MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theamk | 2025-05-19 02:22:47+00:00
Yep.. but there is an ultimate solution against cheating: proctored tests on school-provided computers with student-owned devices prohibited, and specialized software which limits which resources can student access. To be more realistic (because it's not a high school anymore), professor might allow using a textbook, or a official documentation, or a few pages of student's own notes.

The proctor does not even have to know the subject, so there could be a few shared exam-taking centers for entire university. There could even be remote proctoring centers for those remote students, although it introduces risks of dishonest proctors.

Or the alternative, which is already kinda happening, is that degrees and university names become less and less important, and instead job admission becomes harder - in-person interviews only, hard tasks, and absolutely no AI allowed. This, in turn, means that will be are a lot of recent graduates who have paid the full tuition price but cannot find any job - they fail every interview because they cheated their way through college. Which means if some college _does_ introduce in-person, no-personal-devices rule for all of its tests, it will be able to sell this to both employers ("our students did not cheat") and the students ("our graduates have high hiring rate").

This means future students are better learn to work under time limit. The nice times of take-home and remote exams are coming to the end.
by krick | 2025-05-19 02:23:40+00:00
Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.

Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-19 02:25:02+00:00
As a technical nit, the 64-bit AMD Opteron was released in 2003, not late 2000s. It almost immediately took over the low- to mid-range server market and HPC market because nothing could touch its performance and scalability for the price. It was a state-of-the-art design for the time and relatively cheap, same vibes as the Apple M1 release.

People still used the big mainframe-y UNIX servers but their usage shrunk and you could see the writing on the wall. I was already replacing Sparc database servers with Opterons in 2004. The hardware wasn’t as gold-plated but they were fast and workloads were already outgrowing the biggest mainframe-y servers.

TBH, a lot of the gold-plated “enterprise” hardware failed far more often in practice than you would expect, including unrecoverable hard failures. That was a common enough experience that it probably detracted from the sales pitch for that extremely expensive hardware.
by shmoozername | 2025-05-19 02:25:48+00:00
Looks to me like he maintained proper mains separation except for the one assembly mistake he admitted to (which wasn't catastrophic, obviously -- his wiring color choices look good for avoiding catastrophic errors). The relay board he's using (I recognize it) is rated for mains voltages, and power-wise is ok-ish for the task (I wouldn't choose it for a commercial product, but for his exact scenario--see below--it's probably ok). Doubling up the relays works fine for the main concern, which is overheating via sustained high amperage, which is how fires start. Surge risk is usually just welding the relay, not starting a fire (unless you're way over spec, which he is not), and it almost always welds shut, not open, so less likely to fail silently into the scenario where it's running on one relay and the sustained amperage becomes a risk, and instead into behaving obviously badly as is typical when motherboards go out (at which point you turn it off and rectify, just like a commercial one). He mentions the whole unit is isolated from mains when not in use, so in that respect it's safer than a commercial one as long as he doesn't run it when away from home/asleep.

Again, not a viable commercial design, but not insane with proper supervision either.

I was curious how you knew about the leak sensor so I did a quick search, and see you're just making things up to complain about -- that model has a turbidity sensor (which I suspect are the NC wires you noticed), but no leak sensor. Oh no! His water might be too turbid! Also the fill valve is wired inline with the float switch (in the machine itself), so it's double-covered for overflow prevention. Flooding seems highly unlikely.

The flaky connections he mentions are the 3 volt ones -- again, not a fire risk. Common for low-voltage contacts like that to get flaky in commercial devices too (e.g., face-plate contacts for thermostats, etc) and without disastrous outcomes. The high-voltage/amperage connections he uses are plugged into the OEM harness, so the same connectors as the OEM motherboard. So, again, seems like you're just making up things to complain about.

I don't want to encourage people to mess with mains power if they're not adequately informed, but it's also not a magical domain you can't learn about with a little research and caution (easier in the US than the UK...). And his gadget worked for years, by the sounds of it, which is better than any commercial appliance I've bought in the last decade...

But I agree he's probably gambling on the home insurance issue, even if his device(s) isn't at fault...
by domenicd | 2025-05-19 02:26:22+00:00
My "Daily Life" deck is pretty small. But I fill it with things whenever I try to recall something and am embarrassed to not know it. Now I know them!

