MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw310822 | 2025-05-13 13:31:52+00:00
> Russia did meddle in the elections to trumps benefit, but that’s not the “only” reason.

So the talks of "Russian asset" and "elected thanks to Russia" are conspiracy theories, right?

> A coup attempt does not require military involvement

A coup is the taking over of the government by groups (military, political, institutional) that are prepared and organised to do so. When violent protesters invade a government building, it's a violent protest.

> If your post requires a throwaway account, you already know it’s wrong.

It's not a throwaway account.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-13 13:31:57+00:00
This sounds ridiculous, expensive, and ineffective. It should play quite well with insurance agencies and providers looking to sell a quack solution to spiritual maladies.

In the past, I have regaled HN readers with my story about my broken leg, and the electromagnetic "bone stimulator" that they prescribed me in a successful attempt to exploit Medicaid to the fullest extent possible.

Did you know that electroshock "therapy" (ECT) is still widespread and in current use? I did not, but it was only a few years ago when I encountered patients at my clinic who said they couldn't get through the week without another dose of ECT.

Perhaps they can find a way to hook up these machines to home EV chargers in your garage and you can just sit there for a 10 minute morning dose, along with your coffee and donut.
by bluGill | 2025-05-13 13:32:02+00:00
> Or could we make a phone that runs 100x slower but is much cheaper? I

Probably not - a large part of the cost is equipment and R&D. It doesn't cost much more to build the most complex CPU vs a 6502 - there is only a tiny bit more silicon and chemicals. What is costly is the R&D behind the chip, and the R&D behind the machines that make the chips. If intel fired all their R&D engineers who were not focused on reducing manufacturing costs they could greatly reduce the price of their CPUs - until AMD released a next generation that is much better. (this is more or less what Henry Ford did with the model-T - he reduced costs every year until his competition adding features were enough better that he couldn't sell his cars.
by vharuck | 2025-05-13 13:32:05+00:00
If I understand the parent commenter, here's a common example from population-level statistics like public health:

"State X saw a mortality rate last year that was statistically significantly higher than the national rate. We should focus our intervention there."

The null hypothesis is that the risks of death are exactly the same in the state vs the nation. That may work with experimental sample sizes, but at the population level you'll often have massive sample sizes. A statistically significant difference is not interesting by itself. It's just the first hurdle to jump before even discussing the importance of the difference. But I've seen publications (especially data reports with sprinklings of discussion) focus entirely on statistical significant differences in narrative next to tables.

This isn't P-hacking an experiment, but it is abusing and misunderstanding statistical significance to make decisions.
by rwieruch | 2025-05-13 13:32:10+00:00
Thanks for your feedback and for validating the pricing model! We see it the same way.

Most property management systems charge campground owners several thousand dollars upfront, before they can even try the software. That’s where our approach stands out: we offer a low barrier to entry paired with a modern user experience. Many competitors started over 15 years ago, and you can tell by how outdated their products feel.

Taking just a 1% cut can pay off if it helps capture more market share, this was my thinking too. We’re not quite there yet, as not all of the 250 campgrounds on our platform have adopted online payments. Still, it’s both exciting and a bit terrifying to see some of them already processing over $250,000 in annual bookings through our system.

I’ve had a few sleepless nights, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend building a marketplace product to everyone. Once real money flows through your platform at that scale, things get intense fast.
by tomhow | 2025-05-13 13:32:22+00:00
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-05-13 13:32:22+00:00
It's never been completely safe to just do things you found on the Internet. Attach another Rube Goldberg machine to the front, this doesn't fundamentally change.

AI accelerates complex search 10x or maybe 100x, but still will occasionally respond to recipe requests by telling you to just substitute some anti-matter for extra calories.
by Tainnor | 2025-05-13 13:32:26+00:00
> ORMs

Certain ORMs such as Rails's ActiveRecord are part of the problem because they create the illusion that local memory access and DB access are the same thing. This can lead to N+1 queries and similar issues. The same goes for frameworks that pretend that remote network calls are just a regular method access (thankfully, such frameworks seem to have become largely obsolete).
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-13 13:32:40+00:00
In case more advanced nodes would disappear, even a semiconductor factory capable of producing eg. 200..500nm structures would already be very useful.

