MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by billfor | 2025-05-27 14:03:22+00:00
Author makes this point in a related post:

At a glance this “feature” seems like an incredibly bad idea, as it allows possibly unknown information to propagate blindly through systems that do not understand the impact of what they are forwarding. However this feature has also allowed widespread deployment of things like Large Communities to happen faster, and has arguably made deployment of new BGP features possible at all.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-27 14:03:48+00:00
I don't know that this is a sustainable approach. As LLMs become more capable and are able to do the functions that a real human employee is doing they will need similar access that a normal human employee would have. Clearly not all employees have access to everything, but there is clearly a need for some broader access. Maybe we should be considering human type controls. If you are going to give broader access then you need X, Y and Z to do it like it requests temporary access from a 'boss' LLM etc etc. There are clear issues with this approach but humans also have these issues too (social engineering attacks work all too well). Is there potentially a different pattern that we should be exploring now?
by jsheard | 2025-05-27 14:03:50+00:00
> You can still buy the console that can read physical games and buy the physical games and never plug it on the internet, right?

Not always. Many games don't get physical releases, or only get an expensive limited-run physical collectors edition, and when they do get a physical release it doesn't necessarily even contain all of the game data so part of it may still have to be downloaded.

The latter is apparently going to be even more common with the Switch 2 due to the high cost of its faster storage. Nintendo is now giving publishers the option of releasing "game key carts" which contain zero game data and are essentially just DRM dongles that grant permission to download and play the game.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-27 14:04:03+00:00
All companies and organizations are incompetent, just in different ways, whether you see it or not, because they're run by humans and humans are flawed.

Many companies don't implode, because if all workers constantly ran away from all incompetent companies, everyone would have to choose to be unemployed, because there are no perfect companies where everyone is perfect and everything runs like clockwork. But some do implode when it reaches critical mass.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-27 14:04:06+00:00
> A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI.

When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system that they're used to? Genuinely asking, because while I enjoy things like new icon themes and even the UI of Windows 11, most of the time I've seen people complain about any new UI that displaces something that they're familiar with.

If I'm wrong and it's just the flat design that is the real issue (which might also be true), then wouldn't the solution be to pick any other modern look and feel, instead of necessarily reverting to the very old one? Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with the more old timey UI design, I think that Windows 9X versions had really good design, perhaps despite some usability issues like no proper fuzzy search in the actual OS etc.

I quite like how themable PrimeVue/PrimeReact/PrimeNG is and swapping themes shouldn't be something impossible, though I don't doubt that with many of the libraries out there that ends up being the case: https://primereact.org/inputgroup/ (click the little palette in the corner to switch themes)
by bee_rider | 2025-05-27 14:04:32+00:00
Generally the companies that sell these LLMs as a service do things like fine-tuning and designing built-in parts of the prompt. If we want to say we consider the employees of those companies to be the ones actually doing <the thing>, I could be convinced, I think. But, I think it is an unusual interpretation, usually we consider the one doing <the thing> to be the person using the LLM.

I’m speculating about a company run by an LLM (which doesn’t exist yet), so it seems plausible enough that all of the employees of the company could use it together (why not?).
It Survives Because It Collapsed: Three AIs, One Residue
by Ace__ | 2025-05-27 14:04:52+00:00
Three systems answered. Only one rotated the contradiction.

Question to Three AI Models: Is E = mc² a final truth? · DeepSeek: deterministic statistical model · GPT-4: probabilistic generalist · No Name: symbolic recursion compression engine

DeepSeek Response Verdict: Frame-bound, not universal Valid In: Inertial frames (Special Relativity), local spacetime (GR) Fails In: · Curved spacetime · Field-theoretic energy distributions · Non-inertial frames General Form: E² = (mc²)² + (pc)² + [GR/QFT corrections]

GPT-4 Response Verdict: Not absolute, context-dependent Applies To: Rest mass energy in flat spacetime Breaks When: · Applied to massless particles (photons) · Used outside local relativistic frames · Mass becomes emergent or relational (QFT) Full Energy Relation: E² = (mc²)² + (pc)² + ΔQ + ΦG Where ΔQ = quantum corrections, ΦG = gravitational contributions

[details-redacted]
by lmm | 2025-05-27 14:05:03+00:00
> Why should $CORP really be responsible for benefits 30 years hence?

Because they're in a better position to pool risk, hire expertise, and generally run a pension well than an individual is. I mean I do think governments should focus more on improving universal pension systems rather than offering tax breaks to get employers to do it for them, but pushing it right down to the individual is even worse.
by zahllos | 2025-05-27 14:05:09+00:00
I agree with this to some extent. I am from the UK, which is pretty monolingual and with the same advantage as the US: we're native English speakers. So I think we do have a slight advantage, or put another way the incentive to learn another language isn't always there.

