MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j_bum | 2025-05-05 00:39:46+00:00
I struggle to relate to this. I have aphantasia, which means I can’t see anything in my mind’s eye.

This is most painful when I try to “imagine” my wife’s face, my family, friends, favorite parts of nature, etc, but am left with nothing.

For me, this means that I struggle to remember things from my past beyond major life events. Even major events can be fuzzy for me.

As a result, I’ve always tried to snap quick pictures of what I’m doing, even if it means I have to “step away” from enjoying the moment for a brief second.

A few months ago, I loaded my 30k+ pics (across ~10 yrs) stored on a hard drive into an Immich instance. I can now easily look at those pictures and remember my past in a way that I simply couldn’t beforehand.

This has been an unbelievable improvement in QoL through an improved self-identity, remembrance of my past, and reconnection with memories of lost loved ones.

I can agree with the author on the disruptive nature of picture taking. But for me, none of what I listed above would be possible without capturing my memories in moderation and with pointed intent.
by planck_tonne | 2025-05-05 00:42:17+00:00
There must be a balance.

Recently I met some people that were constantly filming and taking pictures of everything. It was ridiculous IMO, for the same reasons OP mentions.

This is not new. For me, it began with the rise of the smartphone. So I made it a point not to waste my time photographing things.

10 years later, I regret having essentially no pictures of anything. In particular, no "good" or "frameable" pictures (blurry pictures from funny angles don't count...). Especially from important moments. Yes, I was there living the moment. But with a picture, I could relive it for a bit.

It's not hard to find the balance, though, I guess. You don't have to constantly be filming everything. Maybe just get the group together for one picture at the end of the event and that's it. Good enough.

That's what'll I try from now on at least. Report back in 10 years...
by hellisothers | 2025-05-05 00:43:31+00:00
Seems like you missed the point of the article. The author is saying that if you treat the class/lesson as a means to an end only where the goal is to get a diploma then you’re not actually getting an education. If you’re using an LLM to do the work for you even if the other students are too then you’re just following all the other lemmings off the ledge.
by userulluipeste | 2025-05-05 00:44:01+00:00
It has everything to do with the available means that we have, for now. For the record though, we haven't yet been able to spot planets in other galaxies, just in our own Milky Way. The spotted ones just happened to be there when we decided to look, twice. To spot an astral body properly sized to fit the definition of planet, which we yet suspect to orbit around our own star, we should be lucky enough to look exactly at it and not at something else.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-05 00:44:23+00:00
Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant!

I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.
by delichon | 2025-05-05 00:44:33+00:00
An LLM tuned for charisma and trained on what the power players are saying could play politics by driving a compliant actor like a bot with whispered instructions. AI politicians (etc.) may be hard to spot and impractical to prove.

You could iterate on the best prompts for cult generation as measured by social media feedback. There must be experiments like that going on.

When AI becomes better at politics than people then whatever agents control them control us. When they can make better memes, we've lost.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-05 00:45:24+00:00
> I did so because I already have a site on github pages as well, so needed more free options.

Every repo you make shows up at a different place. Is that no enough. If you care about enough the domain name then register a domain?

> What have you seen that would force people out of their free tier?

If that's not common then maybe I just have a bad memory.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-05 00:45:28+00:00
As I prepare for my own round-the-world adventure in the year ahead, I’ve been finding myself spending more time musing on a packing list, than the destinations. The OCD wants to prepare for everything, to have anything it needs on hand and ready to go. It wants to pack my X-Pro 3 and a bevy of lenses, and a flash, and batteries, and my laptop to process it on when I get back to the hotel room, and a backup drive, and-

And then I remember that this may well be the only time in my life that I will see these places, meet these people, and try these things. That the more I bring with me, the less mental room I have to savor, enjoy, and process the world around me in those precious moments.

I’m going to bring either my X100F, or splurge on a GFX100RF. That’ll be it. No flashes, no tripods, no laptops, no international high-speed data plan. Just me, a point-and-shoot, and unlimited EDGE data for the odd GPS route.

I want to use my photographs to remind me of times gone by, traveling alone, when my memory is foggy or old age has caught up with me. I don’t want to be in photographer mode, I want to be in-the-moment mode.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-05 00:45:32+00:00
That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry.

* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-05 00:45:35+00:00
I actually took up photography as a hobby when I was a teen. Set up a darkroom and everything. Somewhere along the way in life realized I never looked at my photos. So I just stopped taking them and never really missed it. I do use my phone camera as sort of a notepad when that is handy. E.g. if I’m working on something and I want to document which parts go where, or to send to someone and ask “what is this” but I usually delete them after they’ve served their purpose.
by baobun | 2025-05-05 00:45:35+00:00
Counter-point: Dark patterns are also pervasive in more niche applocations including B2Bs targeting tech startups. Some of it is culturally endemic.

Obsession with one-size-fits-all, metrics-driven development, and UX excusively aiming for the lowest common denominators are also part of this problematic incentive structure you allude to.

> I'm also not seeing "normal" people raving about it much either, but most people really do not share the opinion of this post.

I don't think the "we" here was intended to include the general population.
by poly2it | 2025-05-05 00:46:22+00:00
Many seem worried about the safety of the insects. An author responded as mentioned in the article.

> The experiments did not harm the cicadas, co-author Naoto Nishida, now at the University of Tokyo, told New Scientist. "Some of them wanted to run away," he said. "Others were like, 'OK, use my abdomen.'"
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-05 00:46:25+00:00
This reminds me of my teenage years, when I was ... experimenting ... with ... certain substances ...

I used to feel as if I had "a special connection to the true universe," when I was under the influence.

I decided, one time, to have a notebook on hand, and write down these "truths and revelations," as they came to me.

After coming down, I read it.

It was insane gibberish. Absolute drivel.

I never thought that I had a "special connection," after that.
by utrack | 2025-05-05 00:46:56+00:00
Jfyi, I'm doing exactly this (and more) in a platform library; it covers the issues I've encountered during the last 8+ years I've been working with Go highload apps. During this time developing/improving the platform and rolling was a hobby of mine in every company :)

It (will) cover the stuff like "sync the logs"/"wait for ingresses to catch up with the liveness handler"/etc.

https://github.com/utrack/caisson-go/blob/main/caiapp/caiapp...

https://github.com/utrack/caisson-go/tree/main/closer

The docs are sparse and some things aren't covered yet; however I'm planning to do the first release once I'm back from a holiday.

In the end, this will be a meta-platform (carefully crafted building blocks), and a reference platform library, covering a typical k8s/otel/grpc+http infrastructure.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-05 00:47:39+00:00
I've found that many special moments, excursions to special places, are best experienced exactly that way, in the moment, without fiddling with that camera app and being behind the viewfinder. In fact, look at any live footage of a large event with a V.I.P., such as a popular politician, a rock star, or the Holy Father, working the crowd of tourists. Now look at all those unfortunate people who are behind viewfinders. They are still electronically mediated, even though they're only a few inches from the very person they admire so much. Isn't it truly sad that they're struggling to get some "ShakyCam" footage that would get any newscaster fired, instead of reaching their hand out, smiling, seeing that scene unfold before their actual eyes?

Therefore there are many events where I won't bring a camera. I'll experience it as it unfolds. It's more rewarding that way. In fact, many large events are already so well-covered by a professional camera crew -- why bother? I mean, I'll just go look it up later on Facebook anyway, right?

My current exception is astrophotography; firstly possible to see bodies that are much, much fainter with the assistance of the smartphone camera. The photos reveal details I could never detect with an unassisted eye. For example, last year's big comet: I stood at an intersection to sight it, and it was invisible until I pointed my camera in that direction. And astrophotography is a nice technical means of stargazing in specific ways with a specific field of view and live time constraints. I mean, if I really want to see a huge arbitrary starfield, there are plenty of apps that can simulate it for me. But if I curate my own star photographs, I can edit them, add notes, and share them around.
by kelnos | 2025-05-05 00:47:46+00:00
> I remember them all vividly now, years later, but I have no photos of it.

That's wonderful for you, but my brain doesn't work that way. My memories tend to get very fuzzy over time, and photos are a very powerful aid for me in recall. My photos of a trip with my wife to France last summer are already reminding me of details I've forgotten. I just took a trip to Japan last month, and I expect, before too long, that the same will be true of the photos I took there.

> It’s wonderful to be cut off from everywhere else — to be more fully only there.

You can take photos and still fully be there. There are many many points on the spectrum between not having a camera at all, and viewing the world through your phone's screen because you are taking photos or video of nearly everything.

> But when you use your phone, you’re everywhere. You keep in touch with friends. You hear what’s going on at home. You see the screen exactly as you do anywhere else.