- Population of Tokyo / Tokyo metro area / Japan (where I live)

- Japan emergency numbers (like 911/411 in the US)

- kg <-> lb and km <-> mi conversion ratios

- My Japanese phone number (and my wife's)

- Number of neurons / synapses in a typical human brain

- Number of parameters in SOTA language models

- How many people work in my office

- Last 4 digits of a couple important credit cards, so I can identify them when UIs present me a choice of pre-saved CCs.
by misswaterfairy | 2025-05-19 02:26:29+00:00
> I wonder if lack of consequences might be related to lack of proof.

Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/rbzJTTDO9f4

Perhaps the only way to really to provide evidence against cheating accusations is to also provide a version history of the document the student worked on over time, plus notes (hand written preferably), and so on?

That would exponentially increase the workload of educators though, so it's unlikely to be taken up.

(I'm an instructor in a vocational field - students need to demonstrate their skills to achieve qualification, rather than write essays/reports/etc. - so AI isn't as a significant deal as it is in the academic fields.)
by throw10920 | 2025-05-19 02:27:15+00:00
> Isn't this just...black-body radiation?

I think that they explicitly controlled for that. From the article:

> The results revealed that despite both groups having the same body temperature of 37°C, the live mice showed robust emissions, whereas the UPE from the euthanized mice was nearly extinguished.

It's possible that they controlled improperly, but that's another question - from my reading of the above, they artificially heated the corpses (or measured immediately after death) to control for blackbody radiation.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-19 02:28:12+00:00
Stagnate just like hand thatched rooves? Or like weavers, ever since Jaquard?

I don't see too many people defending artists also calling for people to start buying handmade clothing and fabrics again.

That said and because people on here are feisty, I have many artist friends and I deeply appreciate their work at the same time as appreciating how cool diffusion models are.

The difference being of course that we live in a modern society and we should be able to find a solution that works for all.

That said, humans can't even get in something basic like UBI for people and humans consistently vote against each other in favour of discriminating on skin colour, sex, sexuality, culture. Meanwhile the billionaires that are soon to become trillionaires are actively defended by many members of our species, sometimes even by the poor. The industrial age broke our evolved monkey brains.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-19 02:28:46+00:00
I noticed that too and I agree that sounds wrong - I suspect the authors of the popsci phys article were being hasty and wrote poorly, using "invisible" to refer to the intensity, separate from the frequency (even though it's misleadingly mentioned immediately after).

Or maybe they're just wrong and didn't realize that 500 nm is visible light - that's possible too.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-19 02:28:50+00:00
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.

It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
by ryanwhitney | 2025-05-19 02:29:46+00:00
Pricing page:

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Freely download and self-host Directus for any project without the need for a license. Get Started

If you and your organization have less than $5M in total annual income (revenue and any funding), then you do not need to pay for self-hosting Directus. This applies to all projects, including production and commercial projects.
by isr | 2025-05-19 02:32:22+00:00
If you're not too wedded to git, have a look at fossil, perhaps. Its a dvcs just like git, but is itself distributed as a single static binary. This binary, in addition to allowing you to init & interact with fossil repo's, also comes with an integrated bug tracker, gui (for logs, etc), wiki, even a web forum with threaded discussions (so kind of a replacement for a mailing list).

And a builtin admin interface to govern permissions on the above. Plus, its its own server. All of this ... is builtin to that single binary.

It has a few of its own quirks as a vcs, but its pretty much equivalent to git, both functionally & conceptually (if you know git, you'll know fossil in 5 minutes)

So, if you want a dvcs for syncing, and don't want to setup git for external access, try fossil?
by cyberax | 2025-05-19 02:33:14+00:00
There won't be any effect.

Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.

The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.

But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
by csa | 2025-05-19 02:33:50+00:00
> The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like

If you can hazard a guess, which make and model is the “Tesla killer” for EVs, if such a car exists.

