "yes."

[0]: https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-05-05 01:14:26+00:00
YMMV, in my uni there is more or less zero impact of cheating in your homeworks in most classes: the homework has low weight in final grade and are graded very generously.

I agree that making assignments not designed with external sources in mind significantly impact the final grade is not ideal. I think this is minor and easily fixable point rather than some failure of the whole education system.
by kylecazar | 2025-05-05 01:14:40+00:00
I haven't attended one in a while, but I signed up for some on devpost and so far it seems on point. Also -- lots and lots of AI, which I guess is to be expected.

I remember attending a hackathon many years ago in my university's comp sci department. It was just a random weeknight, a smallish group of people coding and talking. Anyway, like 5 pizzas came, and I asked who I should give money to. I was told "don't worry, Google buys them". It was the first and last time I heard the company mentioned that night.

It was cool.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-05 01:16:07+00:00
Interesting. We have biodiesel and ethanol in gasoline (I'm not sure if both projects are still on). But I don't remember any biomethane project. Gas is cheap, but we import a lot of it too.

Most major cities here have natural gas, but it's slowly switching to electrical because keeping the tube in good state inside the homes is difficult. I remember like 10 years ago in a trip to Brazil the electrical shower, and I was very nervous. Like Electroboom in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06w3-l1AzFk
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-05 01:16:27+00:00
they are throwing the baby out with the water. i agree that maintaining 3 frameworks is crazy, but keeping only the last one as the new lts would have been the right move.

they seem to be "doing a gnome" and soon will start to launch huge redesigns to the entire user base. plasma is one of the few things i have surprises on rolling distros. just two weeks ago desktop would hang because the wifi applet had a bug. everyone waiting 20s in login or when changing wifi networks. one week for the fix. which is fine, but now imagine that surprise being not a 20s delay but features disappearing or changing not because it's the plan, but because they are taking a few months to refactor something.
by mistercheph | 2025-05-05 01:17:22+00:00
In real life, many education professionals are co-conspirators with students to produce work artifacts in lieu of actual work, ChatGPT has done wonders for both parties to help accelerate production of piles and piles of paper that have the appearance of schoolwork, paper piles > learning is the nash equilibrium of the incentives in our present education scheme in the United States.

But don't worry, worst case scenario, all of the kids growing up in this environment that are actually learning will build structures to exploit the prompters, I suspect the present situation where prompters can accidentally find themselves in real jobs is transient and building better filters will become survival imperative for businesses and institutions.
by otterley | 2025-05-05 01:17:57+00:00
Racism is when you stereotype people based on their racial characteristics. Calling people of a certain race or ethnicity "groups" instead of "races" when making this judgment doesn't make it not racist.

Putting that aside for the moment, the argument rayiner made, and that you appear to be supporting, is that if you bring too many foreigners into a country, it will change the cultural makeup of that country. It's an argument that seeks to exploit people's fears. It's not a new argument, and it's a largely discredited one. People who make this argument have to anticipate at least the following questions and provide some very difficult answers to them:

1. What exactly is American culture?

2. Is American culture homogeneous? If not, how do you know where immigration will disrupt existing culture, and where it won't?

3. How will you know when American culture is disrupted because of immigrants as opposed to intrinsic forces?

4. How much immigration is too much? How do you know?

5. Which immigrants do you believe are OK to permit into the country, in what numbers, and where?

6. For any potential individual immigrant, how do you know this immigrant will or won't assimilate?

7. How long should an immigrant be given to assimilate? What will assimilation look like for them? What does the bar for "good enough" assimilation look like?

8. Why isn't conformance to our laws sufficient for an immigrant to be accepted?

9. Should new immigrants be Judeo-Christian? If so, how do you square that with the First Amendment's freedom-of-exercise clause? What about all the Muslims already in the USA? Have they adversely impacted America? If so, how?

10. How do you think about the difference between a Black person already in the USA (see question 2) and a new African immigrant?

