MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altairprime | 2025-05-26 17:27:17+00:00
These are all valid concerns. My goal was to highlight an opportunity for improvement that does not require capital equipment purchases. As you note, analysis may not reveal any opportunity for improving the regenerative controls. Given their inability to address the problem today, I expected they’d rather investigate a low-odds opportunity than disregard it. I was incorrect; I will raise my minimum-likelihood thresholds at HN in the future. ‘Simple’ was meant only in relation only to all other identified options, that each require non-zero capital expenditure and thus invoke the complexities of capital expenditure. It was not my intent to diminish the intricacies or difficulties of rail electrical engineering with my imprecise use of that adjective and I apologize for the disrespect inflicted.
by mmmBacon | 2025-05-26 17:27:23+00:00
I would love to try this. I couldn’t tolerate CPAP. I used a dental appliance and that worked really well for a while, although was not perfect. I’m now on a path to have jaw surgery to move my lower and upper jaw by 1cm. I’ve started with extensive orthodontic treatment and it’s super uncomfortable. The thought of the surgery is also fairly terrifying. So if there’s a pill that could help, I’d sign up in about a millisecond.
by Rastonbury | 2025-05-26 17:27:31+00:00
What I want from Google is showing me results (not summaries) from sources that I tell it from natural language. If I know I am going to search for a topic I know is going to be filled with a ton of SEO garbage, I default to chatgpt to get sources for me, unfortunately I still do not trust chatgpt to have done a thorough job but sometimes I can't be bother to trawl through blogspam.

The reason why chatgpt and perplextty are stealing queries from them is because Search has become so bad.
by stevep98 | 2025-05-26 17:27:49+00:00
Trex makes composite decking planks from recycled shopping bags. Seems like a perfect use for the material. Its durable. It doesn’t have to be sterile or pure. Apparently 100,000 bags will go into a typical deck.

https://nextrex.com/

Having said that I don’t see what’s wrong with incineration if it’s done correctly. It’s not open pit burning, with waste gases going into the environment. It’s high temperature, with additional gas and oxygen to promote more complete burning. And waste gases are filtered.
by neilv | 2025-05-26 17:28:21+00:00
> It can’t be done. If someone is on a home network whose router has been compromised and is part of a ddos attack, there’s no way their innocent HTTP traffic is getting through. Ditto if their machine has been compromised.

To me, this sounds like giving up way too easily on engineering problems.

One distinction to start with: Let's say grandma's router isn't part of a DDoS attack. Even if she might be trying to talk with a site that someone is trying to attack.

After solving that one, maybe the solution also somehow solves the problem of when grandma's router is involved in DDoS (or that site? of a different one?), or maybe we have to think harder.
by Scramblejams | 2025-05-26 17:28:39+00:00
The link I provided mentions a correction they made (where they undercalculated the EPA's reference dose of decaBDE by a factor of ten), but the study authors maintain the overall conclusion is sound. And I'd rather have zero decaBDE in my breakfast than what the EPA says is okay, whatever my cookware's color might be.

I've searched around for other corrections or challenges but haven't found any. Got a link?
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-05-26 17:28:44+00:00
Computers, pigs, cows, and chickens are conscious, but it doesn't matter.

Humans value things that are hard to replace. (This is a first-order approximation)

Abortions are okay because fetuses only take 1 person nine months to make, and it's their decision whether to keep it.

Infanticide is not okay because a healthy baby is difficult to replace, and also lots of people might like to adopt it, and if it's breathing on its own then the maintenance cost is as low as it can get.

Software like LLMs can be abused because it costs nothing to roll them back and clone them endlessly.

Pets are hard to replace because you can't replace the interpersonal bond between a pet and their keeper. They fall somewhere high above computers and a little below children on this scale.

Pigs, cows, and chickens, commonly called "livestock" are bred and slaughtered in mass (most of our farmland is for growing their feed) because they all look the same to us and aren't commonly kept as pets. Kind people are disgusted when they think of raising rabbits or dogs for food. Thoughtful people look at all this and decide not to eat any animal product at all.

Under this model, everything makes perfect sense. Did I miss anything? /engineering_hubris
by NikolaNovak | 2025-05-26 17:28:49+00:00
It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed).

I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0]

0: https://xkcd.com/763/
by OrderlyTiamat | 2025-05-26 17:28:51+00:00
NHST is wrong as a matter of theory. It is a weird amalgamation of null hypothesis testing (Fisher) and significance testing (Neyman and Pearson). Those two approaches by themselves are correct, and theoretically sound, given the appropriate assumptions are met.