I frequently suggest to folks in the US (where I’m from) that BYDs in the US would change the competitive landscape, but I can’t reliably point to a make/model or two that they can check out online.
by nine_k | 2025-05-19 02:36:09+00:00
At the meta level, my life is already too short to allow closed-source tools for anything on which I may need to depend in the long term. Commercial entities come and go, for reasons important for them but not necessarily for me. Old, ancient code can be made to run, as long as it's available and legal to distribute and run. If it's useful enough, I will be not the only user by far, and there'll be enough collective effort to keep it afloat, or replace adequately.

Locally runnable freeware is the next best thing, but a distant second.

So, no Obsidian for me, no Directus for me, etc, no SaaS; Org mode is good enough so far, and when it becomes inadequate, if ever, I'll start looking.
by rubitxxx6 | 2025-05-19 02:37:01+00:00
> This event establishes a new worst-case scenario

This person’s definition of “worst-case scenario” is much different than mine.

We don’t know with certainty what the universe will throw at us.

We just do the very best we sensibly can.

Why should we assume that the worst thing that could happen to us happened within the past 20K years?
by emmelaich | 2025-05-19 02:37:20+00:00
You're right. I have just read a bit about this[0] and agree. I do still believe that it's possible for the expensive parchment to have been obtained by someone uneducated or "naive", or quack and used by them.

[0] https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispe...
by throw10920 | 2025-05-19 02:38:04+00:00
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.

When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".

No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
by echan00 | 2025-05-19 02:39:35+00:00
Shameless plug of my language app, dangerous.

Our language app is largely based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition. We explain the context behind every word and phrase, provide additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also use speech recognition to test recall and pronunciation.

We're invite-only at the moment, but happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who may find it useful.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dangerous-language-skills/id67...
by avs733 | 2025-05-19 02:41:18+00:00
I think what’s unspoken here is that this isn’t an AI problem, AI is one component of a multiplicative shit show.

Among other issues: They can’t read effectively, they can’t pay attention (which is related to the above), they have largely only experienced classes that value right answers not thinking, they have mental health problems, their teachers passed many of them because of said mental health problems, oh and both because of and as a result of the above they are glued to devices.

I teach a course that is totally team based. Six students in a room working. I’ve had students sit in the room with their teammates, and have three screens out none of them on class related work. They tried to claim that was necessary for their mental health. That’s fine, but if it is then this class is not for you.

Given the above don’t get me wrong, students aren’t to blame. They are a product of their environment. I teach at what most would call a top US school. The top students are the same, but the median has slid badly. Our society is not preparing them to learn or think.
by rasz | 2025-05-19 02:42:10+00:00
Pentium innovation was FPU that could have many instructions in flight. You would issue 0 cycle free FXCH and keep filling pipeline with new FPU instructions

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac...

486, Cyrix, K5 were stopping until previous instruction retires, and even AMD up to late K6-2 revision couldnt do 0 cycle FXCH.
by joe_the_user | 2025-05-19 02:46:09+00:00
"Notice that all the all the languages mentioned depends on the external BLAS library". I didn't notice this 'cause I don't think it's true. For example, it highly implausible that APL[1] would depend on BLAS[2] considering APL predates BLAS by 5-10 years ("developed in the sixties" versus "between 1971 and 1973"). I don't think Futhark uses BLAS either but in modern stupidity, this currently two hour old parent has taken over Google results so it's hard to find references.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra...
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-19 02:46:31+00:00
I'm pretty in tune with US politics and I wouldn't describe either of those things as a bad news cycle for Biden, chiefly because he's not the president anymore and hasn't been in the news for what amounts to an eternity in the political world. The only person I've seen mentioning this nothingburger had been Nate Silver, and that's more likely out of his relentless need to show that he was the first, akshually, to talk about Biden being old before everyone else was talking about Biden being old.

Furthermore, I think it's questionable at best to suggest that someone released news as grave as their likely terminal cancer prognosis simply to shift the news cycle. That goes doubly for Biden, given his family history with (albeit brain) cancer.

> 25th Amendment can be applied retroactively

He's not the president anymore. What would be the point? Another bullshit end run to try to invalidate every law or EO he signed?

> They needed something to shift that cycle, and distract.

"They" being his family, or what? Who are they?
by KetoManx64 | 2025-05-19 02:47:08+00:00
On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people.