11. Do the impacts of immigration--particularly of Africans--manifest differently in the Americas than they do in other countries, say, in the UK? If so, why?

12. What about native-born Americans who don't conform to whatever American culture is (see question 1)? Should we eject them?

When I ask people these questions, they invariably end up falling all over themselves. People don't think about immigration rationally; they fall back to primitive "in-group" and "out-group" thinking and engage in "otherism." Sometimes it's religious hatred; sometimes it's racial hatred; other times it's class hatred. I encourage anyone who believes that immigration causes problems figure out for themselves the answers to the above questions and how they would craft a policy that serves everyone better, and not one that just suits their own prejudices.
Show HN: AgentShield SDK – Runtime security for agentic AI applications
by iamsanjayk | 2025-05-05 01:17:59+00:00
Hi HN,

We built AgentShield, a Python SDK and CLI to add a security checkpoint for AI agents before they perform potentially risky actions like external API calls or executing generated code.

Problem: Agents calling arbitrary URLs or running unchecked code can lead to data leaks, SSRF, system damage, etc.

Solution: AgentShield intercepts these actions:

- guarded_get(url=...): Checks URL against policies (block internal IPs, HTTP, etc.) before making the request.

- safe_execute(code_snippet=...): Checks code for risky patterns (os import, eval, file access, etc.) before execution.

It works via a simple API call to evaluate the action against configurable security policies. It includes default policies for common risks.

Get Started:

Install: pip install agentshield-sdk

Get API Key (CLI): agentshield keys create

Use in Python: from agentshield_sdk import AgentShield # shield = AgentShield(api_key=...) # await shield.guarded_get(url=...) # await shield.safe_execute(code_snippet=...)

Full details, documentation, and the complete README are at <https://pypi.org/project/agentshield-sdk/>

We built this because securing agent interactions felt crucial as they become more capable. It's still early days, and we'd love to get your feedback on the approach, usability, and policies.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-05 01:18:26+00:00
What's the benefit of communicating something is 15x the distance of Pluto if people are expected to have at least a ~15x error in how far away Pluto is supposed to be? At that point it's all nonsense, nothing is relevant anymore. Might as well say something useful for those who do have a clue about the solar system.

Hell, it's been nearly 2 decades since Pluto was itself planet 9. Just bringing the name up in a discussion about planets is going to cause more confusion.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-05 01:18:27+00:00
It's because they truly are fake.

I've been to several of them in Toronto, this year and last. Teams nowadays just `git clone` some repo, put in some crappy logo and then say "I made this", and they mean it.

This is a general trend I've observed to be prevalent with zoomers (but not Gen Alpha), they just lie to others as if it was nothing. No idea what are the social cues that led them to this, but I would find that interesting to study. I don't think they're ill intentioned, I think they don't consider lying to be bad and it's some sort of way of going through life.

Not long ago I was having dinner w/ some scammers (one of them is on the latest YC batch, btw) and this guy was telling everybody that you need to lie to get ahead, "if you don't lie to your investors they will invest in someone else who is lying to them". This guy was somewhere between milennial and zoomer by age, but with a mien and mind more akin to that of a zoomer (TikTok, etc...).

Very vulgar individual. That's SOTA these days.
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-05 01:18:57+00:00
Agreed. I went on a work trip to the islands off of Phuket, and several days in the UAE.

I loaded up hard. R5, the "holy trinity" (15-35/2.8, 28-70/2, 70-200/2.8), 100-500, and an 85/1.2. I used two lenses, mostly one (the 28-70).

I am going on a trip, two weeks in Maui. And I'm going to take an X100VI, for most days, and mirrorless with 2 lenses for 2 or 3 of the days tops. I have an SSD with a CF/SD reader, and both cameras I will have have USB-C charging so I want to enjoy, but not have the experience be secondary to photography.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-05 01:19:00+00:00
The US federal government does not, but they are rather common in US states. The US federal government was structured with its direct constituents as states, not citizens, and while that has evolved a bit over the years, it still is reflected strongly in its structures (Constitutional amendments must be ratified by a kind of referendum, but it is a referendum of state legislatures, not citizens.)
by chongli | 2025-05-05 01:19:00+00:00
It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three.

