MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dekhn | 2025-05-07 16:10:29+00:00
"Burning" fat doesn't violate conservation of mass/energy. Instead, weight loss occurs primarily through co2/oxygen exchange that is connected to metabolism.

https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257

(note I don't totally agree with this paper, and agree that if you eat almost no food, you will lose weight, and that exercise definitely seems to increase the metabolic rate and increased mass exchange in the lungs. Like I said, it's complicated).

I'm not being disingenous or irresponsible- I'm describing mainstream science based on biophysical data.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-07 16:10:50+00:00
Same reason responsible technologists warned less-informed users about installing BonziBuddy. It was a free product that told jokes or whatever just as it said it would. It was also spyware.

Responsible technologists should raise the alarm on spyware products because they are harmful toward their users. Malware is often given away for "free" (sometimes even sent to you without you asking!), so it doesn't really make sense to say "well that's the deal". Somehow people seem to be forgetting this over the years (I suspect because a lot more technologists make money from participating in the surveillance/malware economy these days, and it's gotten so bad that some of them have started to think malware distribution and exfiltrating (and often selling) user data is not a thoroughly black-hat activity).

If you're okay with adware or spyware or crypto miners or botnet proxies or whatever else running on your computer as a form of "payment", great. You consider that a reasonable "transaction". Other people appreciate being warned about such behavior. In any case, one shouldn't consider the product to be "free" as advertised.
by the8472 | 2025-05-07 16:11:23+00:00
On linux there also is preadv2(..., RWF_NOWAIT) which can be used to do optimistic non-blocking read from the page cache. That might be useful for io_method = worker to shave off a bit of latency. Try reading on the main thread with NOWAIT and only offload to a worker thread when that fails.
by LinusU | 2025-05-07 16:11:52+00:00
(not the one you asked, but can chime in with some info)

This was a long time ago, but the way I did it was to use XcodeGen (1) and a simple Makefile. I have an example repo here (2) but it was before Swift Package Manager (using Carthage instead). If I remember correctly XcodeGen has support for Swift Package Manager now.

On top of that I was coding in VS Code at the time, and just ran `make run` in the terminal pane when I wanted to run the app.

Now, with SwiftUI, I'm not sure how it would be to not use Xcode. But personally, I've never really vibed with Xcode, and very much prefer using Zed...

1: https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen 2: https://github.com/LinusU/Soon
by ty6853 | 2025-05-07 16:12:06+00:00
Let's be extra generous and assume you meant leave and renounce.

Now let's talk about those harrowing deductions, which you are somehow ignorant of.

So it is decided you have to do X, otherwise leave, but actually leaving isn't enough. You have to show up at my special location (embassy), outside the country, using the passport I may or may not issue you (if you owe me lots of tax, or child support, you do not get it -- even if you need to leave the country to earn more money) -- pay me $2350, possibly an exit tax, and deal with setting up appointments and probably returning a couple times when I say with bureaucrats.

And so by not doing all those things, you have given consent. Even though many people paying taxes don't even have $2350 to their name, so they can't even buy a passport from the people taxing them let alone pay the renunciation fee.

You would definitely not be comfortable with this definition of 'consent' for anything sexual, for most things financial, and for anything involving your personal effects. It is a bastardized version of consent using mental acrobatics specially for taxes.

---- PS

>You also don't have to leave! You can simple declare yourself sovereign and let the foreign country engulfing your independent domain decide how it wants to conduct foreign policy with you.

This plan doesn't work. The only reliable way available to renounce is to leave the country and show up in a country with consular access (embassy normally). Declaring your own country wouldn't allow you to renounce because you would have no consular access to renunciation without going back into US land/airspace to go into another country.
by comrade1234 | 2025-05-07 16:12:21+00:00
My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards.

The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife still feels bad for it but still…

Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.
by youainti | 2025-05-07 16:12:43+00:00
The reason the US exports blood products is because it is one of 5 countries that allow commercial blood product harvesting. Well, at least plasma. I don't remember which organization it is, but there is an international organization that tries to get countries to be "self-sufficient" in blood products so that they are not internationally traded (the organization is something like WHO, UN, or Red Cross). Only those 5 countries that allow some level of commercialization actually meet their goals of being self sufficient (and export as on top of that).

Source: A guest lecture at my university by Al Roth, Nobel prize-winner in economics, who is currently focusing his work on these type of markets. Most of his work is on kidney exchanges right now.
by timr | 2025-05-07 16:12:49+00:00
When you insert a giant labeling bureaucracy in the middle of it, then point to consumers doing what they would have done anyway, then no, it’s not “the market at work”.

