MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sota_pop | 2025-05-03 01:23:52+00:00
As others have commented, I believe strongly that to define “language brain” and “math brain” is a false dichotomy and bunk neuroscience. Mathematics IS a language in itself; a collection of symbols created to express concepts. This study works really hard to make a statement that most people already know: anyone can be a good programmer, mathematician, “whatever” if they have the interest, drive, and opportunity to do it.

An interesting book that illustrates the evolving societal perception of mathematicians (and by extension, computer scientists) over time is “Duel at Dawn”. The modern (sic recent) notion is the reclusive genius (maybe even suggestion of autism) who possesses the alien, superhuman, unattainable, too-cool-for-you ability to process numbers and information that you can only be born with. (Those familiar with the TV show “the big bang theory” would recognize the trope of the “Sheldon Cooper” character.) This is False.

The reality is that no one is born with the super-human ability to do anything - anyone who is very good at something has worked very hard to get good at that thing regardless of the perception.

edit: my initial criticism of “the study” was based upon the article. On a skim of the actual cited paper, I revised my specific criticism, but the actual paper still comes off as no more than a mild eugenics argument dressed in psychology and statistics jargon.
by vunderba | 2025-05-03 01:24:51+00:00
As someone who very much enjoys the hell out of rhythm based games (pump, vib ribbon, Cytus, etc) - Beat Saber is a great game, but apples-to-apples I actually prefer Sound Boxing which is basically DDR meets Tae Bo. It never got nearly the mainstream success as Beat Saber, but I found the motion to be a little more natural for your body - you also feel a little less like an air traffic controller on meth.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/517130/Soundboxing/
by commandersaki | 2025-05-03 01:24:52+00:00
Yeah. I kept telling my manager and other team members I wanted to do some work. I also was clear that I didn't understand a lot of the tooling and systems primarily because I wasn't interacting with them, because I wasn't assigned any work (full circle). Over months nothing really came of this until at about 6 months later. However I participated in all the team meetings like scrum poker estimating tickets I had no idea about because I hadn't interacted with systems or software. Whether I was responsible for my own situation is debatable, but you bet if I've been idle for 6 months and not really getting adequate training that I'm definitely going to start looking for a new job. I've worked at companies of all sizes and never had this situation before and after, and at the time I was in Amazon I had been in the industry for more than a decade.
by Terretta | 2025-05-03 01:25:05+00:00
"Wildlands" is an open world map done well.

The research to compress Bolivia into a map was extraordinary. The sense of place as you play through is so strong, you can see a screenshot years later and know exactly where it was shot.

The "game loop" of the first release was perhaps simplistic*, but by Fallen Ghosts the formula drew on what they learned from Breakpoint (a failed open world but with better game play feel).

Nearly a decade later, Wildlands retains its appeal.

Story of the research and art design:

https://www.vg247.com/ghost-recon-wildlands-building-bolivia...

Fan appreciation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wildlands/comments/yqtbvt/wildlands...

To your "too much time and money to do well", this did take a lot of work.

Weirdly, for Breakpoint Ubisoft said: Well, in Wildlands we made the mistake of designing the world, then putting stories in it. So the pacing was off, you could spend too much time exploring without an encounter, or have too many encounters all in a cluster. So in Breakpoint, we designed game encounters, and made sure the world spaced them out well, it's so much better. In players' view, for the world/map design, they were wrong.

* If you run and gun, you miss the scenario design effort they put in. Any given scenario was designed to enable strategic stealth, tactical assault, heavy or light, rewarding teams that played co-op and talked through a plan before going in. This is where Wildlands really shines, 4 people on headsets playing deliberately, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2025-05-03 01:27:19+00:00
<< The point is that someone in bad circumstances can focus on the task

There is something to be said about being able to focus on something other than your immediate surroundings. This one guy[1], for example, was apparently focused on the task of infiltrating Auschwitz.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
by humbledrone | 2025-05-03 01:27:50+00:00
Short answer: it has been a big pain in the butt. The GPU hardware is mostly really great, but the drivers/APIs were not designed for such a low-latency use case. There's (for audio) a large overhead latency in kernel execution scheduling. I've had to do a lot of fun optimization in terms of just reducing the runtime of the kernel itself, and a lot of less-fun evil dark magic optimization to e.g. trick macOS into raising the GPU clock speed.