Remember the first 32-bit cpus were manufactured on >1um processes. Never mind 8-bitters or KB-sized memory chips.

Also note that IC designs, assembly programming & more, can be (and has been) done by hand. Having any kind of compute, no matter how slow by today's standards (couple MHz) helps a lot. Same for basic applications like text processing, spreadsheets, small databases, software development, etc etc.
by newsclues | 2025-05-13 13:33:25+00:00
It’s the rotten bureaucracy (bloated administration) in academia that results in the symptoms of non academic spending. The root cause is the management that is not allocating resources to the core mission and instead focusing on administrative costs (salaries), and expensive facilities that aren’t academically necessary.

You don’t get the professional managerial class investing in world class research labs, they spend more on sports!
by weweersdfsd | 2025-05-13 13:34:13+00:00
They do get parts through various third party countries.

Sanctions really don't work in aviation either. Iran has faced harsh sanctions through the 2000's, yet they've kept flying Western made planes, lately even newer models. Similar story with Cuba, somehow they operated ATR turboprops for decades, and those certainly do have American made parts.

If you have the money, somebody will supply you the parts.
by gruez | 2025-05-13 13:34:18+00:00
>but democrats don’t govern as if it’s true and those aren’t positions espoused by the vast majority of the party, including all the ones with notable power.

Maybe they're not "governing as if it’s true", but their statements certainly do. See for instance, the "Kamala is for they/them" attack ad? Granted, it was an attack ad and Kamala moderated her stance in the 2024 election, but her statements in 2020 was far left of the average voter, which was why it was why it was so effective.
by sgarland | 2025-05-13 13:34:20+00:00
Correction: devs have made the mistake of turning everything into remote calls, without having any understanding as to the performance implications of doing so.

Sonos’ app is a perfect example of this. The old app controlled everything locally, since the speakers set up their own wireless mesh network. This worked fantastically well. Someone at Sonos got the bright idea to completely rewrite the app such that it wasn’t even backwards-compatible with older hardware, and everything is now a remote calls. Changing volume? Phone —> Router —> WAN —> Cloud —> Router —> Speakers. Just… WHY. This failed so spectacularly that the CEO responsible stepped down / was forced out, and the new one claims that fixing the app is his top priority. We’ll see.
by cess11 | 2025-05-13 13:34:51+00:00
Dialyzer might be considered "bolted on", but the BEAM itself is strongly and dynamically typed. In Elixir the compiler is getting static typing as well.

https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof

These languages have other properties that can play the role that types are sometimes relied upon to do. It's uncommon that I think in types at all when building things in Elixir, thinking about shapes usually gets me all the way.

In my experience string processing libraries are the weakest part, due to some of them having abysmal performance for whatever reason. Last I had this problem I wanted to do ETL on mbox files but gave up and did it with someone's PHP one-class weekend project instead.
by mjevans | 2025-05-13 13:35:15+00:00
Related... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1966096

If you're running Firefox on Debian please make sure you manually update it since the package repo's been down for a while. I filed a 'support' ticket first ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1510388 ) since it seemed to be the proper place, but no one seems to look at those.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-13 13:35:17+00:00
Give them tools, maybe, but "The network" can't do it natively. They doesn't have an understanding, can't filter out "ad absurdum". Plus they can only go so deep. Maybe they can hit snopes and check something, but I don't believe current ones even with tools do detailed cross examination with open ended research and stop when they are convinced that they have enough data.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 13:35:58+00:00
What humanity has achieved here is incredible. We couldn’t even build an idiot for decades.

What you’re referring to is popular opinion. AI has become so pervasive in our lives that we are used to it and the magnitude of achievement has been lost on us. The fact that it went from stochastic parrot to idiot savant to crappy consultant is from people in denial about reality and then slowly coming to terms with it.

In the beginning literally everyone on HN called it a stochastic parrot with the authority of an expert. Clearly they were all wrong.
by intermerda | 2025-05-13 13:36:17+00:00
> No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

It's by design.

Aand of course this submission gets flagged.
by duxup | 2025-05-13 13:36:41+00:00
I had a cheap DJI drone a while back and it was fun, but I'd like one a bit better / that would last me longer (the batteries wore out fast, one won't charge and the other barely holds onto a charge).