It’s a bit like making a Department of Deliciousness, and “voluntarily” labeling every cookie sold as part of the SweetStar program. My goodness…people like certified delicious products! Let’s hire more people…
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-07 16:13:19+00:00
You have to run the business case (at the end of the day all the work you do has to support this).

What's the NRE/tooling and marginal cost to produce a harness variant, and how many units with that variant will you sell? Will people buy the device without the harness adapter?

OE connectors are hard to get, they're typically not some stock Molex or Deutsch dealy-o. I've worked on projects where we 3D printed whole connector blocks to try to do get mating to OE ECUs. It kinda sucks, and you need a whole lot of volume to support that kind of engineering.
by SilasX | 2025-05-07 16:13:23+00:00
"Stop drinking" doesn't work for most alcoholics, because they go back to drinking. Simple as.

"Don't commit violent crimes" doesn't work for most violent criminals, because they go back to committing violent crimes. Simple as.

"Stop gambling" doesn't work for compulsive gamblers, because they go back to gambling. Simple as.

"Have superhuman willpower in a domain where I don't feel temptation" isn't a cure, it's unempathetic judgment.
by mlyle | 2025-05-07 16:13:55+00:00
The problem is, there's around 2^62 double precision numbers between 0 and 1, but they're not uniformly spaced-- there's many, many more between 0 and 0.5 (nearly 2^62) than there are between 0.5 and 1 (around 2^52), for instance.

So, if you want a uniform variate, but you want every number in the range to be possible to generate, it's tricky. Each individual small number needs to be much less likely than each individual large number.

If you just draw from the 2^62 space randomly, you almost certainly get a very small number.
by tiew9Vii | 2025-05-07 16:13:56+00:00
It works very well.

It’s not automatic braking. It’s automatically letting off the brakes for a fraction of a second to prevent locking up, aka anti-lock braking system

If it does kick in you get a slight pulsing on the leaver which means unless you are emergency braking, back off.

As far as the front goes, you never want the front to lock as you are almost certainly going down.

For off-road abs modes normally they turn rear off completely so you can deliberately lock it and decrease the sensitivity on the front but still keep the abs on for the front.
by jfengel | 2025-05-07 16:14:17+00:00
The part that most applies to me:

"Large-scale protests have failed to materialize. Even if they had, protests rarely have an impact unless they threaten regime survival"

I don't like protests. I attended one, and then skipped the next one. I think there's a broad feeling that it hasn't yet reached the need to threaten the survival of the regime yet -- but the author is correct that her personal survival is indeed under threat. So I am making the choice that her survival does not merit me risking my own life (which would be the consequence of a protest with any chance of working).

The best mechanism for protecting her would be the voting booth. We failed at that in November. We might get another chance in 18 months, but we might not, and even if we do, there's every reason to think we'll fail again. She cannot take that risk.

So I've failed her. I think it's important to take that responsibility. It's not just on me, but there are a lot of people who should have helped, and didn't. They failed her, and I failed to convinced them that they should.

I am sorry that she has to blow up her life to be safe. I hope that people are reading this, and that they see the thing that I see in it. The ones who are persecuting her will not change, but I'd like to think that there are enough people who will make the absolute minimum effort to prevent that.

If not, it will get worse and worse, and eventually it will come for me. And I wish I knew how to get through to people that it will come for them.
by genrilz | 2025-05-07 16:14:29+00:00
The reason '+ 1' is fine in the example you gave is that length is always less than or equal to capacity. If you follow 'grow_one' which was earlier in the function to grow the capacity by one if needed, you will find that it leads to the checked addition in [0], which returns an error that [1] catches and turns into a panic. So using '+1' prevents a redundant check in release mode while still adding the check in debug mode in case future code changes break the 'len <= capacity' invariant.

Of course, if you don't trust the standard library, you can turn on overflow checks in release mode too. However, the standard library is well tested and I think most people would appreciate the speed from eliding redundant checks.

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/raw_vec.rs.html#651 [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/raw_vec.rs.html#567
by sahil_sharma0 | 2025-05-07 16:14:57+00:00
This was a great read — love how it blends real-world frustration with a builder’s mindset.

The insight about how little attention goes into motorcycle specific safety tech is spot on. The market tends to over-index on cars, but the stakes for motorcyclists are arguably higher per mile. Would love to see more open source or modular frameworks emerge in this space something others could build on top of, regionally or by use-case.

Curious if you explored anything around passive detection (weather, terrain, phone telemetry) or if most of your work focused on rider input and behavior?
by freehorse | 2025-05-07 16:15:31+00:00
No problem, and thanks for the response here! I sent two feedback threads (added a second test where a file succeeded to edit and the rest failed). It was actually quite entertaining seeing the model try troubleshoot stuff anyway.