Long answer: I've written a fair bit about this on my devlog. You might check out these tags:

https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/tags/gpu https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/tags/optimization
by Retric | 2025-05-03 01:28:04+00:00
The less choices you the more random noise you get from rounding.

A reviewer might round up a 7/10 to a 3 as it’s better than average, while someone else might round down a 8/10 because it’s not at that top tier. Both systems are equally useful with 1 or 10,000 reviews but I’m not convinced they are equivalent with say 10 review.

Also, most restaurants that stick around are pretty good but you get some amazingly bad restaurants that soon fail. It’s worth separating overpriced from stay the fuck away.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-03 01:29:39+00:00
How is this different from regulations for airline pilots requiring minimum downtime between flights? Or any other industry that requires minimum turn times. I've worked for feature film shoots that had to alter shoot schedules because days went long and the minimum required turn time forced the next day's call time to be pushed. It's always fun switching from a day to night schedule, and these minimum turn times are a god send
by kerkeslager | 2025-05-03 01:31:41+00:00
> There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work.

True!

> And those regulations are mostly followed.

Very false, at least as of 5 years ago.

I worked with trucker biometric data which for a large company which runs trucks all over North America.

The company itself keeps its hands clean: they required drivers to keep strict manual logs and have strict rules about compliance with regulation. But at every step of the way, the incentives are for drivers to lie in these logs. Particularly, per-mile pay incentivizes driving a lot of miles at times when there's less traffic on the road (night). If your truck isn't moving, you aren't getting paid, and drivers want to get back to their families and hobbies, so they minimize time spent sleeping in their truck in a random location. Additionally, missed deadlines can significantly impact your pay, and deadlines are set at levels which cut very close to regulation, so that any delays force drivers to break regulation to meet the deadline.

Biometric data shows flagrant violations of regulation, which we can't share with anyone (including the company), because it's medical data protected under HIPAA. The manual logs are corroborated by an electronic black box on each truck, but these logs aren't checked unless something goes wrong, at which point the company can use to show the trucker was in violation of their stated policies to reduce liability.

I've only seen data from one company (which I cannot name due to non-disclosure) but it's my understanding that most of the company's driver incentives are structured similarly to the reputable parts of the trucking industry. Other companies have mile quotas (or inversely, mile bonuses) which further incentivize lying in logs. There are extremely exploitative owner/operator outfits which force drivers to work desperately to pay off their trucks, likely resulting in worse violations.

So sure, on paper, the letter of the regulations are followed, but that's definitely not what's happening on the road.

> And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets

Even if there were true (which it isn't), a head on collision with a sleeping local fuel delivery driver is just as deadly as a head on collision with a long haul trucker. This is irrelevant.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-05-03 01:32:07+00:00
Always a good idea the actual text of these things, to get a true idea of what is actually being changed and why:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...

It doesn't take away CPB's money - it just tells them that they can't fund NPR and PBS anymore, but NPR only gets about 1% of it's funding from CPB anyway. I couldn't find the number for PBS.
by akomtu | 2025-05-03 01:32:34+00:00
At a glance, this looks like a bunch of coupled oscillators. A natural extension of this idea is strings: a 1d array of oscillators modelling a wave equation. For example, a piano sound can be modelled by attaching a basic oscillator to one end of a string and a mic to the other end of the string. The string and the oscillator push each other, creating the piano tone. Real pianos use 3 such string with different properties.

Another idea. What if you make a circular string and attach 1 or more oscillators at random points? Same idea as above, but more symmetric. This "sound ring" instrument may produce unreal sounds.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-03 01:34:03+00:00
The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later.

This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
by tomhow | 2025-05-03 01:34:44+00:00
These kinds of "predictions" are really a signal that the story doesn't belong on Hacker News. Predictability and repetition is exactly what we don't want on HN, and is the main reason why politics-related stories are generally discouraged (the comments tend to be the same even if the specific story is different).

If we're going to have politics-related stories on the front page of HN, the stories need to have something new about them that at least have a chance of cultivating curious conversation.

When the top comment is this kind of pre-emptive attack, it starts the discussion by breaking the guidelines from the get-go, and from there things can only go downhill further. The relevant guidelines are:

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

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

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
by simoncion | 2025-05-03 01:36:28+00:00
> A single person could turn all of these things into Decepticon in seconds. ... It could give someone the power of a global army.

