MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-04 19:48:15+00:00
I’m not saying all Trump voters are stupid. Just that there is a stupid subset that are not rationally motivated. It’s productive to call this out, because I think it requires reworking our political system to deal with their threat. Fortunately, MAGA seems eager to set the precedents we’ll need in the future. (It’s also not patronising because I don’t care what they do as much as that they don’t cause problems for other people. That’s defensive more than patronising.)
by zacka | 2025-05-04 19:48:37+00:00
To create enough force to lift the car using linear motors requires massive copper coils and rare earth magnets, which is heavy and expensive. It’s also wasteful, because in real world drive cycles peak force is only needed for short periods of time and at relatively low linear velocities. Further, linear motors require significant packaging space which requires the chassis be designed around it. Instead, we use a much smaller motor and a high “gear ratio” using hydraulics to achieve high forces via mechanical gain. This reduces raw material cost by a factor of >10x while achieving similar performance.
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 19:49:15+00:00
> Bypassing and/or undermining democratic institutions (media, courts, bureaucracy)

Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.

It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.

In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
by me3meme | 2025-05-04 19:49:33+00:00
-- Do a 2x2 block matrix multiplication to convince yourself that this preserves the form achieved so far.

I don't consider this a proof. Perhaps you have in mind two simple but key properties of reflections about the hyperplane orthogonal to a vector v: (a) The hyperplane of a reflection is the fixed point of the reflection (b) the hyperplane is the orthogonal vector space to the vector space spanned by v. From this two properties it follows that each step of making zeroes does not change previous zeroes.

Your claim that for advanced students there is no need to comment about details it is not falsifiable. Citing Mac Lane: A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

But from a practical point of view one can see the very basic level and simplicity of the definitions and calculations prior to the proof. So at this level of detail I consider that noticing that one must be careful to not destroy previous zeros is matching the level of discourse at the proper level.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-04 19:49:42+00:00
I can only speak for myself but I don't think you've got the cause and effect right. Dependences tend to have their own dependencies (which have ...). It's not so much the difficulty as it is the awareness of it that leads me to minimize my dependencies to the bare minimum.

All my dependencies are locally cloned. I build them from source in a network isolated environment. And yeah, that makes it more expensive to bring new ones in so I tend to shy away from it. I see that as a good thing.

That said, if you're willing to give cmake access to the network things largely just work as long as you don't attempt anything too exotic compared to the original authors. For that matter boost already has a decent solution for pretty much anything and is available from your distros repos. Rolling your own is very much a cultural past time as opposed to a technical necessity.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-04 19:49:54+00:00
Something I see a lot these days, what with modern scientism and all, is that even a tiny amount of $x causes permanent damage. You hear it about everything, from sunlight exposure to alcohol to sleep deprivation to red meat consumption. Most of the studies, of course, are an amusing combination of poor study design, funding bias and/or p-hacking, but occasionally a well-designed independently funded study by honest people slips through. Typically these studies will show the effect size so small as to be negligible. For example the Nature study about alcohol consumption shrinking brains showed an effect size over a lifetime of drinking equivalent to a fraction of the brain shrinkage that occurs over a normal year. Statistically significant? Yes. Practically significant, and enough to outweigh any benefits? Ehh...

But the larger problem is that the slabs of thinking meat that we inhabit are the most complex system in the known universe, and it is usually impossible to understand the effects of a single chemical. I wrote about this here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42326209
by PhilipRoman | 2025-05-04 19:49:59+00:00
Here is a fun paper with rigorous analysis of the protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573814

"Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol"

Also some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 19:50:09+00:00
> because everything I've seen is either rats that were exposed to truly insane doses (10X more than a human would take) or among long term, heavy users (weekly).

These studies get emphasized by MDMA proponents because they find them easiest to argue against.

Many of the arguments are based on flawed logic, like taking rat mg/kg numbers and translating directly to human mg/kg numbers. This isn't how drugs are scaled to animal doses (see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804402/ if you want to understand) so it leads to a lot of claims that studies are giving insane doses when they may not be.

Honestly this game isn't my favorite because someone always comes along to point out why various studies aren't 100% perfect in humans with a large sample size and then tries to suggest that therefore it should all be ignored. If they can't attack the study, they attack the motivations of the authors or insert claims like how the sample group may have been taking other drugs. If that fails, they try to claim that the drug users may have had those deficits to begin with, which led to the drug use. It goes on and on.