I used github copilot's sonnet 3.7. I now tried copilot's sonnet 3.5 and it seems to work, so it was prob a 3.7 issue? It did not let me try zed's sonnets, so I don't know if there is a problem with zed's 3.7 (I thought I could still do 50 prompts with a free account, but maybe that's not for the agent?).
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-07 16:15:43+00:00
Yup, memory access dominates an awful lot of things. We keep obsessing about more and faster cores, but if they're just waiting on memory it doesn't really do that much. A while back I did an experiment with the Sieve of Eratosthenes--and found that with modern systems the scattered memory access dominates. Finding all primes up to value X was much faster by brute force than using the Sieve. The brute force approach runs entirely from the L1 cache, the only operations outside it are writes. The Sieve ensures the only cache hits are from prefetching.

While this is obviously an extreme case the reality is that one must consider the cost of precalculated data, you can do quite a few operations for the cost of reading one answer from a table that doesn't fit cache. And there can be substantial benefits when iterating multi-dimensional arrays correctly. A total flip from when I started out where you considered the cost in memory from precalculating (is it worth the memory to build this table of square roots??) to now where the cost in time from looking up the answer (is it worth the memory fetch to look up that square root? Nope.)
by xenodium | 2025-05-07 16:15:53+00:00
I'd love to, though my experience hasn't been super positive with this approach. I've tried this on the App Store. You'd be surprised how many support queries, feature requests, negative App Store reviews, etc developers get from folks installing the app for free who never intend to upgrade/unlock.

edit: It's not uncommon to try apps on the App Store and request a refund if it doesn't work out https://support.apple.com/en-us/118223
by Sharlin | 2025-05-07 16:16:04+00:00
Floats are typically used to approximate reals, a uniform distribution over individual float values is usually not what is needed. What is wanted is uniform distribution over equal-sized intervals.

2^53 equally-spaced values within [0, 1) is plenty enough for many use cases, but it's still fundamentally a set of fixed-point rather than floating-point numbers. For a true random floating-point value, all the available precision should be used such that every single value in the domain has some probability mass (except maybe subnormals, but you can usually forget about subnormals). Especially with 32-bit floats it's not that difficult to run out of precision when you start doing math and only have a fixed-point subset of size 2^23 available.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-07 16:16:05+00:00
By the time of Russia's most recent invasion, NATO had been doing some minor training with Ukraine to "westernize" their military. It only took a little bit. They also provided bits and pieces of equipment, primarily anti-tank missiles. Donald Trump in his first term tried to coerce Zelensky into opening up an "investigation" into Hunter Biden by threatening to withhold those weapons. There were impeachment hearings.

Then leading up to the actual invasion (Which US intelligence called weeks in advance, don't know why everyone is insisting that it wasn't expected, maybe they should reconsider who they pay attention to) the US was convinced it would be a steamroll fight and then Ukraine would run an insurgency, so they provided thousands more anti-tank missile launchers.

It wasn't until Ukraine had mostly stopped the invasion convoy that the west took them seriously, and it took even longer for the west to start providing supplies.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-07 16:16:26+00:00
If we're at the point where planning what I'm going to write, reasoning it out in language, or preparing a draft and editing it is insufficient to make me not a stochastic parrot, I think it's important to specify what massive differences could exist between appearing like one and being one. I don't see a distinction between this process and how I write everything, other than "I do it better"- I guess I can technically use visual reasoning, but mine is underdeveloped and goes unused. Is it just a dichotomy of stochastic parrot vs. conscious entity?
by seam_carver | 2025-05-07 16:16:28+00:00
A recent feature I implemented a few weeks ago was virtual panel view.

You can enable it in the Kindle Aa menu.

You can double tap a corner to zoom into the corner in portrait mode 150% zoom.

Or you can turn the Kindle sideways to read half a page at a time.

and KCC scaling using the LANCOZ algorithm, which looks great.
by MengerSponge | 2025-05-07 16:16:31+00:00
Expensive things can be affordable. A house is expensive, but with stable employment and a bank loan you can afford it.

When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems.

States have substantially reduced their per-student support for universities: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in...

This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-07 16:16:37+00:00
> I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.

I would agree, if not for the empirical evidence showing us that legislators rarely make the changes that the people want. If they're not going to do it, somebody else has to.

Narrower changes would be nice, but they require a correspondingly short feedback loop of decide-act-adjust, which does not currently exist for legislators or most government administrators. If one desires narrower changes, I encourage them to first ensure the government moves and responds to customer (citizen) needs, faster than it currently does.