I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability standpoint. Yes, I could stick to being a die hard FOSS user and spend twice as long doing the same tasks, or not even be able to due to lack of community extensions that do the same thing on Joplin's side. I could spend a 100 hours learning how to write a Joplin extension to do what I want and that would be a waste because that's 100 hours less that I've spent focusing on growing the skills that I get paid for. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel every single time.
by echan00 | 2025-05-19 02:47:21+00:00
I'm building a language app based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition.

We generate cards that respond to speech to evaluate card recall and pronounciation (via speech recognition). We don't market it as AI but behind the scenes we use LLMs to explain the context behind every word and phrase, offer additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also generate roleplays based on specific topics & scenarios.

Happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who wants to check it out. https://getdangerous.app
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-19 02:47:40+00:00
> But it also applies at the national level. If country A consistently makes having kids miserable, then in the long arc of time, the way of life in country B (which makes family life great) will win out.

Country C which simply reduces the ability for women to not have kids will win out over county B, since country B is extremely unlikely. Even the Scandinavian countries can’t come close to being country B with a sufficiently large total fertility rate that beats country C.
by mannykannot | 2025-05-19 02:48:14+00:00
> …they are getting pressure from administration to pass the students.

I know someone who resigned her position over this issue, and paid a decade-long emotional cost for her integrity (fortunately she came back stronger than before, but still…)

The cheaters may think they are entitled or they may think they are beating the system, but the only winners are those who profit from the machine.
by danaris | 2025-05-19 02:48:27+00:00
Designing group assignments that don't penalize people for having shitty group members is not really that hard.

Either you design the assignment so that each person is responsible for a different segment of it, and then they bring it together at the end, or you require each group member to provide some kind of nontrivial write-up of their own contributions, and what they learned, as part of it.

Ultimately, the key is never to grade individuals in the group based on anyone's performance but their own. Otherwise it's just another form of collective punishment, which is pretty damn unethical.
by Animats | 2025-05-19 02:50:40+00:00
That may be reading too much into this behavior. Watch this video of metronomes self-synchronizing.[1] That's a pervasive phenomenon. Anything with similar oscillation frequency and coupling will do this. (Including polling systems with fixed retry intervals.)

Are you sure that's not just this effect?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs
by odo1242 | 2025-05-19 02:53:48+00:00
The game developer Pirate Software had a video on this. He mentioned that the demo for his game, Heartbound, was really popular in Brazil, but due to Brazilians not having high purchasing power, the final version was too expensive for Brazilians to buy. So he lowered the price of the game in Brazil and added Portuguese translations to the game, and the game now makes 25% of revenue from Brazilian players (also it increased the total amount of revenue and reduced piracy, I think)

The general idea is based on charging people based on how much they can pay. There are reasonable ways to execute this (I’d argue localized pricing is among them, along with things like open source software and donations, and financial aid at colleges) and unreasonable ways (like Kroger’s bid to use facial recognition to do it in their stores)
by overfeed | 2025-05-19 02:54:48+00:00
> Debian are working on packaging HA stuff

Which is part and parcel of distro-maintainer duties - someone has to deal with the complexity, between the upstream project, linux distro or the end user.

Complaining that the upstream project won't support specific configurations or installations reads as incredibly entitled to me, especially for projects like HA or Pihole that aim to be useful to folk who may not know how to fix package dependency issues, fix a broken install, or many other such foot-guns. This would be a magnet for unpaid support.

If one is knowledgeable enough to complain about installing onto an existing install, then one is likely skilled enough to know how to side-load the app and debug and resulting challenges. It's worth noting the upstream provides the installation artifacts!
by enceladus06 | 2025-05-19 02:55:16+00:00
I’ve truly understood something when I can explain it clearly to someone else and back it up with competent performance.

Bloom’s two-sigma effect is real in my own experience—both in the one-on-one mentoring I received from my advisor, postdocs, and a staff scientist during grad school, and prior to that when I was learning to work in a cleanroom.

To cement new knowledge—whether it’s a biological protocol or an inorganic nanofabrication process I usually rewrite the entire procedure from memory later the same day.

That method suits me, though it doesn’t work for everyone.