MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tstrimple | 2025-05-09 23:20:52+00:00
All "full self driving" cars right now have "disengagements" where a human operator has to take over.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-drivi...

> Disengagements occur when the self-driving system is deactivated with control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention.

> Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.

> The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co, which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles.

Notice that Tesla isn't even included. That's because they don't actually have full self driving tests ongoing like this. Just the half-assed version they beta test with their customers on public roads.
by atulvi | 2025-05-09 23:21:09+00:00
OK, developer here. Here is how it works. It connects to groq and asks this

"I was going in this rabbit hole of wikipedia articles: #{chain} \n I have now found these topics:\n\n#{related_topics}\n\n Select the 2 most mind blowing topics from the list and that I'd enjoy given my rabbit hole. Ensure two topics are not the same."

and pics two articles that it returns. This is slightly better than random.(related article names are obtained from wikipedia API).

Right now, I'm maxed on daily Groq usage and the app falls back to pure random choice.

Why two articles? I was kind of going for a hot or not style system.

Anyway, it was a fun experiment. Learned lots.
by favorited | 2025-05-09 23:21:22+00:00
> a language with a garbage collector (Swift)

You can certainly make the case that reference counting is a form of garbage collection, but it is absolutely false to say Swift has "a garbage collector." There is no runtime process that is responsible for collecting garbage – allocated objects are freed deterministically when their reference count hits zero.

The same thing is true of `shared_ptr` instances in C++, and there's certainly no "garbage collector" there, either.
by atulvi | 2025-05-09 23:21:29+00:00
OK, developer here. Here is how it works. It connects to groq and asks this

"I was going in this rabbit hole of wikipedia articles: #{chain} \n I have now found these topics:\n\n#{related_topics}\n\n Select the 2 most mind blowing topics from the list and that I'd enjoy given my rabbit hole. Ensure two topics are not the same."

and pics two articles that it returns. This is slightly better than random.(related article names are obtained from wikipedia API).

Right now, I'm maxed on daily Groq usage and the app falls back to pure random choice.

Why two articles? I was kind of going for a hot or not style system.

Anyway, it was a fun experiment. Learned lots.
by freejazz | 2025-05-09 23:22:14+00:00
I'm not sure how your post doesn't fall for exactly what you claim to be criticizing. You do not engage with the substance of anything I said and instead just name call.

I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-09 23:22:26+00:00
Obsolete is good! Hobbyists running mini CNCs and converting old manual Bridgeports exploited the obsoleteness well into the 2010s by buying up really cheap old machines to run Windows XP with MachCNC, which could drive the CNC via parallel port (with a proper expansion board, which used to be the expensive part).

It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.
by krapp | 2025-05-09 23:22:27+00:00
There's documentation from the people who created it stating as such, and it's weird how intransigent so many people here are about that fact.

Yes, the "w" does stand for "web" and yes it was designed with the web in mind but no it was not designed exclusively or even primarily for the web and no it isn't DOA because DOM access from a browser isn't here yet, as demonstrated by all of the existing applications already using it.
by frenchmajesty | 2025-05-09 23:24:31+00:00
Funny you should ask I just ended up here googling "graph memory LLM"

So yea I'm very much looking into it. I want my personal agent to grow to know me over time and my life is not bunch of disparate points spread out across a vector space. Rather It's millions of nodes and edges that connects key things. Who my parents were, where I grew up, what I like to do for fun and how it ties into my personality and strengths, etc...

To have this represented in a graph which a model can then explore would allow it to make implicit connections much easier than attempting the same with embeddings.
by anonymars | 2025-05-09 23:24:51+00:00
Here's some potential background. A lot of it rhymes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Con...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

A little money on propaganda goes a long way

Related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina#National_Rifle_As...
by kiroguku | 2025-05-09 23:25:29+00:00
Postmortem thread posted: https://x.com/SFBART/status/1920945151419003225

>The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.

> BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin.
by lovemenot | 2025-05-09 23:25:51+00:00
>> it's just the best mathematical model we have for physics that are too extreme for us to measure

It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.
by vkou | 2025-05-09 23:27:20+00:00
Instead of only listing the disadvantages, could you list the advantages of decoupling the money supply from how quickly we can dig yellow rocks out of the ground?

There are quite a few of them, and you've conspicuously omitted them.

It's a bit like issuing a scathing review of the automobile by listing all the disadvantages of diesel engines compared to horses.
by const_cast | 2025-05-09 23:27:21+00:00
I think it's important to remember that, historically, science has been very racist and very sexist. It's not like the diversity statement came out of nowhere - the majority of our understanding of a lot of topics only comes from studying white men.

This is why AA men and women have significantly worse healthcare outcomes, or why women are more likely to die in a car crash.

Yes, maybe it's slightly inconvenient to write a diversity statement. But it's because of these types of initiatives that we're able to build more equitable research and improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, suck it up. Or, at least, understand why they're asking for it instead of assuming it's some sort of strange, convoluted, personal attack on your character.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-09 23:27:24+00:00
The government is not borrowing foreign currencies to buy an oversupply of domestically produced goods.

