MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rriley | 2025-05-12 21:51:00+00:00
The Barbican is such a striking example of an architectural utopia, built not just as housing, but as a statement about how people could live, work, and engage with culture in one integrated space.

Few others worth exploring...

Walden 7 (Spain): A labyrinthine, colorful complex by Ricardo Bofill with inner courtyards and skybridges, aiming for a more social urban life based on B.F. Skinner's Walden Two philosophy.

Arcosanti (USA): Paolo Soleri’s desert experiment in “arcology”, architecture + ecology—exploring sustainable living in a compact footprint.

Unité d'Habitation (France): Le Corbusier’s "vertical garden city" combining apartments, shops, and communal spaces into one concrete megastructure.

Habitat 67 (Canada): Modular housing units stacked like Lego, Moshe Safdie’s vision for dense yet humane urban living.

Auroville (India): Founded in the 1960s as an experimental township aiming for human unity beyond politics and religion.
by michaelteter | 2025-05-12 21:51:43+00:00
Still not excusing them, but these HN responses are very hypocritical.

US tech is built on the "go fast, break things" mentality. Companies with huge backers routinely fail at security, and some of them actually spend money to suppress those who expose the companies' poor privacy/security practices.

If anything, college kids could at least reasonably claim ignorance, whereas a lot of HN folks here work for companies who do far worse and get away with it.

Some companies, some unicorns, knowingly and wilfully break laws to get ahead. But they're big, and people are getting rich working for them, so we don't crucify them.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-12 21:52:32+00:00
> I've heard more than one co-worker or family member refer to buying pre-owned goods as "buying someone else's problem."

Well, products just aren't built to last these days. Just take electronic devices... for phones, if it's not an iPhone and maybe a flagship Samsung, after two years the resale value isn't much because it's either bent and scratched to hell or it won't get any more software update. For laptops it's just the same. After 2-3 years, unless it's Apple, usually the battery is shot, the hinges are worn out and the plastic body next to the touchpad is as discolored as the keyboard is.

Cars are also pretty bad. It's either "buy a new car and risk a lemon" or "buy an used car and pay the difference to a new car in repair costs", and on top of that the second-hand car market is pretty dead. You can't do much in terms of repair yourself any more on any car younger than 10-15 years when cars started to be hyper-crash-optimized computers on wheels, with a shrunken chemical factory attached to the exhaust port.

Furniture, even worse. Almost nothing is made from real raw cut lumber any more for weight and cost reasons, it's all sawdust and glue... or in IKEA's newest trend, cardboard.

Clothing for adults, that's the worst, the fast fashion/shein/... crap completely tanked the market. The stuff that you get offered is falling apart after maybe two washes.

The places where second hand still rocks are the ones where either the market is slooow moving (ham radios) or baby stuff because babies grow out of stuff and need new stuff so fast that it doesn't really make sense.
by shagie | 2025-05-12 21:53:22+00:00
The point of https://www.nrel.gov/index is to research how to do renewable energy. Likewise, the research done by https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/about-hpc and its data center https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-data-center is to pioneer ways to reuse its waste heat (and better cool existing data centers).

I'm kind of disappointed that their dashboard has been moved or offline or something for the past few years. https://b2510207.smushcdn.com/2510207/wp-content/uploads/202... is what it used to look like.
by alpaca128 | 2025-05-12 21:54:15+00:00
I would say the risk of identity theft for over 150 million people justifies some preventative measures. And yes, there also were hundreds of lawsuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Or how about four suicides and 900+ wrongful convictions?

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

Not to mention the various dating app leaks that led to extortion, suicides and leaking of medical information like HIV status. And not to forget the famous Therac-25 that killed people as direct result of a race condition.

Where's the threshold for you?
by markovs_gun | 2025-05-12 21:55:03+00:00
Plus being poor is essentially an IQ debuff. I remember I had a week where I had my identity stolen, had a large unexpected medical bill that I spent 20 hours on the phone with my insurance trying to figure out why I was getting said bill*, my grandma was sick, and I was having a tough time at work. If I were slightly less well off or didn't have a job where I could take a day off on short notice to sort all of this out( or as is often the case, both at the same time), that week could have started a cascade effect that would have outright ruined my life. I was so stressed out that week I was forgetting really basic things and doing things wrong, I wasn't sleeping, and all I wanted to eat was junk fast food because it was fast and easy and I didn't have to think about it.