>The Mavic 4 Pro is now on sale in most regions except the United States starting at €2,099 or £1,879 (about $2,360) with the RC2 controller

Holy cow, naw.
by justinrubek | 2025-05-13 13:36:42+00:00
This shows only a surface level understanding of what nix provides here.

One of the biggest benefits is the binary cache mechanism, which allows you to skip building something but have the effective result of the build pulled from the cache. It's classical distributions that make building from source only possible for those who can afford the infrastructure, nix is what enables the rest of us to do so.
by arisbe__ | 2025-05-13 13:36:51+00:00
Professionalization and high employee debt means that the employees will choose sel-prezervation over creative inquiry and truth seeking.

Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.

I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?
by vasco | 2025-05-13 13:37:29+00:00
He mentions the rate of innovation would slow down which I agree with. But I think that even 5% slower innovation rate would delay the optimizations we can do or even figure out what we need to optimize through centuries of computer usage and in the end we'd be less efficient because we'd be slower at finding efficiencies. Low adoption rate of new efficiencies is worse than high adoption rate of old efficiencies is I guess how to phrase it.

If Cadence for example releases every feature 5 years later because they spend more time optimizing them, it's software after all, how much will that delay semiconductor innovations?
by api | 2025-05-13 13:37:34+00:00
What you're describing is Enterprise(tm) software. Some consultancy made tens of millions of dollars building, integrating, and deploying those things. This of course was after they made tens of millions of dollars producing reports exploring how they would build, integrate, and deploy these things and all the various "phases" involved. Then they farmed all the work out to cheap coders overseas and everyone went for golf.

Meanwhile I'm a founder of startup that has gotten from zero to where it is on probably what that consultancy spends every year on catering for meetings.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-13 13:38:28+00:00
> I didn’t even know how to think about the changes I needed, because I didn’t understand enough

When you hire a team of consultants, it is typically the case that you are doing so because you have an incomplete view of the problem and are expecting them to fill in the gaps for you.

The problem arises due to the fact that the human consultants can be made to suffer certain penalties if they don't provide reasonable advice. A transformer model ran in-house cannot experience this. You cannot sue yourself for fucking up your own codebase.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-05-13 13:38:32+00:00
Why do damage control for free for tech companies when you can get paid to save lives with your damage control skills in somewhere like the navy?

More seriously, I will never surrender to this stupid idea that "the app store" or "walled gardens" are good. They are not and simply being on the app store is not a signal of trust for anything at all.
by deng | 2025-05-13 13:38:49+00:00
I think TFA is wrong.

It is correct that you cannot access private app folders, meaning stuff like /data/data, /Android/data, /Android/obb. But this is nothing new and you basically need a rooted device to access them. You can however access anything on external storage, which is typically where apps would store data you would want to sync and which would cover by far most use cases from users. At the moment, users are mostly complaining that only media files are synced, but not documents. SAF would solve this.

> I'm sure they would happily allow you to select the folders you want to give permissions to, but I think that's not possible anymore.

That is absolutely possible:

https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d...
by lupusreal | 2025-05-13 13:39:01+00:00
I've been on the front line of user bug reports for much of my career, so I definitely know what it's like. I also have very little sympathy for the complaints. Devs want to only take bug reports from other devs, and more so, only experienced devs, and more so, only devs specifically with experience with that specific project... That's great for the short term interests of the devs but not for the long term prospects of the project.

It's really not that hard to sort through user bug reports, find and categorize the ones that are actionable and respond with boilerplate requests for more information to the rest. It's not super enjoyable, it's work, but it's absolutely manageable and devs need to keep some perspective when they complain about it. I think maybe a mandatory part of every CS education should be an internship in messy and difficult manual labor so that devs have some real context about what it means for a job to be unpleasant.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 13:39:12+00:00
You’re still in denial and possibly behind. AI cites stuff all the time and has become agentic.

On the opposite end of the spectrum of worshippers there are naysayers and deniers. It’s easy to see why there are delusional people at both ends of the spectrum.

The reason is that the promise of AI both heralds an amazing future of machines and a horrible future where machines surpass humanity.
by sdoering | 2025-05-13 13:39:23+00:00
Would it help prompting (and adapting the system prompts for the coding assistants) accordingly? Like:

> Do not assume the person writing the code knows what they are doing. Also do not assume the code base follows best practices or sensible defaults. Always check for better solutions/optimizations where it makes sense and check the validity of data structures.