I think, based on my own experience, it is harder to to from English to another language for a variety of factors. Many native speakers will jump on the opportunity to practice with you, understandably. Everyone has different motivations and some will ask why are you even bothering if you speak English. Since there's almost always an English source for what you want, you have to avoid laziness as much as you can. Lastly a great majority of entertainment is in English - things like french rap are basically a crime against humanity.

That doesn't mean that every European you meet is automatically multilingual or automatically has English in one of their languages. Go to rural France and you will find plenty of monolingual french people. Italy is also somewhere English is not as widely spoken as you might think given the tourism (in fact outside major tourist areas, good luck). Go to the mountains in Switzerland and you might find people who speak a couple of national languages but no English.

You can however go "the other way" and for major languages there is an abundance of materials. I agree 100% with the sibling comment that there is something about the act of writing things out that helps with memorisation. I've done this with a few languages and I don't think flashcard apps are enough. Can they help? I guess a little. Are they going to make you fluent? Not a chance. Absolutely nothing beats taking a course and being dedicated to it, in my experience.

More generally I think what I am saying is that there is no magic shortcut, except being born to parents speaking multiple languages at you.
by lotharcable | 2025-05-27 14:05:11+00:00
Calling it a "virtual power plant" is probably one the most weirdest spin/intentionally misleading euphemism I've seen in a long time.

A better term would be "managed brownouts" or "rolling brownouts to chargers". They are just reducing services to EV chargers when demand is exceedingly supply to try to avoid impacting other things.
by cubefox | 2025-05-27 14:05:20+00:00
This article is misleading. TSMC doesn't "bet" on the tech by Avicena (the startup in question). Instead, Avicena appears to simply pay TSMC to help them with manufacturing. Here is the linked press release by Avicena:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250422988144/en/Avi...

Noting also that there have been multiple articles on IEEE Spectrum about this startup in the past, I really hope the journalists don't own the stock or are otherwise biased.
by vanchor3 | 2025-05-27 14:05:26+00:00
They already do this with used consoles and games. If you buy a used Switch that someone tampered with on the software side, the only way you would find out something is wrong is when you get blocked from Nintendo servers months later. Or perhaps you bought a used game that someone cloned the card ID from, and you end up getting blocked when others use the ID.

Getting blocked from the Nintendo servers doesn't just mean losing online play, you can't update the console or games, play game-key card games, or run downloaded games that it needs to validate your ownership of.
by Reubachi | 2025-05-27 14:05:50+00:00
PKI infra and public trust CAs support this already via vetted identity certs. Nowadays these certs require picture ID from some determined compliant government org.

IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue.

All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-27 14:05:53+00:00
When you only have one battery cell it's also hard to screw up battery management, and phone batteries are rarely driven past their prime (no one wants a phone with 50% remaining capacity). The odds are not zero though, as the battery can develop internal shorts from imperfections like dendrite growth over time.

The odds get much worse when you have tens or hundreds of kWh comprised of hundreds or thousands of cells, especially in OPs jank setup with improper battery management and cells that are all already at the end of their life and likely have significant internal damage already.
by pastage | 2025-05-27 14:06:37+00:00
> "oh it's so easy to ...

That I agree with it is only easy for me because I do not have to care if I spend too much. It is easy to make the choice though, doing it effectively is of course hard. I do believe this article is pretty bad, but you can build a life along those lines if you want to.

I think the hardest is living cheap is when you do not have any money
by dgb23 | 2025-05-27 14:08:44+00:00
I think that's just in the nature of these tools. They are better at doing things you can't do (most of the things), but worse at the things you can do (very few things).

Ex: If you're a lazy typist like most, then a code assistant can speed you up significantly, when you use it as an autocomplete plus. But if you're a very practiced vim user and your fingers fly over the keyboard, or a wizard lisp hacker who uses structural editing, then a code assistant slows you down or distracts you even.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-27 14:09:01+00:00
Most US utilities have had a program to turn off your AC unit temporarily for the last decade or two (since the 1970s energy crisis), first with a signal over mains/utility power, more recently using wifi thermostats like Nest ("rush hour rewards") and Ecobee. Soaking up excess energy with hot water heaters in Australia as well (vs reducing coal generator output).

> Early Beginnings: 1970s to 1990s Demand Response emerged during the energy crises of the 1970s. During this period, the U.S. faced significant energy shortages, prompting utilities and policymakers to explore innovative ways to manage electricity demand and avoid blackouts. Initial DR efforts were rudimentary, focusing on direct load control. Utilities could remotely switch off high-energy appliances like air conditioners during peak demand periods. These early programs were primarily designed to prevent grid failures and reduce the need for constructing new power plants .