The thing is, a lot of poor people live like that every day. I have some friends who are a single car problem away from being financially destitute because of the death spiral that can come from being poor- your car that you drive to work breaks down and you don't have the money to fix it. You lose your job because you can't get to work, and you can't get another job because you don't have transportation. Public transit is non existent in most of the US. You can get another car, but it's a junker at an insane interest rate and that's another expense you don't need. So yeah in that headspace I can understand feeling like financing a burrito could make sense. If you're already not thinking straight and you're tempted by a simple pleasure that feels like the one thing you can control in life and you know you're going to have the bank balance tomorrow, I can see it.

People wanting stuff like this doesn't mean it's rational to use or moral to offer. It's a symptom of a society that is fundamentally broken, that is designed to keep people on the razor's edge of their current economic status and in constant fear of losing what little they have.

*If you're curious how this happens, I take an expensive medication for a chronic illness and my insurance randomly changed how they pay for it without informing me before I got hit with a $2000 bill
by cameldrv | 2025-05-12 21:55:40+00:00
The Autobahn is much more challenging to drive on due to the extreme speed variation between trucks in the right lane going 80 kph and race car drivers in the left going 250.

IMO the only reason that it's acceptably safe is strict German driver's licensing requirements and fairly strong enforcement of traffic laws. If you had the same regime but American style speed variation, I think you'd see considerably safer roads in Germany.
by dijit | 2025-05-12 21:56:13+00:00
Yeah, I agree.

But it does sting a bit to do a month of research and then someone comes along in 10s and invalidates it.

I still welcome it, but it does sting.

The more annoying ones are the ones who don’t engage and act emotionally when presented with a conclusion they don’t like. The reason for me to write most often is because I found something I think is worthy of being discussed and that almost never aligns with peoples preconceived sensibilities.
by polalavik | 2025-05-12 21:56:43+00:00
Sorry hardcaml and amaranth were my examples of things with baked in sim features.

Also great work with spade. I love to hate, but the hardware industry needs folks like you pushing it forward. I just fear most people are making toys or focusing a ton of effort on the wrong issues (how to write HDL in a different way) instead of solving industry issues like verification, wrangling hand written modules with enormous I/O, stitching IP together, targeting real FPGAs, auto generating memory maps, etc. some of that is a tough solve because it’s proprietary.

[1] https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml/blob/master/docs/wave...
by tjohns | 2025-05-12 21:57:26+00:00
> He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking.

This is such an odd take. I see lots of older folks around me - and 42 isn't that old.

That said, it's undeniably true that expectations are raised the further along in your career you are. Interviewers will accept mistakes from a fresh college grad that they won't accept from an engineer with 20 years of industry experience who should know better (and is paid more). Not to mention there's just statistically fewer openings for TL positions. All of that definitely makes interviews harder as you're further along in your career.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-12 21:58:28+00:00
Does Apple even allow you to replace Siri with another assistant? For the longest time on android, all non-Google assistants were crippled by not being able to listen in the background or use the assistant hardkey, gestures, or shortcuts. I'm not sure if the Google assistant still has privileges others don't, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least.
by ramity | 2025-05-12 21:58:53+00:00
I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some believe it.

One of the most profound realizations I've had lately is that the perception of the medium of communication itself is a well that can be poisoned with artificial interactions. Major empahsis on perception. The meer presence of artifical can immediately taint real interactions; you don't need a majority to poison the well.

How many spam calls does it take for you to presume spam? How many linkedin autoreply ai comments does it take to presume all comments are ai? How many emails before you immediately presume phishing? How many rage baiting social posts do you need to see before you believe the entire site is composed of synthetic engagement? How many tinder bots do you need to interact with before you feel the entire app is dead? How many autodeny job application responses until you assume the next one is a ghost job posting? How many interactions with greedy people does it take to presume that it's human nature?
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-12 21:59:29+00:00
I have a cat and I noticed that the communication is mostly cat -> me. Not really the other way round.

She is very capable to express what she wants, but my attemps not so much.

Except when I make certain weird noises (a specific set). She will wave her tail a bit every time, whether she is sleeping, or staying at something invisible, or looking at the roomba.

I always wondered what this tell wave mean (it is just the sun's, they're is no followup afterward)
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 21:59:32+00:00
> Are people using them to generate entire books or news articles, rather than buying a book or an issue of the new york times?