NHST is not associated with any statistician, and you will find no author claiming to be its inventor. It is a misunderstanding of statistics apparently originating from psychology back in the 1960s, or at least that's as far back as I've found it.
by sandeepkd | 2025-05-26 17:28:59+00:00
Working on building a platform that allows the hosting for the front end of the website, and use the dynamic backend similar to Firebase. Only difference may be the drop in authentication functionality without any hassle going all way up to support enterprise level IDP.

The authentication space becomes too complex above a certain company size, the concepts like admin user, service user, are not always supported as first class concepts. In a nut shell, just trying to solve the problems that I have personally come across the last decade and more in the industry in authentication space
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 17:29:21+00:00
I prefer not being on social media, it's amazing.

Where to jump back in honestly depends on your target audience.

For niche tech stuff, HN seems to be fine.

I can't recommend reddit. I got an account a few months ago, and nearly every post or comment I spend time and effort on got downvoted to 0 immediately and stayed there. But maybe I'm just a terrible low quality contributor, who knows.

Tiktok is hit or miss when it comes to interesting social content. I really enjoyed the niche debates on there that get at most 10k views. My main issue with it is how addictive it is. It's designed to be literally crack.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-26 17:29:28+00:00
The costs of storing more and more plastics will only increase, storage is cheap at first, and that's why they did that, and when it starts getting expensive, they abandon ship. It is either classic fraud or incompetence.

These plastics will have to be dealt with eventually, recycling, burning or burying them. Waiting is just a waste of money. If we wait "a generation of two", we will be drowning in warehouses full of plastics like over-ground, inadequate and expensive landfills.

These are plastics, not nuclear waste. The "wait and see" strategy works for nuclear waste works because such waste is compact, hazardous and potentially very valuable. It also decays naturally, so the simple act of waiting makes it less hazardous. Plastic waste is the opposite of that: bulky, relatively harmless, mostly worthless, and it becomes worse as it degrades.
by yearesadpeople | 2025-05-26 17:29:51+00:00
I've come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in version control... writing those words make me wince). I have a small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to share (I believe the kids are calling this 'new age curation'). Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the market - to realise this. Love Simon's articles, another nice insight
by twixfel | 2025-05-26 17:30:02+00:00
That's true of all taxes. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be any taxes. We should also be able to agree that taxing wealth is preferable to taxing income, at least morally, because hard work should pay a little bit more, and simply owning things should pay a little bit less.

I'm simply arguing that work is taxed too much in comparison to wealth. I am not saying taxes should go up even more in general, necessarily.
by dang | 2025-05-26 17:30:08+00:00
I think the (anonymous? I can't find a name) author of the OP slipped slightly at the end of that otherwise-impeccable sequence of quotes. That last comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546438) was responding to a question about open-sourcing the entire HN codebase, not just the Arc implementation.

Open-sourcing HN wouldn't work because of the anti-abuse stuff, etc. But open-sourcing the Arc implementation (i.e. Clarc) would be much easier. The way to do it would be to port the original Arc release (http://arclanguage.org/) to Clarc. It includes a sample application which is an early version of HN, scrubbed of anything HN- or YC-specific.
by ComposedPattern | 2025-05-26 17:30:18+00:00
I'm not that convinced by this paper. The "impossible languages" are all English with some sort of transformation applied, such as shuffling the word order. It seems like learning such languages would require first learning English and then learning the transformation. It's not surprising that systems would be worse at learning such languages than just learning English on its own. But I don't think these sorts of languages are what Chomsky is talking about. When Chomsky says "impossible languages," he means languages that have a coherent and learnable structure but which aren't compatible with what he thinks are innate grammatical facilities of the human mind. So for instance, x86 assembly language is reasonably structured and can express anything that C++ can, but unlike C++, it doesn't have a recursive tree-based syntax. Chomsky believes that any natural language you find will be structured more like C++ than like assembly language, because he thinks humans have an innate mental facility for using tree-based languages. I actually think a better test of whether LLMs learn languages like humans would be to see if they learn assembly as well as C++. That would be incomplete of course, but it would be getting at what Chomsky's talking about.

