MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2025-05-01 19:48:19+00:00
It's not levying war against the United States. I don't know what the legal definition of Enemies is, but I would imagine it would involve a declaration of war.

The Korean war was never formally resolved, but the US hasn't declared war since WWII.

There's also no indication of adherence here.

Doing things that benefit a country and a leader that your government officically doesn't care for can be all shades of prohibited and illegal, but it's not treason.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-01 19:48:38+00:00
When you see headlines (or hear podcasters) talk about dopamine and other neurotransmitters, remember that neurotransmitters are merely signaling molecules.

The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important.

The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome.

Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
by standardUser | 2025-05-01 19:48:56+00:00
> I wouldn't want one these anywhere near a high-pedestrian traffic area ever, and I feel the same about human-driven cars, too.

Much of San Francisco is a "a high-pedestrian traffic area" and Waymos operate in those areas constantly and more or less flawlessly. As someone who lived carless in SF for nearly 15 years, I see nothing but upside from more Waymos and less human drivers on those busy streets.
by prussian | 2025-05-01 19:48:58+00:00
I think people forget that some of this software may be relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy library calls. I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from Chrome to Word.

Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work machine

(Measure-Command { git status | Out-Null }).TotalSeconds

while running the same command on my personal Windows 11 virtual machine is near instant: ~0.1 seconds. Still slower than Linux, but not nearly as bad as my work machine.
by OJFord | 2025-05-01 19:49:01+00:00
This is almost all research though. (Medical) doctors aren't in the habit of doing longitudinal studies on procedures they don't do because they don't believe in them. (I mean, for one thing, where would they get the data!)

But that's why you have peer review, further studies from different authors perhaps on competing methods that point out some flaws in your approach, etc.
by dakshgupta | 2025-05-01 19:49:28+00:00
I'm not sure that commercially-motivated, mass-produced code takes away from "artisan" code. The former is off putting for the artisans among us, but if you were to sort the engineers at a well functioning software company by how good they are/how well they're compensated, you'd have approximately produced a list of who loves the craft they most.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-01 19:49:53+00:00
It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have

People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity

Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel

Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig

And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
by creer | 2025-05-01 19:49:55+00:00
> hard

Oh yes, no doubt about that. And one of the many, many real life skills that schools should concern themselves with. Because who else?

Another opportunity though is people watching. When bored or noised-out I sometimes give up on getting two words in and instead observe how people in that circle are talking or rather participating. There is amazing stuff going on at the meta level. People trying to be good hosts, people with zero self-awareness, other people observing and taking notes, people aware they are being chased, others not at all... It's fun.
by frankus | 2025-05-01 19:50:34+00:00
Loosely related talk from Hank Green a number of years ago whose thesis is basically that you don't owe your past self's dreams anything. It's kind of hard to summarize further, but I really like it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPtopvsxmZY (the main part starts about 5 minutes in, some salty text)
by Onewildgamer | 2025-05-01 19:50:39+00:00
As a developer, you are allowed to put only one 'link' (not a more user friendly button/supporting text) to your own website for any purchase, it has to be a small font, and not in the checkout flow that takes to Apple pay. Which in itself is very scummy to begin with.

To top it, when the user actually sees that hidden 'link' and clicks on that, the user is put up with a big screen of message that the external website doesn't have security, privacy etc.

Check it yourself in this article by a developer: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-01 19:50:49+00:00
> most advanced military's battle plans could have been broadcast widely weeks in advance to the houthis and they'd still lose

I have an undergraduate aerospace background. I could find a firing solution to those jets given public data about carrier deployments and the specific take-off times (when jets are low and slow—very vulnerable). If those chats had been public for weeks, the Houthis would have scored a hit.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-01 19:51:03+00:00
Or it could be short-term relief that moves somebody from a bad mindset to a good one, so they start taking care of themselves. Perhaps it makes them go out more, leading to real friends.

The key is "good". An AI friend which just validates and reinforces one's existing feelings (like current AI) may become popular, but I wouldn't call it a good friend. Fortunately if such AI leads to bad outcomes, real friendship will be seen as more valuable.
by palmotea | 2025-05-01 19:51:04+00:00
> I didn't flag this, but it looks like the typical slop reporting that comes with the topic (do you really need to spend the first page talking about brain worms?).