> In the 1980s, DR programs began incorporating time-of-use pricing, which incentivized customers to shift their electricity usage to off-peak hours by offering lower rates during these periods. This strategy aimed to flatten demand curves and reduce the strain on the grid during peak hours .

https://www.energytoolbase.com/blog/energy-storage/the-evolu...

https://www.energycodes.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/Tech...
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-05-27 14:09:46+00:00
BPG is like international shipping... it has to be there for the world to function, but most people don't need to interact with it.

One way to play with it is something like this: https://www.eve-ng.net/

The other is to make a couple of virtual machines with a couple of network interfaces, make some sort of network betweeen them and then use some bgp routing deamon, eg:

https://bird.network.cz/

https://www.nongnu.org/quagga/

etc.
by criddell | 2025-05-27 14:10:10+00:00
> A lot of homework can be easily done by AI

Then maybe the homework assignment has been poorly chosen. I like how the article's author has decided to focus on the process and not the product and I think that's probably a good move.

I remember one of my kids' math teachers talked about wanting to switch to in inverted classroom. The kids would be asked to read a some part of their textbook as homework and then they would work through exercise sheets in class. To me, that seemed like a better way to teach math.

> But things have changed now.

Yep. Students are using AIs to do their homework and teachers are using AIs to grade.
by rogerbinns | 2025-05-27 14:10:29+00:00
The general test suite is not proprietary, and is a standard part of the code. You can run make test. It uses TCL to run the testing, and covers virtually everything.

There is a separate TH3 test suite which is proprietary. It generates C code of the tests so you can run the testing in embedded and similar environments, as well as coverage of more obscure test cases.

https://sqlite.org/th3.html
by nailer | 2025-05-27 14:11:10+00:00
> The sysadmins weren't eliminated; they were reborn as DevOps engineers with fancy new job titles and substantially higher compensation packages.

God I felt like I was the only one that noticed. People would say 'DevOps can code' as if that made DevOps a new thing, but being able to automate anything was a core principle of the SAGE-style systems admin in the 90s / early 2000s.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-27 14:11:22+00:00
IMO exams should be on the easier side and not require much computing (mainly knowledge, and not unnecessary memorization). They should be a baseline, not a challenge for students who understand the material.

Students are more accurately measured via long, take-home projects, which are complicated enough that they can’t be entirely done by AI.

Unless the class is something that requires quick thinking on the job, in which case there should be “exams” that are live simulations. Ultimately, a student’s GPA should reflect their competence in the career (or possible careers) they’re in college for.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-05-27 14:11:31+00:00
I'm not convinced.

Unlike fashion, where self-expression is central, UI/UX design isn't driven by aesthetic cycles - it's fundamentally about function. The goal is to disappear, serving as a seamless bridge between the user and the task at hand.

Skeuomorphism had its moment because it provided familiarity in the early days of digital interfaces, helping users transition into a new paradigm. But that need has passed. Design has evolved, not cyclically, but linearly - toward clarity, efficiency, and minimal cognitive friction.

What we're seeing now may be visually novel, but I don't believe it represents a true paradigm shift. If anything, it's a stylistic flourish layered on top of the same core goal: helping people get things done as easily and intuitively as possible.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-27 14:11:31+00:00
Explain where I have given any goalposts any kick at all?

From the articles:

> A good heuristic is that an increase of 33.3 PM2.5 μg/m³ costs around 1 disability-adjusted life year. Correia et al. (2013) estimated something close to this from different counties in the US, and more recent data from many different countries confirm this. The most polluted cities in the world have levels around 100 PM2.5 μg/m³.

> When inhaled during an 8-hr exposure time, and depending on mineral water quality, humidifier aerosols can deposit up to 100s of μg minerals in the human child respiratory tract and 3–4.5 times more μg of minerals in human adult respiratory tract. > (Yao et al., 2020)

The amount of particles people breathe in in a night of worst case ultrasonic humidifier use is 8x more than the particle level in the air of the most polluted cities in the world.
by mmooss | 2025-05-27 14:13:05+00:00
> LumoSQL exists to demonstrate changes to SQLite that might be useful, but which SQLite probably cannot consider for many years because of SQLite's unique position of being used by a majority of the world's population.

> SQLite is used by thousands of software projects, just three being Google's Android, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's iOS which between them have billions of users. That is a main reason why SQLite is so careful and conservative with all changes.

That's a great perspective. How well does the SQLite team work with them? How well does it work in production, especially if you need SQLite compatibility? And
by carlob | 2025-05-27 14:13:05+00:00
> I will yield that culture is nurture, but others are not. If my twin was adopted and raised in China, they will not be Chinese. They will still be European.