It's a shame that so many people have such a bad relationship with their tech that they can't put it away. I absolutely do use my phone for mapping and navigation and other useful tasks while I'm traveling, but I tend to put it on do-not-disturb mode, and ignore it much more than I do at home. I still wander around, without a particular destination in mind, and get "lost" often enough to spontaneously run into interesting things. Sure, I'm not fully disconnected, but I don't see that as a negative.
by MortyWaves | 2025-05-05 00:48:04+00:00
I completely agree with you but I also think, like many aspects of "tech" certain segments of it have been monopolised and turned into profit generators for certain organisations. DevOps, Agile/Scrum, Observability, Kubernetes, are all examples of this.

This dilutes the good and helpful stuff with marketing bullshit.

Grafana seemingly inventing new time series databases and engines every few months is absolutely painful to try keep up to date with in order to make informed decisions.

So much so I've started using rrdtool/smokeping again.
by v64 | 2025-05-05 00:48:50+00:00
Earlier comments found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43869093

From my brief reading of it, it seems like the interesting bit here is the development of the Hypercatalan numbers as the coefficients of the infinite sums of roots of polynomials. Some partial results for special cases of the Catalan numbers and roots had been found in the past, but the full understanding of the structure they call the Geode enabled generalization of the previous findings.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-05 00:48:54+00:00
My point was not about intuiting the distance, it's about what the solar system looks like qualitatively, as a cartoon with orbits drawn around the sun. Most people have no idea if 700AU is closer than Pluto, a little further than Pluto, or much further than Pluto. 15x the distance of Pluto is much more direct.
by gyomu | 2025-05-05 00:49:10+00:00
When I was in college (over 20 years ago now), what we called “hackathons” was a bunch of us (4-6 max) holing up in an apartment for the weekend, and working on our personal projects while ordering pizza and sleeping on couches.

It was really nice having a group of people you could demo what you were working on/ask for help or feedback within immediate range at all times. There was also something really peaceful about coding at 5a on Sunday while everyone else was fast asleep.

When I moved to SF, I was so surprised to find out that there were “professional” hackathons. I went to a couple and came to the same conclusion as you.

I do miss the vibe of the OG hackathons I did with my friends, but I was 19 and we had no commitments back then. Nowadays the best way for me to be productive is to have regular meal, disciplined working hours, and good nights of sleep - so no more sleeping on couches with half empty boxes of pizza by my side.
by ropable | 2025-05-05 00:49:22+00:00
Agreed; it's completely impractical for someone to "hold" a proper non-modern war bow at full draw. Every single instance I've seen of reenactment archery using an authentic bow has the archer smoothly nock, draw and release in one motion. There is no "aiming" like we see in modern competition archery - this occurs during the draw. Not to say these weren't accurate, some video I've watched of reenactment archery looks positively lethal out to about 30 metres or more.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-05 00:50:47+00:00
Computer SSD can hold more books than all books you ever saw in your life.

saw, not read, saw in movies, saw in photographs, saw in magazines. all that can fit into your SSD

So just make freaking daily journal. there is plenty of space. You will be surprised what everything you did forgot. you will be surprised how your brain worked few years back. etc etc

And computer can hold more and retrieve faster then any other mechanism.

Also most wealthy people i know have their own "CRM system", where they note contents of phone calls, meetings etc, it is even easier with current state of AI/ML transcription services. They note names of children, spouse of their business partners. Hobbies, life situations, birthdays.... and they WILL look you up, right before you enter their office for joint meeting, so they can have conversation with you...
by susiecambria | 2025-05-05 00:50:48+00:00
The hackathons I attended were focused on solving/addressing the Washington, DC budget (I know, very weirdly specific, but I'm a major policy wonk) and social services.

To the latter, the benefit for me was to have tech folks help the policy folks ask and answer the right questions. Later, specific projects were started to help social service orgs implement some thing.

Have to say, both events (and I attended several of each) were exciting. . . they challenged me in a way I was unfortunately not used to (except in high school and college) and showed that others were actually interested and part of the solution.

The major plus of the budget hackathons was that we got to see students (middle schoolers, IIRC) who were doing whatever it was they were doing and having a blast. As a child advocate (lobbyist on kids issues), this made me very, very happy.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-05 00:50:51+00:00
> Is it frivolous to not want dopers in cycling competitions?

There are a couple reasons to care about doping in professional sports, that don’t apply here.

First off, these matchmaking games are not real professional competitions. It is more like a pickup game; the stakes are essentially zero. Nobody cares if you dope for your pickup games or your weekend bike rides for friends (other than that that would be a ridiculous thing to do of course).