It's from Ars Technica, which I used to like but kinda got tired of. They regularly have kind of "two minute hate" columns against their house villains, and revel in schadenfreude.
by thisisit | 2025-05-01 19:51:07+00:00
That is not even remotely correct. The American Floodlight Company would sell the floodlights for slightly below the 392k - the total amount these guys paid. Something like 350k and tell the consumers they just saved "42k". Because the alternative is? Import it and pay huge tariffs. This is what happened last time with washing machines.

The protectionism also means American Floodlight Company no longer needs to innovate. Because they can keep producing the same lights over and over again. What are people going to do? Look for innovative floodlights overseas and pay huge tariffs?

It also means American Floodlight Company products cannot be exported. It is costlier and not innovative. Japanese, Chinese, Koreans brands are going to leave them behind.

In the meantime, American Floodlight Company is a business, not a charity. They will find loopholes like get cheap parts -- this will be easier as world moves on to newer, more efficient lights, so that overall input costs are low - despite the tariffs. Then assemble it in US and claim it to be "Made in USA".

Win, Win for the company while the consumers can take a hike.
by ted_dunning | 2025-05-01 19:51:09+00:00
Actually, that isn't the case with the SAVE act.

If I produce a social security card and any government ID, that is typically enough to work (in the US).

It won't be enough to vote under the proposed act. In many cases, what will be required is a birth certificate that exactly matches other ID. If your name has changed, unspecified documentation will be required beyond a marriage license or court approved name change. A government issued ID such as military or REAL ID will not suffice.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-01 19:51:18+00:00
> The president of the commission is voted upon by the European parliament

I know that this is the wording the EU itself chooses to put there, but no. They are not "voted upon". Parliament cannot choose a EU commission president. The council (the heads of state of the member states) put forth a candidate and if the parliament says no, the council has to select a president (this time ... without the parliament needing to confirm them)

Like anything else in the EU, the executive is in full control of

1) itself

2) law in the EU (the commission is the ONLY EU institution that can make laws, and yes, the essential part of that is that the parliament IS NOT in charge of EU law. It can neither force a law through nor can the EU parliament prevent the commission from enacting a law)
by seba_dos1 | 2025-05-01 19:51:41+00:00
Whether a project is developed by a community or by a single entity holding all keys is completely orthogonal to being Open Source/Free Software. There's nothing wrong in putting one kind of projects above the other, but you may want to revise "your opinion" if you want to stay communicative, because terms and definitions are only useful when people agree on what they mean.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-01 19:52:18+00:00
> in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder,

This is not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.

Trauma can precede relapses or bouts of drug abuse, but it's not a universal explanation.

There are a lot of pop-culture ideas that explain everything away as trauma. These are popular on podcasts, Reddit, and other social media websites. There are also types of therapists who learned to treat trauma and then try to apply that to everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". These therapists will try to reframe everything as trauma because it's what they know how to teach.

They often reverse engineer a traumatic backstory as an explanation even when one doesn't exist. You can find podcasters and therapists who will even claim that being born imparts permanent trauma that explains things long into adulthood. There's no evidence behind this claim, but it's convenient for therapists who need to find a traumatic backstory before they can address something because everyone was born at some point.

> The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.

That idea is completely wrong, though.

The study is talking about dopamine signaling in one specific location of the brain.

Dopamine is used in other locations in the brain to encode aversive stimuli, among other things.

Dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) don't just do one single thing in the brain. They have diverse effects all over.

Also, many of the drugs that people associated with dopamine actually have much broader effects, such as on norepinephrine (stimulants) and serotonin (cocaine).

There are dopamine agonist drugs that go in and very precisely target different dopamine receptors in the brain, activating them directly. Many people are surprised to learn that a common side effect of these drugs is an irresistible urge to sleep when first taking them, for example.
by indigodaddy | 2025-05-01 19:52:40+00:00
I disagree. High percentage of these scenarios are at speeds and scenarios where hitting the brake would not prevent a collision and a quick swerve is the only option to not collide. Obviously your quick swerve could cause another collision so I guess it's which decision on average causes the least harm/death? I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake. Mine never has been though.
by hajile | 2025-05-01 19:54:10+00:00
> If we ditched "reasonableness" as a legal concept, even the most basic laws like e.g. the ones about murder would be significantly affected. So what you're proposing is a drastic redesign, and the onus is on you to demonstrate that it is even workable.