Either way, government structure and action should be what meets the needs of the people.
by johnobrien1010 | 2025-05-07 16:16:54+00:00
Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/

For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed.

Also, the fact that the disclosure seems to limit sales to being only occurring in Bermuda seems intentional. I suspect that this product would be highly illegal in most if not all US states, so they must offer this only for sale in Bermuda to avoid that issue.
by lfittl | 2025-05-07 16:17:27+00:00
It depends on the I/O method - as described in the article, "io_uring" is only available on Linux (and requires building with liburing, as well as io_uring to be enabled in the Kernel), but the default (as of beta1) is actually "worker", which works on any operating system.

The "worker" method uses a dedicated pool of I/O worker processes that run in the background, and whilst not as performant as io_uring in our benchmark, did clearly outperform the "sync" method (which is the same as what Postgres currently has in 17 and older).
by ack_complete | 2025-05-07 16:17:42+00:00
That Unity itself or Unity-based games use LGPL components doesn't matter. What matters here is what is allowed on the Unity Asset Store. There is nothing requiring Unity to allow everything on their Asset Store that could be linked into a Unity game, and apparently at the time, the Provider agreement simply said: you can't sell LGPL assets on the store.

It isn't surprising or unreasonable that the Store might have additional requirements, and there are plenty of reasons to do so. One is Unity limiting their risks as a distributor of third-party content. Another is that the Unity Asset Store does not require assets sold to be used with Unity, and for some assets it can be allowed depending on the specific asset's license:

https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/34387186019988-C...

On the other hand, not enforcing the LGPL rule evenly against other assets also currently being distributed with LGPL components, on the other hand, is more problematic.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-07 16:17:45+00:00
In my home country (Norway), I've met plenty of startup founders that come from MBB consulting. Actually a pretty "normal" path here, compared to jumping straight into entrepreneurship out of college. But that also has something to do with how risk-averse investors here are, compared to the US (no one here is going to give inexperienced college kids a bunch of money, unless they've proven themselves to be bona fide serious people) - and the fact that consultants actively get to see market needs in real time, and in positions where other external people might not.
by craftkiller | 2025-05-07 16:17:52+00:00
Hmm well damn, I did go to school a little over a decade ago, so things could have slipped since then. My school seems to be in the low 600s on CWUR[0] which sounds like the same ballpark as Toronto Metropolitan University on those rankings.

[0] https://cwur.org/2024/rensselaer-polytechnic-institute.php
by theoryaway | 2025-05-07 16:18:09+00:00
> I grew up in late 20th century India, in a deracinated household.

> A cultural and linguistic break had occurred, and between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation, there lay an imporous layer of English education that prevented both my father in Pakistan, and my mother, in India, from being able to reach their roots.

Blaming "only on a single generation of English education" is shortsightedness.Before implementation of english education(1835), art and literature of India was already on the path of destruction. At the time of its implementation, a large portion of India was illeiterate.

Anyway, I agree on the linguistic break.It has started many times ago.People want secure future for their children and preparing them to become Engineers or doctors.We as a society, have prioritised students to find the biggest sum of money and a secure future/career.In this country(or at least the place I belong now), after 10th people send the top students to Science, next to commerece and then the rest to arts.After science, people ask you "What do you want to become?"Unadmittedly, they have 2 options for you,Engineering or Doctor.

And today,the condition is worsening.Many toddlers and preschoolers today are glued to never-ending collection of youtube videos.Digital addiction at such a small age gives me no hope that they will be able to rediscover their true roots through their lifetime.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-07 16:18:25+00:00
Well, I was imagining this was related to web search.

I went back and looked at the system prompt, and it's actually not entirely clear:

> - Never reproduce or quote song lyrics in any form (exact, approximate, or encoded), even and especially when they appear in web search tool results, and even in artifacts. Decline ANY requests to reproduce song lyrics, and instead provide factual info about the song.

Can anyone get Claude to reproduce song lyrics with web search turned off?
by yial | 2025-05-07 16:18:30+00:00
I’m trying to understand this comment - are you saying that there’s an advantage to drivers behind you not thinking you’re braking? As in - you don’t want them to think you’re coming to a complete stop when you’re regulating your speed?

Or are you saying that you don’t want them to think you have a skill issue ?

I live in a semi mountainous area, where people driving automatics ride their brakes most of the way down the mountains. (Relatively small mountains, elevations ranging from 1,900-2,700 with the surrounding area around 1,000-1,100 elevation. So not the same necessity of engine braking as somewhere out west where the elevation is 3-6k average with mountains up to 12-14k).