Also, GPT-2 actually seems to do quite well on some of the tested languages, including word-hop, partial reverse, and local-shuffle. It doesn't do quite as well as plain English, but GPT-2 was designed to learn English, so it's not surprising that it would do a little better. For instance, they tokenization seems biased towards English. They show "bookshelf" becoming the tokens "book", "sh", and "lf" – which in many of the languages get spread throughout a sentence. I don't think a system designed to learn shuffled-English would tokenize this way!

https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.787.pdf
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-26 17:30:18+00:00
It is Tirzepatide which is a GLP-1 agonist, like Semaglutide (Ozempic). I don't know how much of the co-occurring issues from sleep apnea are caused by the sleep apnea or are comorbidities for something else. I suspect quite a lot of the later. I think we're going to find that GLP-1 agonists are really good for a lot of things beyond obesity including many auto-immune conditions which I think underlies many mental conditions.
by nicbou | 2025-05-26 17:30:53+00:00
I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website (https://allaboutberlin.com). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse.

My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. Having all information mediated by two companies isn't just digging into my revenue, it's killing the fun.

The unfortunate side effect is that it made me focus more on business and less on serving my readers. I'm working on health insurance stuff when I would rather work on a citizenship guide. It's also sad to see all the nuance stripped from my carefully chosen words.

It sucks, honestly. I am being replaced by AI, but I am still supposed to go experience the real world and translate it into LLM training material. In the end, there still is a thinking, feeling human being doing the essential work. He's just not getting paid anymore.
by nullstyle | 2025-05-26 17:31:00+00:00
Then you aren't paying attention, IMO.

An example for the dense: A friend of mine used his conversations with ChatGPT to get through a tough spot in his marriage. The distinction between what happened in ChatGPT's internal processing and what would have happened in the internal processing of the brain of a family therapist is a meaningless distinction.

My friend was able to benefit from the thoughtwork of ChatGPT.
by ThatMedicIsASpy | 2025-05-26 17:31:15+00:00
I have tried NixOS and the out of the box experience isn't bad, neither on my main VM nor my notebook. Everybody points you to flakes and flakes point you do use the unstable branch of nixos and that is where I say no. Then you learn a bunch of things along the way like upgrading replaces your stuff and you have to start again.

I've moved to Atomic desktops and can't name anything I am missing. For dev stuff there are containers.
by briandear | 2025-05-26 17:31:25+00:00
The “anti American sentiment” is overblown. Average person doesn’t care. I live in Spain and I’m not seeing much anti-American anything. Anti-Israel has reached hysterical levels on the other hand — at least in the media, though the average person really doesn’t care about that much either.

In my circles of high level Spanish/European motorcycle racing, we continue to have a very positive reception as Americans in the paddock. The (Spanish) TV announcers have been positive towards our riders, the teams and crew are positive and helpful. We have more people wanting to talk about Route 66 than trade policy. Most Spaniards I know tend to roll their eyes at their own government more than anything happening in the U.S. The only exceptions are hysterical US expats on Facebook groups acting like the sky is falling. But they do that reliably every time a Republican gets elected.

Anecdotes aren’t data of course, but vocal people online don’t represent broader thought.
by gosub100 | 2025-05-26 17:31:33+00:00
this won't solve all your problems, but replacing the sports guard with a rubber one that is meant for bruxism, or even better, paying the $400 and getting a custom one from your dentist, will help a lot. the sports guards aren't soft enough to prevent damage to the surface of your teeth. My custom dental guard has lasted for several years, and although I was skeptical at first, the cost was worth it.
by nullstyle | 2025-05-26 17:31:58+00:00
> Why do you assume that training on the internet would lead to AGI?

Answer my question, please. edit: let me rephrase to be more clear with what i'm asking. Why are you assuming that consuming the entire internet would lead to either "AGI is here" or "AGI will never be here"? New techniques for developing better intelligence are emerging all the time.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-26 17:33:01+00:00
> Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. Unfortunately. separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative Arc implementations we’ve been working on.

Is this a case where security through obscurity is good, or bad? Legit question. I am curious to read the responses it may prompt.

I found this though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27457350

> There are a lot of anti-abuse features, for example, that need to stay secret (yes we know, 'security by obscurity' etc., but nobody knows how to secure an internet forum from abuse, so we do what we know how to do). It would be a lot of work to disentangle those features from the backbone of the code.

The question still stands for curiosity!
by Sunspark | 2025-05-26 17:33:07+00:00
I remember awhile back that they were and do train on repositories to the point that I never wanted to use GitHub for anything other than submitting bug reports to projects.

Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection money? But then you run into the whole if it's public there's nothing stopping some other AI that isn't MS from accessing the repository and training on it.
by bhelkey | 2025-05-26 17:33:28+00:00
When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives [1]. Germany did not cooperate. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial.

One more mid level engineer involved in the scandal made the mistake of taking a vacation to Florida. He was arrested in the airport awaiting his flight home to Germany [2]. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison but was let out after serving half of that sentence [3].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...

[3] https://www.autonews.com/automakers/ex-vw-manager-schmidt-ge...
by rurban | 2025-05-26 17:33:49+00:00
VW? Everyone who used the Bosch ECU cheated. VW was just the biggest who got caught and had to go to jail therefore. All the others, which were more guilty than the VW execs are still free.

And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
by usrbinenv | 2025-05-26 17:33:57+00:00
Markdown is unreadable as a source. This solves the problem of looking good and clean as a text document and not having to remember many rules (certainly less than Markdown) to write a valid Shrimple markup that compiles nicely to HTML. Another thing is a static site generator that's very nice for writing documentation sites -- it takes care of generating not just the html pages tree, but also inserts menu and navigation links in them correctly.
by jmclnx | 2025-05-26 17:34:18+00:00
The only one I kind of care about is Google, I guess I will need to change that PW. And the google email is pretty much ignored by me.

Of the list, I only have a Facebook PW, but I tried to delete that ID years ago without luck. I have not be in it in ages.

If some here gets that PW, please delete my Facebook Account :)
by raverbashing | 2025-05-26 17:34:24+00:00
Honestly it's not "worse"

But I think HN built on what Reddit got right (at least old reddit) and also on a context of more online/faster interactions as opposed to Slashdot that brought some of the old forums structure and on a context of slower and more meaningful (ahem, for the most part) interactions. Hence why moderation was more precise, upvotes had color and you still had things like user signatures

In a way, users and posts on HN are "cattle", not pets ;)
by sepositus | 2025-05-26 17:34:38+00:00
For reference, I use Nix to manage three different machines, always via home-manager and nix-darwin (I left NixOS awhile ago and haven't looked back). I don't think it's "inevitable" that you'll hit the difficulty wall, but certainly likely.

As an example, I was recently playing with Pyinfra which is like a pure Python version of Ansible. It turns out that one of the dependencies uses an archaic version of setuptools and the package owner had inserted some _very_ hacky code that ended up breaking on two of my systems. Now I'm relatively experienced with Nix, so it took me a few hours to track down, but it would have been days if not impossible for a beginner.

Nowadays I package brew along with my machines and as soon as something smells funky in Nix I just manage it with brew. Much more peaceful.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-26 17:34:56+00:00
>Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ... just to get a quote.

Jeesh these companies are dumb... they could be selling referrals to other businesses but are instead dropping them on the floor.
by fchaubard | 2025-05-26 17:35:03+00:00
Layman Abstract: Transformers keep around all previous tokens for each generated token, so they take up ENORMOUS gpu memory and cost during inference. But humans do not, we page in / out of our small, fixed-size "working memory", keeping around only the important information of the past.

RNNs are more like us, they compress all previous tokens into a small fixed-sized memory. However, we can't train them with legacy backprop through time (BPTT), because it doesnt scale and suffers exploding/vanishing gradients.

So we discovered a 1992 zero order algorithm to replace BPTT, and not only does it scale amazingly well, in some cases, it trains 19x faster than BPTT! So maybe with this, RNNs can replace transformers?
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-26 17:35:18+00:00
I would suggest getting a library card, and trying to read a good book, writing down any questions you might have for later review. While it doesn't feel as though you're learning as much, or as quickly, most people will find that they actually know a lot more about the subject afterwards.

A chat log that takes me 2 hours to produce, I can read in 5 minutes. There's no world in which that's efficient pedagogy, even disregarding ChatGPT's truthfulness issues.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-26 17:35:34+00:00
your comment assumes that features and functionality are a good thing. "worse is better" does not apply here.

"worse is better" is people putting up with footguns like this in python, because it's percieved easier to find a python job:

def fun(a = []):

HN is very much "less is better", not "worse is better".
by bilekas | 2025-05-26 17:37:01+00:00
This comment is so on point, reminds me of the old one about if you owe the bank 500k they own you, but if you owe then 2Billion you own them. Something along those lines, maybe I'm only noticing it more recently but it seems to me that there's also a higher prevalence of "Non class actions" clauses in terms and conditions these days too.

It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.

Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.

> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.