Reasonableness is a quick approximation for world view or "the majority values and lived experiences of a specific culture at a specific time and place". For example, dueling is considered murder, but was once considered absolutely reasonable and NOT requesting a duel in some circumstances would be considered a "reasonable" sign of guilt.

Would you convict someone of murder over manslaughter because your gut told you they were guilty? The Southern US has countless cases of innocent black men hanged because they had "reasonableness", but no hard evidence.

Reasonableness is fickle. For example, in self defense cases with video (probably the most important cases concerning reasonableness), the prosecution pushes to review the video frame by frame while the defense pushes to play the video in realtime. Why? because when you see the video in realtime and make snap decisions, the defense seems more reasonable. When you pick it apart frame by frame, you have tons of time to think about all the things you might have done and can convince yourself that maybe lethal defense wasn't needed.

If reasonableness changes so much just by HOW you watch the same video, how can it really be considered reasonable? What is does reasonable actually mean in practice?

It's also worth noting that not all evidence is admitted in trials and the judge has significant ability to shape the outcome of the trial based on what evidence they "reasonably" believe should be included.

> How do you envision the legal system dealing with issues such as intent and negligence without the notion of a "reasonable person"?

I'm not proposing something radically different. I'm proposing we use reasonable doubt instead of reasonable intuition as the primary metric. You can never completely remove reasonableness, but its effect should be mitigated and controlled. If you can't prove something, you shouldn't convict based on the unprovable ideas your world view fabricates that may or may not be accurate.
by elefanten | 2025-05-01 19:54:27+00:00
Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.

But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.
Ask HN: What's a good system to remember to wear my reading glasses at my desk?
by dottjt | 2025-05-01 19:54:45+00:00
One thing that's been recommended by my optometrist is to start wearing reading glasses at my desk for computer work. I work from home and spend a solid 8+ hours in front of the computer.

The only issue I have is that I struggle to remember to wear them. Actually, I'm not sure if it's even a memory thing. It's like they're right there on my desk, but I just don't put them on most of the time.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to overcome this?
by zoogeny | 2025-05-01 19:54:47+00:00
All of these tools are insanely expensive (from my own experience at companies that have used them). I understand it, since building your own pipeline to handle the kind of throughput analytics takes is expensive and time consuming. Business leaders want the visibility but don't want to redirect dev resources to build and maintain these creaky data pipelines. It is the perfect market of high-value and low tolerance for build (on the build or buy spectrum).

But I am not going to pay $1000/month as a bootstrap startup. What open source alternatives exist that can be run on basic hardware?
by ignatif | 2025-05-01 19:54:52+00:00
Location: Tbilisi, Georgia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React, Next.js, Node.js, Nest.js, React-Native, Electron, TailwindCSS, GraphQL, Apollo, Redux, Zustand, Tanstack Query, LLMs (applied AI: RAG chatbots, voice assistants, AI agents) Résumé/CV: https://maximignatev.vercel.app/ Email: ignatif@gmail.com

Open to full-time, part-time and contract jobs. Can carry projects from 0 to 1, high level of autonomy, have experience in UI/UX so can bootstrap a design for your project as well. Drop me a msg

Upd: quite desperate lately at landing a job so would work even for a low budget
by dheera | 2025-05-01 19:55:06+00:00
Dooring is so incredibly preventable with simple computer vision and some kind of actuator that adds an audible alarm and mechanical 3x resistance to the door opening when a cyclist is detected. The door should still be openable in emergency but should be hard to open until the cyclist passes.