Yes.

> No one is substituting marvel movies with sora video.

Yeah because sora kind of sucks. It's great technology, but turns out text is just a little bit easier to generate than 3D videos.

Once sora gets good, you bet your ass they will.
by nighthawk454 | 2025-05-12 21:59:57+00:00
I guess it depends on how loosely we take the definition. Wikipedia has it as just a function that maps variable length sequences to fixed length sequences. So by that definition most embedding networks fit.

Hashes are often assumed to be 1d, discrete valued, deterministic, uniformly distributed, and hard-to-reverse. And embeddings are often assumed to have semantic structure. Those two things certainly have some pretty different properties.

In the strict definitions, I’d say if hashing is just mapping to a fixed-size output space and an embedding is a projection/mapping of one space onto another (usually smaller) space, then they’re similar.

Some hash algorithms like SimHash or LSH use random projection onto sets of random hyperplanes to produce output vectors. Blurring the lines fairly well. You could even implement that as a NN with a single projection layer. Or indeed the torch.nn.Embedding class. Of course the outputs are usually then quantized or even binarized, but that’s more a use-case specific performance optimization not fundamental (and sometimes so are embeddings).
by elliottkember | 2025-05-12 22:01:09+00:00
The comment asking about riding positions drop bars was hilarious.

Lots of Americans in the comments is probably why, plus the Hacker News tendency toward armchair expertise.

The American grid system tends to produce hills that are unmanageable on a town or cargo bike, so bicycles are a fitness/enthusiast thing. And US cities are much more spread out, too. In more walkable European cities, these bikes make a lot of sense.
by alpaca128 | 2025-05-12 22:01:37+00:00
I agree creating software in general shouldn't be gatekept, but requiring that app developers who process PII have more to show than vibe-coding experience would probably be beneficial.

I don't think anyone is proposing that Flappy Bird or Python scripts on Github should be outlawed. Just like you can still build a robot at home but not a bridge in the town center.
by watwut | 2025-05-12 22:01:44+00:00
There is no such major group. There are people who think saving lives or improving quality of life does not matter, but those are also against individual liberties. They care about lowering taxes, more or less. They care about hierarchy.

But they do not care about liberties or freedom as such, not for anyone except the top of the hierarchy. They are consistently voting for politicians that restrict those and want to return back to times when average person was considerably less free. They are good at using freedom as a slogan, as an excuse to enact anti-freedom agenda, repeatedly, again and again.
by entilzha | 2025-05-12 22:02:58+00:00
Great to see our paper here again! Since the paper release, we've also released model weights here for anyone interesting in building on top of it: https://huggingface.co/facebook/blt. We also added HF Hub code to easily load the model https://github.com/facebookresearch/blt?tab=readme-ov-file#l....
by goldchainposse | 2025-05-12 22:04:04+00:00
Some quotes stood out to me

> ...in fact I own three houses

> ...I left behind everything and everyone i know and love on the west coast to come to New York specifically for this opportunity of helping care for my family and growing long term equity with real estate

> With my full time engineering job bringing in around $150k, a salary that I clawed my way slowly and steadily for 20 years, I could just about manage covering all the expenses, maintenance, and planned improvements for the long-term vision of the properties, maintain my 16-year-old daily driver car, and maybe even have four or five thousand dollars left over each year to take one little camping trip and make a couple stock and crypto investments.

Rather than building a career as a software engineer, he spent most of his time as a small-time real estate and crypto(!) investor subsidized by his software engineering side hustle.
by sitkack | 2025-05-12 22:04:38+00:00
It needs dependent types to encode when signals are valid.

I have looked at TL-Verilog, I love the language, I am on the fence with the syntax, which arguably, is nearly an inconsequential nit given how far languages and tools need to progress.

https://github.com/TL-X-org/TL-V_Projects

Wow, a TL-Verilog video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2epusH-fXI
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 22:05:14+00:00
The danger is that AI can be biased, so if we don't know how it's making it's decisions it could be stupid.

I mean, imagine that making an insurance claim with a black-sounding name results in a 5% greater chance of being rejected. How would we even know if this is the case? And, how do we prevent that?

Now, of course humans are biased too, but there's no guarantee that the biases of humans are the same as the biases of whatever AI model is chosen. And with humans we can hold them accountable to some degree. We need that accountability with AI agents.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-12 22:06:40+00:00
There are pretty major exceptions to what require engineering licenses, and it is pretty unclear where software should fall in.