Here's one random study where abstinent users had decreased memory scores. The decrease scaled relative to how much of the drug they recalled using: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9855498/ (Opponents will point out one of the authors is hated in the drug community due to past controversy and therefore they won't trust the study)

Here's another one where ex-users showed verbal memory deficits, among other things: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16510479/

It's honestly not hard to find studies like this, but what you won't find is big placebo-controlled gold standard trials with enough dosing to achieve statistical significance. That's because it's not ethical to do so, and therefore it won't happen.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-04 19:50:46+00:00
...imagine fixing a bug, but 2 years later, the distribution isn’t shipping your update...

This grossly misstates the concept of a stable distribution (e.g., Debian stable, with which I'm most familiar).

Debian stable isn't "stable" in that packages don't change, to the point that updates aren't applied at all, it's stable in that functionality and interfaces are stable. The user experience (modulo bugs and security fixes) does not change.

Stable does receive updates that address bugs and security issues. What Stable does not do is radically revise programs, applications, and libraries.

Though it's more nuanced than that even: stable provides several options for tracking rapidly-evolving software, the most notorious and significant of which are Web browsers with the major contenders updating quite frequently (quarterly or monthly, for example, for Google Chrome "stable" and "dev" respectively). That's expanded further with Flatpack, k8s, and other options, in recent years.

The catch is that updates require package maintainers to work on integrating and backporting fixes to code. More prominent and widely-used packages do this. The issue of old bugs being reported to upstream ... is a breakage of the system in several ways: distro's bug-tracking systems (BTSes) should catch (and be used by) their users, upstream BTSes arguably should reject tickets opened on older (and backported) versions. The solutions are neither purely technical nor social, which makes solutions challenging. But in reality we should admit that:

- Upstream developers don't like dealing with the noise of stale bugs.

- Users are going to rant to upstream regardless of distro-level alternatives.

- Upstreams' BTSes should anticipate this and automate redirection of bugs to the appropriate channel with as little dev intervention as possible. Preferably none.

- Distros should increase awareness and availability of their own BTS systems to address bugs specific to the context of that distro.

- Distro maintainers should be diligent about being aware of and backporting fixes and only fixes.

- Distros should increase awareness and availability of alternatives for running newer versions of software which aren't in the distro's own stable repos.

Widespread distance technological education is a tough nut regardless, there will be failings. The key is that to the extent possible those shouldn't fall on upstream devs. Though part of that responsibility, and awareness of the overall problem, does fall on those upstream devs.
by pdonis | 2025-05-04 19:50:53+00:00
> If I have to move interstate ever again I'm selling everything and starting over.

That's more or less what my wife and I did the last time we did an interstate move. The stuff we simply couldn't part with, I drove myself. Truck rental prices were outrageous (this was during COVID), so I ended up making multiple trips with my SUV stuffed to the gills. The rest we sold or gave away, and then we bought new stuff for the new place. Moving the stuff would have cost more anyway with prices as they were.

I'm reminded of a saying which I think is originally Chinese: During the course of a long life, a wise man will be prepared to abandon his baggage several times. I think the saying was originally about avoiding being caught in a war zone, but it seems like it applies to interstate moves these days.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-05-04 19:51:40+00:00
A corollary of everywhere in the UK being North of anywhere in the USA (apart from the cheat-code that is Alaska). The UK is just too damn North, and therefore too damn cold (regardless of the Gulf Stream effect) for the heat-exchange that powers big thunderstorms

Except when it's not ,of course. I recall the Great Storm of 1987 [1], being at Imperial College at the time, and seeing the trees fall and hit some of the campus halls. Fortunately, Linstead Hall (there was an immense tree outside my window) wasn't one of them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1987
by db48x | 2025-05-04 19:52:23+00:00
Nobody killed Pluto.

Back in the early 1800s children used to memorize the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. But then in 1845 astronomers discovered Astraea, and now there were 13. In 1847 three more were discovered: Hebe, Iris, and Flora. Then Metis, Hygiea, Parthenope, and Victoria by 1850. The 100th asteroid was discovered in 1868, and the pace only got quicker from there. Somewhere along that line people started using the words “asteroid” and “asteroid belt” and schoolchildren were mercifully spared the pointless task of memorizing hundreds, and later many thousands, of names of asteroids.