We're talking about an ordinary semi truck with attached trailer and a bevy of sensors. This isn't a war machine. The worst thing that can happen here is the same thing that can happen with an inattentive or exhausted driver.
by energy123 | 2025-05-03 01:37:06+00:00
I think the problem is the lack of a verifier to check the attempt at creativity in a tight loop. Creativity could just be randomness (off the existing average) plus selection done many times over a 30 year career.

That is, you try something new (random) and you, the human, are also the verifier to see whether that random new thing was subjectively good, and then you select based on that.

In this understanding of creativity, creating a new style is a gradual process of evolution (mutation and selection) where your own brain is a necessary part of carrying out the selection. "Did the new idea (mutation) I just tried make me feel good or not (selection)?"

That activity of you being the verifier is effortless and instant, but the AI fundamentally can't tap into the verification and so it has no ability to do the selection step after randomness, and so it is impossible for creativity to emerge no matter the architecture (unless you somehow create a proxy for a human verifier which seems insanely hard).

The only solution I can see to this is to try to simulate this process, seems possible but hard.
by simoncion | 2025-05-03 01:39:44+00:00
> What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered.

I like how you didn't seem to notice that there are 1,460 days in four years.

I get the impression that ten semi-truck hauls a day is a lot. If you hit someone (or wreck the truck) you're not going to make your next haul... you're going to be talking to the cops and/or having a wrecker drag you back home.
by emmelaich | 2025-05-03 01:40:14+00:00
Useful for understanding load on machines. One case I had was -- N machines randomly updating a central database. The database can only handle M queries in one second. What's the chance of exceeding M?

Also related to the Birthday Problem and hash bucket hits. Though with those you're only interested in low collisions. With some queues (e.g. database above) you might be interested when collisions hit a high number.
by delecti | 2025-05-03 01:41:41+00:00
I think for this discussion, "math is stuff you'd learn in a math department" is a pretty useful definition, even if it's not a very good one. There's a lot of math involved in the design and manufacture of the kettle, electrical grid, and water utilities, but a person's ability to put a kettle on isn't going to be improved by math classes. In that way, programming probably is a bit mathy, but good programming is more like good technical writing than it is like math.
by sema4hacker | 2025-05-03 01:42:11+00:00
You're concerned about the job market. You're willing to switch careers. You're only half way through college, and probably haven't done much programming yet. You want to start a company. All of that to me spells business major, not necessarily anything having to do with computer science. Figure out what you really love to do, even if you're not paid to do it, and make that your dream of a future business.
by willy_k | 2025-05-03 01:42:22+00:00
The best I’ve found for focus is simple caffeine. Amphetamines are good for motivation but give me too much motivation to do things other than what I need to be doing. Methylphenidate is maybe a bit better but still a similar story. They also both have considerably worse side effect profile than caffeine. YMMV though, I am an adhd-coded individual and everyone’s brain chemistry is a bit different anyway. Lion’s mane and/or Cordyceps double extract tincture is not bad but I’ve grown to be weary of neurogenic drugs, although that is more of a personal decision.
by Cerium | 2025-05-03 01:44:40+00:00
I read the comment to mean that we have enough technical risk that we don't need more general risk. This stuff adds risk. As I have heard: "do you want to read your joke in a courtroom for a non technical audience?" - in some fields more so than others, but there is always a risk that something will go horribly wrong, your system will be involved and your code shows up either directly or as a side effect of discovery.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-05-03 01:48:10+00:00
The original report from CCC demonstrated an attack on HTTP servers with a lot of request parameters that had hash collisions. That vulnerability was fixed by verifying and limiting user inputs (eg Tomcat 7.0.23 limited number of parameters to 10000 by default among other improvements). You cannot have unconstrained collection for user inputs anyway, otherwise memory based DoS attack becomes possible. So yes, any program that handles user inputs must take care of such scenarios. The best defense perimeter are the parsers of inputs, not just HTTP parameters and headers, but also JSON and XML deserializers, which must be hardened against various types of attacks anyway. Many scenarios where vulnerability may theoretically exist in application code are unpractical for execution of attack, e.g. when inputs are processed after user authentication or rate limit filter.
by vharuck | 2025-05-03 01:48:31+00:00
Silver lining: future work conferences I go to will mean visiting cool cities in Canada and Mexico, the new North American hubs of medical research. Just kidding! According to the White House's proposed budget, there won't be any more chronic disease prevention programs. So my federally-funded position will be gone.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...