Second, professional athletes are celebrities. Abusing performance enhancing drugs sets a bad example for the kids watching. Because most people playing matchmaking games aren’t celebrities, they aren’t setting a bad example. And anyway, cheating in videogames has no side effects.

> If you think fairness in videogame competitions is frivolous then do not participate in them.

I mostly don’t. But I can spot wasted engineering effort when I see it, and will continue to call it out.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-05 00:51:03+00:00
> I'd rather read the prompt

Yeah, to recycle a comment [0] from a few months back:

> Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." [...]we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

In other words, when the presentation means nothing, why bother?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41675602
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-05 00:51:04+00:00
Bringing back communist kitsch is not the same as posting a picture of a mass murderer. I have communist kitsch, in particular from China. The graphic design is amazing. I still don't get what you don't get. I think most people get why most people wouldn't hang picture so Hitler. If anyone deserves to be considered just as bad and just as worthy of not being displayed as decoration it certainly seems to be Mao
by apothegm | 2025-05-05 00:51:11+00:00
> My main expectations for downside risk are (1) AI being used by evil people to do evil, and (2) AI being used by lazy people before it's competent.

Mine are those and mass unemployment. Whether or not AI can really replace human workers, those in charge are looking for excuses to cut headcount.

And while those sort of structural changes may lead to higher average quality of life in the long run, in the short run people go hungry and homeless because they can’t reskill that quickly and the economy doesn’t have room to absorb them. And meanwhile most of the benefits accrue to capital and you get runaway inequality as in the gilded age.
by exiguus | 2025-05-05 00:52:09+00:00
> What I found most interesting is that the multiple choice options included a lot of “I found the Terminator movies scary”, “I read too much Ray Kurzweil”, and/or “I am or was a SF Bay Area rationalist” undertones, but actual ethical objections were strangely absent.

After reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book and see the current state of democracy in the USA and some European countries (apart from the fact that democracies are too slow to regulate anyway), I see little hope for the future.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-05 00:52:39+00:00
> that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.

I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
by righthand | 2025-05-05 00:53:32+00:00
Yeah I’ve been explaining something similar to people. Go ahead and spend your time using the Llm but if you think no one notices you’re wrong. Your colleagues/teammates notice and when it comes time to test your real mettle you will end up last in line because no one has confidence that you can do anything but fake your results. This will hurt you when you want a promotion or raise or recognition of some sort of your efforts.
by solardev | 2025-05-05 00:53:45+00:00
The thing is that most solar projects are commodity energy projects optimized for cost per watt, not necessarily reliability or efficiency (watts per area). We're not building them for the constraints of Mars bases or fancy spacecraft, just run of the mill generation.

Thus the tracker has to not just pay for itself, but be a better investment than simply buying more modules. The goal isn't reliability at any price, but cost effectiveness compared to making the project a little bigger and adding a few more modules.

Even with home rooftops (which have limited space), it's much cheaper to buy more premium modules with higher efficiency, or optimize their outputs with per module micro inverters or optimizers, than to mount the array on a tracker. With big commercial installations, there's even less of a space premium.

Trackers aren't just a one time upfront cost of manufacturing either, but an ongoing maintenance cost over the lifetime of the project. They get more expensive as less and less of the industry uses them and fewer parts and labor are available for them. They just can't compete with the Chinese dumping of cheap modules, which are so cheap now that almost all non Chinese manufacturers have gone bankrupt. So the industry is left with a glut of modules, which are probably just going to get cheaper and more efficient, while tracking technology and costs haven't improved anywhere near the same amount. It's all relative, and the trackers are losing big time.

Sure, as a science project with infinite funding, maybe you can make a super reliable one. In the real world, though, installations across the world have found them largely unappealing from a cost effectiveness standpoint.
by fuzztester | 2025-05-05 00:53:58+00:00
Can't help but post another link, related to what I said above:

>Many top Indian multi-hundred-crore-or-multi-thousand-crore turnover (in rupees) industrialists or groups like the Tatas, Birlas, Bajajs, Singhanias, Thapars, Godrejs, TVS group, TTK group, Munjals, Ambanis, Premjis, and many more, may like to have a word with you, or rather, would smile and giggle at your ignorance.

Here you go:

List of largest companies in India:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in...

Not all of those are about manufacturing, but many are.

Their combined total revenue adds up to hundreds, if not thousands, of billions of US dollars, going by a simple conversion of thousand crore rupees to USD that I just did in Google.

I will let others check it for themselves.