Just a quick draft. Would probably need waaaaaay more refinement. But might this help at least mitigating a bit of the felt issue?

I always think of AI as an overeager junior dev. So I tend to treat it that way when giving instructions, but even then...

... well, let's say the results are sometimes interesting.
by andy99 | 2025-05-13 13:39:34+00:00
A lot of that is down to the training, the "voice" is that of a junior Deloitte consultant writing a report. But this was intentional, as in it was trained to have this voice by virtue of the datasets used in the sft and the rlhf goal function.

It would be interesting to see a LLM trained in a completely different way. There's got to be some tradeoff between how coherent the generations are and how interesting they are.
by aloha2436 | 2025-05-13 13:39:34+00:00
I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers.

On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load.

I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-05-13 13:39:45+00:00
I treat LLM based coding assistant as a fast and obedient intern, I give it easy but tedious work like unit tests or documentation or duplicating simple stuff, but I double check everything.

I also use it as a cognitive assistant, I've always found that talking about a design with a colleague helped me to think more clearly and better organize my ideas, even with very little insights from the other side. In this case the assistant is often a bit lacking on the skepticism side but it does not matter too much.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-13 13:40:00+00:00
It’s only a tradeoff for the user if the user find the added features useful.

Increasingly, this is not the case. My favorite example here is the Adobe Creative Suite, which for many users useful new features became far and few between some time ~15 years ago. For those users, all they got was a rather absurd degree of added bloat and slowness for essentially the same thing they were using in 2010. These users would’ve almost certainly been happier had 80-90% of the feature work done in that time instead been bug fixes and optimization.
by dashundchen | 2025-05-13 13:40:09+00:00
> Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.

It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.

The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff

They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.
by Daviey | 2025-05-13 13:40:54+00:00
Internationally, the concept of regulated airspace began taking shape after World War I. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN) was created in 1919, developing the first air traffic regulatory framework initially signed by 19 states.

There is cooperation between states, with the best example I know of being the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC) which was established in 1972 by Eurocontrol and manages the upper airspace (above 24,500 feet) over Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany.

Eurocontrol is the first and, to the best of my knowledge, the only successful attempt to pool controllers between countries in Europe.
by izacus | 2025-05-13 13:41:13+00:00
I find it deeply ironic that HN users DEMAND that Linux/macOS/Windows all implement this exact sandboxing (where user controls which files apps can access) and then threads like these are full of angry people demanding that Google allows Android apps to just demand access to all private photos, documents and app data with one blanket permission (which was abused by every malware ridden game out there).

Android supports scoped storage which is fine for Nextcloud and requires NO extra permissions. It gives control to user because user then selects which directories they want to give Nextcloud to.

Nextcloud just needs to put in the work to support it properly instead of just demanding full unfettered disk access to all photos and app data with no user control over it.
by n8henrie | 2025-05-13 13:41:26+00:00
If the available evidence does not show an improvement in patient outcomes with shorter hours, and if longer hours are worked willingly and enable them to treat more patients (iso widespread physician shortages), yes I do.

Turning the question around, if mandating shorter hours for physicians were found to result in higher rates of significant patient harm, would you be in favor of those restrictions?
by bayindirh | 2025-05-13 13:41:41+00:00
I think I cleared my point about tools in another reply I wrote somewhere close [0].

As I said, the network doesn't carry citation/source information. IOW, when it doesn't use a tool, it can't know where it ingested that particular piece of information.

This is a big no no, and it's the same reason they hallucinate and they'll continue doing that.

As a tangent, I see AI agents hit my digital garden for technical notes, and I'll probably add Anubis in front of that link in short order.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972807
by latexr | 2025-05-13 13:41:49+00:00
While I don’t agree with the criticism of the person you replied to, it’s worth pointing out that Hacker News is very explicitly¹ for more than computer talk.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Klonoar | 2025-05-13 13:42:11+00:00
> Until then, countless users have learned to use it.

And countless others have requested exactly what I'm saying here. Cuts both ways.

> There's no right answer to the problems you'll be trying to solve

There's no right answer in e.g AppKit or UIKit, but having actual guides for those ecosystems has been crucial for their uptake/usage over the past decade or so. UI frameworks and libraries are not like standard developer tools and need additional documentation.