But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.

We are a society of ladder-pullers.
by TrexArms | 2025-05-05 01:19:20+00:00
I picked up photography for a bit and definitely lived in the lens for about 2 years. What broke me out of it, I got the idea of a sunrise shot. I stayed up all night, left home about 2am. I hiked through the woods to find 150+ people already there with the same idea. I didn't know it until I asked, but there was a parking lot 100 yards from where I was at. I looked around just really confused, waited for the perfect light. I took the shot, deleted it and went home. I didn't press down the shutter button for 5+ years after that.

Now that cell phones exist and I got a super powerful camera in my pocket at all times. I really enjoy taking snapshots. Which for non-photographers are the lowest quality of photos that someone takes(1 out of 5). Occasionally, I'll do a trip to take a picture of something, but I tone down the seriousness of it and make sure that i'm not doing more than enjoying the moment and taking a snapshot. What I really missed was getting out there, it wasn't the photography. The photography just forced me to get out there.
by pvg | 2025-05-05 01:19:42+00:00
It's not my call, I'm just explaining how HN typically works. If you want some story handled differently, you should send an email to hn@ycombinator.com. But 'two or more things about the same thing on the fp at the same time' is a big barrier to overcome, it almost never happens.

There is mod commentary on 'people might miss things because of the title' as well, it's mostly 'it's ok for people to click through the story or thread to figure things out' and that's also a fairly longstanding 'how HN works most of the time' thing.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The operating assumption here is that people are smart enough to follow the developments in the story themselves - in the the thread and outside.
by jgalt212 | 2025-05-05 01:19:45+00:00
> It seems to me the only people willing to spend $200/month on an LLM are people like her. I wonder if the OpenAI wave of resignations was about Sam Altman intentionally pursuing vulnerable customers.

And the saloon's biggest customers are alcoholics. It's not a new problem, but you'd think we'd have figured out a solution by now.
by colonial | 2025-05-05 01:19:47+00:00
> ... their opinion on them and their output has no value

This is ridiculous. Even if the author has never typed a single character into a prompt box, he can still come to perfectly valid conclusions about the technology just by observing patterns in the outputs that are shoved into his face.

"I wish these astrophysicists had stated up front that they've never created a galaxy. How can they have a well-formed opinion on cosmic structures if they only ever observe them?"
by joshvm | 2025-05-05 01:20:08+00:00
Are you asking about best practices? Or the theory behind the printing process? I think there is a ton of this actually, because when 3D printing became affordable, the community did a huge amount of experimentation to figure out how to make their $250 Ender reliable.

Stefan's CNC Kitchen is a good channel if you want to see experiments with things like temperatures and materials. https://www.cnckitchen.com/

Or you could look at the original RepRap research and how it's evolved. The MK4S+ is just a very refined version of the original bed slinging printers. There are also papers on slicer development. There has been a trend towards thicker nozzles as slicers have gotten better (eg using 0.6 by default instead of 0.4).

Otherwise advances in printer technology, particularly first layer calibration, have improved massively in the last few years. So things like bed flatness and adhesives are much less of an issue with auto-levelling/probing nozzles. Bear in mind Ultimaker has been doing it this way for years, but it became mainstream (cheap) more recently. Any of the major modern enclosed printers (Prusa Core/XL, Bambu) shouldn't have adhesion problems with standard filaments. It's also highly filament specific, though the really high end machines (Markforged) are reliable in my experience because they discourage any deviation from their recommended materials and print settings.

For example MarkForged - a $10000+ printer - shipped their desktop FDM machine with Elmer's purple glue. They said it worked best in their testing and it still works for me.