The same thing happened to Pluto. Just as Ceres was the first discovered asteroid, Pluto was the first discovered TNO. There are now hundreds of named TNO and thousands more that are just numbered. Nobody should force schoolchildren to memorize them all. Just tell them that there are an unknown number of objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and they’ll know as much as they need to know. Give them bonus points if they know the names Ceres and Pluto, and more if they know why these two were discovered first of all the objects in their class: they’re the biggest. Otherwise there’s nothing special about them.
by HocusLocus | 2025-05-04 19:52:35+00:00
Why is there a sense that kids simply "don't remember" the pain of surgery if they are lightly anesthetized?

Do they think the nervous system is "turned off" in kids and "turns on" later? Likewise with the formation of memories. A human consciousness that is dealt searing pain under paralysis for an eon of thought-time, might trigger a life long psychosis that impairs living and learning.

Or a thirst for revenge.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-04 19:53:08+00:00
I don’t know anything about the subject area, so I don’t know if this captures enough to get a good grade. But I’m curious if anyone could tell whether the last answer were AI generated if I copied and pasted. These are the iterations I go through when writing long requirement documents/assessments/statements of work (consulting).

Yes I know the subject area for which I write assessments and know if what is generated is factually correct. If I’m not sure, I ask for web references using the web search tool.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c46d-0728-8010-a83d-609fe547c1...
by selfselfgo | 2025-05-04 19:53:39+00:00
When I was kid in school I would write original essays, and I mean truly original creative ideas. But of course any new idea has a chance of failure, so these essays were mostly bad and got bad grades. At a loss for what to do I quickly stopped reading the books I was assigned basing my essays on Wikipedia summaries and other people’s reviews. I saw my first few As and even A+s and I realized if I write something original of even just average intelligence roughly 50% of people will be too dumb to understand it. For an idea to truly be considered intelligent in literature it has to be appealing to people have no actual memory of the things they’ve read. Even for a knowledgeable intelligent person they have a sea of similar information clouding their view.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 19:54:34+00:00
The DMA card still needs to be installed, have drivers installed, firmware, etc. The anti cheat tests for that (the cheaters do mask the device spoofing the name/vendor/etc). Having to make new driver/firmware every time the anti cheat starts to detect it is way slower then just new software. Though at some point they will probably just automate it so that every customer gets their own driver and firmware matched with only their cheat software making this way harder but we are not there yet (and you would have to get all of these signed so following the cert chain should make it easier to find at least whos stolen cert they are using)

Also the amount of people willing to buy another pc and DMA cards is way smaller making the chance of running into cheater in your match smaller.
by pdonis | 2025-05-04 19:55:19+00:00
It used to be that third parties would act as brokers to give vendors an incentive to be honest. For example, my parents had to do several interstate PCS moves when I was a kid while my dad was in the Navy, and each time the movers were hired through the military. They knew there was a lot of repeat business there, so they had an incentive not to screw us. I only remember one mishap during those moves, where a nice desk that was originally from Hong Kong was damaged while the movers were bringing it up a short flight of stairs. They paid the insurance claim without any haggling. The desk was fixed, and I still have it.

Unfortunately, I don't know if even military PCS moves have that level of trustworthiness these days.
by peteforde | 2025-05-04 19:55:35+00:00
I did start by disclaiming a hot take, so forgive my poetic license and unintentional lede burying.

What I'm trying to convey is a metaphorical association that describes moderation and overdoing it. I'm thinking about the articles I've read about college professors who are openly high functioning heroin users, for example.

Every recreational drug has different kinds of users: social drinkers vs abusive alcoholics, people who microdose LSD or mushrooms vs people who spend time in psych wards, people who smoke week to relax vs people who go all-in on slacker lifestyle. And perhaps the best for last: people who occasionally use cocaine as a stimulant vs whatever scene you want to quote from Wolf of Wall Street.

I am personally convinced that there are positive use cases and negative use cases, and it usually comes down to how much and how responsible they are.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-05-04 19:56:33+00:00
An exception to test the rule with: people are generating lifelike video based on the pixel graphics from old video games. I have no interest in seeing a prompt that says "Show me a creature from Heroes of Might and Magic 3, with influences from such and so", but it's incredible to see the monsters I've spent so much time with coming to life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcITgZgN8nw&lc=UgxrBrdz4BdEE...