You can sign a liability waiver and do all sorts of dangerous things.

>most “real” engineering field have had licensing requirements for a century, without any real complaints against that process).

Most newer engineering fields are trending away from licensing, not towards it. For example, medical device and drug engineering doesn't use it at all.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-12 22:07:46+00:00
I think it could be a tad bit clearer. I understand what you are saying but this thread requires reading multiple messages, parsing out the wrong parts, and putting together the correct ones to fully understand.

Put very simply, they exposed an endpoint that took a phone number as input to send a OTP code. That's reasonable and many companies do this without issue. The problem is, instead of just sending the OTP code they _returned the code to the client_ as well.

There is never a good reason to do this, it defeats the entire purpose. The only reason you send a code to a phone is for the user to enter to prove they "own" that phone number.

It's like having a secure vault but leaving a post-it note with the combination stuck to it.
by Anon1096 | 2025-05-12 22:08:24+00:00
I'm curious how you think this would be implemented. Do you think you should need a license to publish on GitHub? Write code on your own computer and run it? Because this was just a startup that some kids founded so saying that a license would have to be a prerequisite to hiring somebody would not cut it. You'd have to cut off their ability to write/run code entirely.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 22:08:35+00:00
>To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.

I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 22:08:35+00:00
> An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers

If it's health insurance, it's not a free market. You don't have a choice. It's employer provided, so suck it up buttercup.

It's just socialized medicine but implemented in the private sector and, like, 100x more shit.

UHC, one of the largest insurers in the US, has a claim denial rate somewhere in the 30s if I remember correctly. Well... that sucks.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-12 22:10:30+00:00
My favorite is Peter Norvig's contradictory clickbait url:

https://norvig.com/21-days.html

Entitled: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"!

People who just see then click on the URL must be really disappointed when they read the actual title.

Doesn't hurt that it's a great article, too!
by sfmz | 2025-05-12 22:10:53+00:00
Trying to get to Heaven tbh. I read this at the advice of my spiritual director.

For the first time in English! A collection of thirty-five meditations of St. Anthony Mary Claret based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Even during St. Anthony's lifetime, this book "produced marvelous results in such a way that, provided sinners make the Exercise well, they will be converted, while the just will be strengthened and perfected in grace." Indeed, these pages contain some of the finest spiritual reading available.

https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Heaven-Anthony-Mary-Claret/dp/...
by ModernMech | 2025-05-12 22:11:37+00:00
"language colonization" sounds pretty woke to me, I think I've lost the plot. I thought we were trying to get rid of woke. Now we are getting rid of "language colonizers" because their terms are wrong?

I thought we were going back to a meritocracy, where people are judged on the merits of their ideas. You read a word and concluded a lot.

It's interesting -- I was in a thread with someone else lamenting it's so hard to get funding if you go against the establishment. Now you're telling me this research shouldn't have been funded because it uses a term that goes against the established term. I think that really highlights the challenges in science funding.
by throw0101d | 2025-05-12 22:11:52+00:00
> We as in civilization? We made it at least a few thousand years without it.

Civilization is a continuity of discrete points of time.

We were able to enter (so-called) Dark Ages where things were forgotten (e.g., concrete) and still continue because things were often not very 'advanced': with the decline of Rome there were other stories of knowledge, and with the Black Death society hasn't much beyond blacksmithing and so was able keep those basic skills.

But we're beyond that.

First off, modern society is highly dependent on low-cost energy, and this was kicked off by the Industrial Revolution and easy accessible coal. Coal is much depleted (often needing deeper mines). Then next phase was with oil, and many of the easy deposits have been used up (it used to bubble up to the ground in the US).

So depending on how bad any collapse is, getting things up without easily accessible fossil fuels may be more of challenge.
by fmajid | 2025-05-12 22:11:58+00:00
My Lai was only addressed after dogged investigators like Sy Hersh made it impossible to keep covering up.

Compare this with the US during the Philippines War in the 19th century, an exceedingly dirty colonial conflict with no meaningful press involvement to blow the whistle, yet a major was court-martialled for waterboarding a prisoner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#During_the_Phili...

Ultimately these practices are either a sign of rotten leadership, or poor discipline. Once you let the rot fester, it's only a matter of time before the entire army is gangrened.