I think your model depends on "workers" being the only people who are taxed, so if workers are being paid less than the cost of the goods they have to consume, the government + workers must be running at a constant deficit.

But you also tax employers and owners.

Inflation is a tool intentionally used by governments to quickly lower wage costs across the board. People at the bottom end can be subsidized, and productive people whose nominal worth just went up with inflation will negotiate for higher pay. Everybody else gets a pay cut.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-09 23:28:05+00:00
You're being downvoted because you're repeating trivially disproven, clear nonsense... which is unfortunately the official position of the whitehouse.

> "I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."

Except that that is NOT what is going on. Trump has been screaming something to this effect for weeks, but when it comes to actually negotiating something he tells world leaders that the tariffs are there to stay! He just did this with the Japanese PM, mere days ago.

Not to mention that many countries have actual, effective tariffs or "trade barriers" on the order of 1% with the US, which means that he can't possible negotiate anything that will improve things more than that.

Trump has no actual strategy. He can't possibly, because his stated list of goals are mutually incompatible. He also wants to eliminate income tax and pay for this with tariffs! He can't do that and return tariffs to 0% after countries capitulate.

He also keeps talking about bringing manufacturing back to the US (note that it never left, it just got more high-tech), but he's tariffing industrial machinery and robots imported from Germany!

This "policy" makes about as much sense as a first-year student's homework essay thrown together the night before it is due.

Anyone engaging in good faith debates is missing the point entirely. There is nothing of substance to engage with, as multiple world leaders are discovered.

PS: Trump apparently made 200 deals, more than the number of countries in the world, then 17, and now just 1 with the UK, where he reduced tariffs from 1% to 0.8%. Wooo! Winning!
by tstrimple | 2025-05-09 23:28:36+00:00
I took their statement to mean more that "DEI as described by conservatives is already illegal" not that the concept of DEI is illegal. But they did say "in practice" which seems to throw my interpretation off. In practice, DEI initiatives are exactly as you've described. Sometimes with more specific mentoring opportunities and more or less investment in the college or earlier pipeline.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-09 23:28:42+00:00
It is far, far from impossibly massive. It is, for example, entirely comparable to a typical mortgage:income debt ratio. It is lower than the debt:GDP ratio of several other countries (including Japan in the recent past) that did not fail as a result.

It also can't be done (in the sense of grown) endlessly if the only tools brought to bear upon it are the ones of heterodox economics and the historical policies of the two major US parties. You don't, however, need to invade other countries. You can take the sort of approach MMT advocates, for example.
by SllX | 2025-05-09 23:30:42+00:00
> Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.

The only mode of transportation that is truly free is walking. BART is already the economical choice compared to the $8 bridge tolls plus gas, but cutting off an existing revenue source hoping to increase service is either going to degrade service frequency, service quality, or both.

> Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.

This is out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issues with making driving more expensive, however this also isn't the counter that you think it is. Both Bay Area roads and Bay Area public transit agencies are subsidized, in addition to having associated fees that add to the cost of each of them.

> Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.

Once again, out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issue with and would even advocate for upzoning around BART. I still would not make BART free after doing so.
by doublerebel | 2025-05-09 23:31:15+00:00
I use a Chromecast Ultra for this, works with Spotify, Tidal, Youtube apps. Or, if you don't care about 4K get a regular 3rd gen Chromecast. These are NOT the newest gen Chromecasts with Google TV, these are 'dumb' devices that just receive streams and don't run apps.

Unfortunately as of a few years ago Google TV/Android TV forces ads for useless content in the home screen, taking up bandwidth and slowing load times. The 'dumb' Chromecasts can still talk to the AVR over HDMI-CEC to turn on power, adjust volume, etc.
by siavosh | 2025-05-09 23:31:35+00:00
I only learned this recently but Stephen Miran, President Trump’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, in 2024 basically laid out the plan to de-value the USD and to encourage foreign nations to move to more diverse basket of currencies all while trying to balance the transition and mostly maintain the geopolitical power of remaining the reserve currency. Who know how it will play.
by hayst4ck | 2025-05-09 23:32:36+00:00
Yeah I could see why you would say that. I linked the article to exorbitant privilege which states some of those advantages.

If you are responsible with your levels of corruption, then fiat currency is generally very beneficial. So it ends up being like a drug. Appropriate amounts can improve your life, but abuse, which the drug will promote, can destroy it.

It's a form of power, and if you can use it responsibly it's good, and if you abuse it it's bad.

Rampant shortermism promoted by shareholder supremacy especially when compounded by government funded bailouts really amplifies our ability to damage our future with our monetary system.

If you can think in the long term then it's very net beneficial, but if you allow short term interests to dominate... the hangover will be devastating.

Thinking about it more, lack of inflation makes savings valuable and potentially implies deflation where saving/not spending money gives you more buying power than investing it. This takes money out of the market and reduces "dollar velocity"/the sum total of market activity which can devastate your economy.
by johnea | 2025-05-09 23:32:42+00:00
I'm not torn at all, I would say going to public domain is exactly what should have happened.

Here in SoCal, our past senator cosponsored the DMCA (aka Disney Millennium Copyright Act) to benefit her long time contributor.