(Page 11 for the CDC)
by scotty79 | 2025-05-03 01:50:01+00:00
I completely agree that's a dance game. Similar way that Guitar Hero is a music playing game. It's not exactly a dance but delivers something close to dance feeling.

My brain can't dance, can't even perceive dance. When I see dancing champions perform, their movements make no sense to me and seem completely unrelated to the music they are dancing to. However when I played Beat Saber occasionally I feel glimpses of the feeling of dancing. That's pretty much as close to dancing as I can get.
by philwelch | 2025-05-03 01:54:00+00:00
It’s easy to just say that the regulations should be improved. Very different to actually improve them. Therapy isn’t a mass produced engineered product like a car; if therapy was a mass produced engineered product, it would be an AI anyway. Materials science and structural engineering are far more mature and well-understood sciences than psychology, and you can’t just throw a crash test dummy into a therapist’s office and measure how damaged it gets.

It’s also not really clear how such regulations could even work. The regulations we have now are basically the obvious ones around licensure that require people to go to the right schools and whatnot. And then you can lose your license if it turns out you’ve broken the big ethical rules. But at the end of the day, that only regulates who can call themselves a “therapist” and get listed in Psychology Today. Actually “doing” “therapy” is, ultimately, built on talking to someone about your problems in some way that is supposed to help you solve them. You don’t need a “therapist” to do that. You can do it with your friend or parent or pastor or bartender or guru or “life coach” and, as long as we live in a free country, nobody’s going to stop you. Sure, the people who are allowed to call themselves therapists have certain techniques and rules that make them different, but even if that was a guarantee of quality there’s no way to stop people from talking to someone other than a licensed therapist, and it would be kind of absurd and dystopian to even try.

So let’s dispense of the notion that we are some sort of omniscient god-emperor who can just magically fix things with vague “regulations” and talk about the world as it actually exists. For a lot of people, I think that’s a world where talking about their personal issues with an LLM is arguably no worse than whatever other options they have. Maybe it’s not the equivalent of whatever amazing therapist you know or have or are or can imagine, but that’s not the therapist that everyone is going to get.
by toddmg | 2025-05-03 01:54:36+00:00
Location: Los Angeles, USA Remote: On-Site/Hybrid/Remote Willing to relocate: Only within California, ideally close to LA Technologies: Python, C++, Java, Pandas, Flask, Keras, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, NumPy, SciPy, NoSQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, PyPlot, Seaborn, Matplotlib, XGBoost, Tableau Email: toddmg@protonmail.com

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Howdy, thanks for stopping by.

I'm a Data Scientist with two years of experience. I worked for Verizon and Accenture. I designed and developed Machine Learning models which predicted budget allocations and time constraints for future Verizon projects.

I'm very eager to work full force and I am very committed to whichever goal I'm given. Reach out if you need Data Science / Data Analysis work. Thanks for reading!
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-03 01:54:42+00:00
By the very expansive definition that you advocate for, what exactly do we do that isn't math?

One could argue that all we do is turn thoughts, senses, and memories into further thoughts and appropriate actions, which is applying a pattern, which is math. But at that point the definition is too broad to be helpful for anything but playing word games.
by tekla | 2025-05-03 01:55:27+00:00
I'm not curious or jealous at all.

I lost 150 pounds in 2 years and all I did was eat less, and I kept it off easily. I'm not curious because I saw pictures of myself before I lost weight and I saw the plates of food in front of me and it was absolutely disgusting amounts of food.

I feel sick when I eat large amounts of food and I like to keep it that way, and all it needed was getting used to eating less.
by nonethewiser | 2025-05-03 01:56:06+00:00
As entrenched as git is, I feel like its only a matter of time until it's dethroned.

The basic workflow is fine. And there are some very powerful features. But then you try find the parent of a given branch and you're left wondering how the f#!@ thats so hard.

It's definitely nit picking. It's probably 85-90% of what you want it to be. But there is definitely enough room for improvement to warrent moving beyond it. I think the workflows and integratoins (github, gitlab, etc.) make it stickier as well. I just dont think we should assume everyone is just going to use git for the next 20+ years.