Maybe the problem is that the professor doesn't want to read the student work anyway, since it's all stuff he already knows. If they managed to use their prompts to generate interesting things, he'd stop wanting to see the prompts.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-05-04 19:57:06+00:00
I work in manufacturing; my boss could use this lesson real bad. Dude works every single day, 14-16 hours a day. Always going on about how he doesn't have time for this or that, too much going on. Always forgetting stuff because he's got 472 things on his mind. Probably has trouble finding any of those 472 things in his Excel-based wall of notes that gets called "task management". Constant miscommunication within the company. Total lack of systematization. He openly admits he he can't take a vacation because the company can't run without him there constantly.

Absolutely refuses to consider revising the processes he's used for 20 years. Where have I worked? What's some young buck gonna come in there and teach him? Meh, not my problem. I systematized my one little area and the rest can go to heck.
by derefr | 2025-05-04 19:57:08+00:00
> They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style.

No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable Diffusion models.

You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a different style. (Or you can set it up to do so by telling it that it "is" or "is roleplaying" a specific type-of-person — e.g. an OP-ED writer for the New York Times, a textbook author, etc.)

People just don't ever bother to do this.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-04 19:57:30+00:00
It is, as do all C derived languages.

After Pascal, all languages that Niklaus Wirth created were case sensitive.

Uppercase keywords are debatable as a style, however with good IDE tooling hardly an issue.

Similarly to BASIC and SQL, or spaces in ML languages and Python, don't use Notepad like editors for them, use something with autoformatter.

Pity that in Modula-2 case those products are long gone, and I doubt many would bother with a VSCode extension or something.
by ajb | 2025-05-04 19:57:53+00:00
The US military had a project to unify all their hardware radios into a mega SDR (software defined radio) project called JTRS. It was a massive debacle and didn't deliver very much. One of their bad decisions was to organise it around CORBA. I was amazed when I read that - CORBA did not solve a critical issue for them; it was just a big distraction. You can think of SDR as being a bit like ffmpeg or gstreamer - a collection of DSP modules. Plugability is a useful feature of those codebases, but the critical requirement is efficient data flow. IIRC this all happened somewhat after CORBA fell out of fashion in the software world too
by bruce511 | 2025-05-04 19:57:54+00:00
You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game your metric.

Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.

Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.

And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end.

When people are only there to play the game, then you can't expect them to learn.

However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really learn.

That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final score. There's so much more on offer.
by quesera | 2025-05-04 19:58:34+00:00
Interesting. I hear the echoes that you mention in Sonic Youth. I would add New York Dolls.

But Sonic Youth also brought something new, more than most bands do. I've listened, as professional obligation, to the entire catalog of Velvet Underground, The Fall, New York Dolls, Iggy Pop. The Fall were the most inventive but Sonic Youth still exceeded them. I recognize that these are the giants upon whose shoulders so many other artists stand, though.

As with The Cure, there are (at least) two Sonic Youths. I see The Top and Daydream Nation as the final recordings of their respective original incarnations.

Interesting that you hear Throwing Muses as a product of a scene. I'd agree for the later records (post-House Tornado), but there was definitely no contemporary scene that the first few records fit into.

I thought about including Lush in my previous list, but did not because, although they had a unique sound, they are a clear extension of the scene they emerged from. Again thinking of the first few releases (EPs) primarily -- after 1993 or so all Brit pop sounds alike for several years.

Re: Kate Bush -- aside from the Fairlight (as successor to Moog) synth, and concept albums, I don't hear much prog rock in there. I think I may prefer to remain ignorant here!

I also left out Siouxsie & The Banshees (again, ~1980-~1990), which was an inexcusable oversight!
by ddingus | 2025-05-04 19:58:40+00:00
Folder / Directory

I most frequently use the latter, directory when I am talking files and filesystems.

Most people return that with "folder", and I am sure that has to with my learning about these things happening where "directory" was the norm.

I have been educating people about files when I bump into ones that do not know much. The abuses are real and growing. Nice comment.
by db48x | 2025-05-04 19:59:16+00:00
For a generation, schoolchildren everywhere memorized the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The list was stable at 12 for about 40 years, but started growing again in the middle of the century. By 1868 there were 100 named asteroids. Not a single one has people living on it, so making children memorize their names was seen as a waste of time. Teach them about the asteroid belt and then move on to more important things. Likewise with the TNO: teach them about the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and then move on to more important things. No need to make them memorize Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, and Orcus, nor any of the hundreds of other named TNO.