Once authors are dead, works should enter public domain.

The "industry" has pushed back this basic principle for many years.

I often say, the only reason "classical music" is even a known thing is because it's not subject to copyright, and orchestras can perform it royalty free.

There will be no such thing with modern media...
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-09 23:34:15+00:00
1 acre is about 4,050 m^2, and incident sunlight has an average intensity of 1kW/m^2.

So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%.

(This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.)

Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to.

Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass.

And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both.

Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply.

(Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.)

This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.
by justanotheratom | 2025-05-09 23:34:37+00:00
Federal Revenue actually went up after Trump Tax Cuts. I hope we can agree that there was some justification for a big spending bill in Covid time window. But after that, there was no justification IMO for the crazy spending that happened in the last 4 years.

Data: Table of Federal Revenue vs Spending: https://chatgpt.com/share/681e9040-edf8-8008-ae3d-370bb5a0d2...
by const_cast | 2025-05-09 23:34:57+00:00
I also don't accept the idea that there is waste.

It feels very much like a hindsight perspective. Sure, a lot (most?) scientific research will not be immediately beneficial to anyone. Some will never be beneficial. But you don't know that until you research it, that's why you're doing the research.

The only surefire way to prevent waste in research is to do no research at all.
by this_user | 2025-05-09 23:35:23+00:00
Negotiate about what? There isn't even a clear ask from the US side when they base everything on trade imbalances. Attempting to bring those to zero makes no sense and would do more harm than good. A country like Vietnam is not able to able enough expensive US goods to offset their exports to the US. Trying to squeeze these countries serves no purpose, and the absolute trade volumes with a lot of the smaller countries are so small that it's not even worth putting in the effort to attempt to negotiate anything.

So, what do they want? It is pretty clear by now that they don't even know. They started a massive trade war without a clear plan or way out, and now they are progressively walking it back and attempting to negotiate some quick, face saving deals like the UK one that barely does anything.

And if they really are worried about China, then they need allies to be able to isolate the Chinese and put enough pressure on them. Except, they have just alienated everyone who could have helped with that.

These are not the actions of some master strategist, but of someone who is in way over his head.
by absolutelastone | 2025-05-09 23:36:08+00:00
That difference in difficulties is kind of the point. Imagine, as an extreme, a company makes a machine with certain functions performed based on which button combinations you press. A second company gets a patent for using the first company's machine for doing various tasks by pressing various button combinations, which are new uses of the machine no one had thought of yet. Now the second company has all the bargaining power in the market and so gets giant margins, despite doing a tiny fraction of the work it takes to make those tasks possible.

I wonder if our current system ended up this way because it is the most efficient in terms of specialization, or because the patent system drove things in this direction where the people last dealing with customers (i.e., those making the software layer) have the best info of what tasks the customers want to do with their computers, and hence patent the solutions first. Leaving hardware vendors no choice but to serve the software monopolies (one after another since the 80's).
by hinkley | 2025-05-09 23:36:45+00:00
The problem I run into with these sorts of structures is the whole aggregation versus composition issue.

With composition the SoA problem is pretty simple. This object belongs to an owner or a category and it just never 'moves' so the most naive solution is just fine.

I haven't looked at C++ in a million years, but looks like this implementation fixes the aggregation problem by handing out handles to the data, but I don't see anything in here where it tries to hand out the same handle for the same offset. I don't know about C++ but that matters in some languages.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-09 23:37:21+00:00
Life is probably the name of the process that happens on the surface of an extremely hot iron ball covered with carbon and water as it cools.

First it starts to stink, then it gets fuzzy, then it starts to stink worse as the irregular fuzziness in the surface is replaced by geometric patterns spitting light and clouds of smoke. Eventually the surface is suddenly awash in fire and burnt black.
by SllX | 2025-05-09 23:37:24+00:00
> These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.

Something you may have missed in this discussion is that BART has hardened its most frequently-used gates and is still in the process of hardening all of them with new fare gates and other infrastructure. This has noticeably decreased the frequency in which people are casually engaging in theft of service. In all of Downtown San Francisco with the new fare gates installed, you can't just step over them anymore, nor is circumventing them a subtle and quick matter.

> I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.

It doesn't require magic to look at someone and assess their clothes, the items they're carrying and general hygiene and clock that with the time of day, or even figure out what their occupation is: mostly office workers and others who work in downtown San Francisco. Most of BART's passengers are commuters with jobs after all, they're not just riding it for fun which is what you would expect from a commuter rail system. Paying for transportation whether that is the bridge toll or the BART ticket is each person's responsibility, and notably there are tax incentives for public transportation within the Bay Area already, and as I noted up thread, plenty of discounts.
by apothegm | 2025-05-09 23:38:51+00:00
Didn’t read the paper, but Inuktitut produces words in a compound manner, right? Not quite like Germanic languages where you can crash a bunch of adjectives and nouns together to make a new word. But if I understand correctly, the syntax is such that complex concepts that in English might be a dozen-word “noun phrase” or “adjectival phrase” or extended description of an action (not sure “verb phrase” is a real term) are expressed as single, possibly extremely long, words in Inuktitut.