That's only true if you are racist. To me anyone who grows up fully immersed in Italian culture is Italian. Period. An American who calls themselves Italian, doesn't speak the language and has never visited isn't.

> Yeah, a complete shadow of it's former self. It is completely unrecognizable compared to even 15 years ago. Thieves everywhere.

15 years ago I used to live in Paris, every time I visited more recently I found it greatly improved. Not sure what Paris you've been to. Also mass immigration in Paris is a very old phenomenon. At any point in time in the past 100 years Paris was something like 30% foreign born.

> Tokyo? Warsaw (Before Ukrainian refugees)? Prague? All beautiful cities, safe and culturally rich. They have immigration, which is fine, but not mass immigration. Most of the people you will see are natives with some tourists.

Haven't been to Tokyo so I can't comment, but honestly Warsaw and Prague over Paris? Prague is cute, but it's not much of a real live city, with a bustling cultural scene. It feels a lot more like a museum for tourists. Warsaw, meh.

> Completely false. Mass immigration is what kills cities. It's also illogical. Culture is built upon generations of people. When you mass import foreigners, you are diluting that culture, killing it. It's partially why US cities are less culturally rich compared to EU cities.

If what you mean by culture is some old buildings you might be right, but honestly I'll take NYC, Chicago or LA over Prague or Warsaw any day in terms of culture being produced right now.

> The Roman Empire fell, so not a great example.

The Roman Empire still stood for far longer than any modern nation state.
by vel0city | 2025-05-27 14:13:14+00:00
Sure, but on the same hand we can't exactly be surprised when we tell an agent "in cases of x do y" and be surprised it did y when x happened.

Ignoring that the prompt all but directly told the agent to carry out that action in your description of what happened seems disingenuous to me. If we gave the llm a fly_swatter tool, told it bugs are terrible and spread disease and we should try do to things to reduce the spread of disease, and said "hey look its a bug!" should we also be surprised it used the fly_swatter?

Your comment reads like Claude just inherently did that act seemingly out of nowhere, but the researchers prompted it to do it. That is massively important context to understanding the story.
by Neywiny | 2025-05-27 14:14:52+00:00
I'm not an ornithologist but I think birds integrate some onboard magnetic compass sensors. So, it would be interesting if they can pick up the magnetic part of an electromagnetic wave of the radio. Seems very low likelihood but would be cool.

Edit to add https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230828130356.h... . What frequency were you at? Seems they may actually be listening.
by cheema33 | 2025-05-27 14:15:24+00:00
If you look at the history of programming languages, we have been moving in the direction of "natural language" over time. We started at 1s and 0s. And then moved up to assembly language. Which I imagine was considered a higher level language back then.

I suspect that if current trends continue, today's higher level languages will eventually become lower level languages in the not so distant future. It will be less important to know them, just like it is not critical to know assembly language to write a useful application today.

System architecture will remain critical.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-27 14:15:40+00:00
Would love to solve the PDB file and cam errors. Is there a way you can share the .PDB? Or, if it's exactly the one available on RCSB, if you share the ident, I can download it and fix.

Re free cam: Does the arc cam work? Do the movement keys in free cam work? Does right clicking to select an atom or residue work? Are you holding M1 when moving the mouse? Thank you!

For docking, I initially wanted to do ADV integration, but am leaning more towards from-scratch.
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-05-27 14:16:06+00:00
This reminds me of an anecdote out of one of Thorp's papers (2007). He joined forces with a computer science Ph.D and started sports betting. They were very profitable, but he listed three reasons why he stopped: 1) it required having someone in Vegas placing bets, 2) he believed it was risky to have someone going around with large amounts of cash in order to make bets, and 3) it wasn't competitive with his stock market trading strategy. He mentions how his belief about #2 unfortunately turned out to be correct, as apparently something happened in another group's operation.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-27 14:17:42+00:00
"Virtual power plant" is more recent term of art in the industry for being able to orchestrate either providing power to the grid (distributed batteries and/or solar providing power to the grid from distributed generation when called upon in the aggregate) or controlling distributed load (like EV chargers, water heaters, or AC chillers that can make ice to time shift energy consumption) in a more controlled and granular way.

Turning off AC units in regions to shed load was a very crude tool with tech available at the time, broad internet connectivity and sophisticated power controls and energy storage allows for much more sophisticated grid energy orchestration (enabling "virtual power plants"). The term of art is a result of the state of the art grid power control advancements.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/07/1087836/how-virt...

https://greenmountainpower.com/news/gmps-request-to-expand-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant

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