(For cars that have both a normally-used electronic door open button and a manual emergency release (e.g. Teslas), the electronic button can use the car's existing cameras to detect cyclists first before actuating the door to open. This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas. The only thing I dislike about the Tesla setup though is that most non-owners are unaware of where the mechanical emergency release is; it is not obvious and not labelled.)
by notatoad | 2025-05-01 19:55:24+00:00
>a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.

no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-01 19:55:57+00:00
> snow and ice, where “hit the breaks” Is the wrong answer, and the correct is to drop the car into neutral

This is only true with 2WD and no automatic stability control, and if you’re going down a slope. For every other case, ABs will out perform in snow and gentle braking will evenly distribute traction force with stability control doing microsecond evaluations.
by godelski | 2025-05-01 19:56:16+00:00
> people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card.

Incredible how so many people misuse quotes and end up undermining the the whole point of the quote.

So for everyone that doesn't understand, here's the longer quote

There is no doubt that the holy grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

Knuth said: "Get a profiler and make sure that you're optimizing the right thing"

It is incredible how this became "don't optimize".

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640 (alt) https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/356635.356640
by mdeeks | 2025-05-01 19:56:41+00:00
My favorite thing from my first Waymo ride was watching a lady walk up to the middle of the street to cross. The Waymo saw her, slowed, and waited to let her cross. She smiled and waved and immediately felt dumb because who is she waving to? Do I wave back? We laughed at each other as it drove away.

Ever since then my fear melted away. They see every direction, never blink, and are courteous and careful with pedestrians.
by K0balt | 2025-05-01 19:57:18+00:00
Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily researched) and what the annual taxes, if any , will be.
by ignatif | 2025-05-01 19:57:27+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE

Location: Tbilisi, Georgia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React, Next.js, Node.js, Nest.js, React-Native, Electron, TailwindCSS, GraphQL, Apollo, Redux, Zustand, Tanstack Query, LLMs (applied AI: RAG chatbots, voice assistants, AI agents) Résumé/CV: https://maximignatev.vercel.app/ Email: ignatif@gmail.com

Open to full-time, part-time and contract jobs. Can carry projects from 0 to 1, high level of autonomy, have experience in UI/UX so can bootstrap a design for your project as well. Drop me a msg
by matttproud | 2025-05-01 19:57:46+00:00
A vehicle that becomes blocked in a crosswalk is unsafe for pedestrians who want to use that crosswalk if it forces the pedestrians to walk around the blocking vehicle. There are crosswalks in SoMa that provide for 45 seconds or more of crossing time. A Waymo that enters one of these crosswalks after 15 seconds into the 45 seconds allocation blocks the crosswalk for the remainder of the 30 seconds. This presents an unsafe situation for all existing and future pedestrians (e.g., a pedestrian who inadvertently steps into the intersection while trying to go around the blocking vehicle).

We also know that in North America that the municipal services skimp on grade separation for bike lanes for budget and political reasons. I did bike in San Francisco when I lived there, and these non-shared colored lanes never ever felt safe.

I can guarantee that if you leave your North American context for a couple of years and come back to it you'll find CA Vehicle Code § 21453 unsatisfactory.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-05-01 19:57:47+00:00
...and billions of taxpayer dollars, hundreds of years of European science, standing on the shoulders of giants, thousands of years of Greek, Arabic and Far Eastern mathematics.... The "self-made industrialist" sketch is funny when it's Monty Python, but when I hear whining SV bros claiming they built an empire from a rolled-up-newspaper, it's so avoidantly ungrateful. Like some kid "divorces" their own parents, disowns their lineage and declares themselves a unique and special self-creation. The US would do well to reconnect its Native American culture and have more respect for what got everyone here.
by thechao | 2025-05-01 19:57:54+00:00
I've always wanted to build (distinct) mechanical computers out of the following kinds of elements:

1. Spur-gear differential; and,

2. Shishi-odoshi.

Both of these are saturating mechanical devices that can be used to build NAND gates; the latter, I think, would be very pleasing, if exceedingly slow.

For the spur-gear differential, you'd need to up-scale the output by a factor of 2 (since the output is half-speed), and use a locking wedge to build a one-way gear out of one of the spur-gear differentials. However, it has the nice property that the logic is made entirely out of a single element: the spur-gear differential.

Similarly, for the shishi-odoshi: you're going to have to do a bit of analysis (drilling a hole in the bottom part of the bamboo ladle), to figure out the in-flow and out-flow to build the basic AND gate, and then balancing out the NOT gate, to build your basic NAND. This is, obviously, very finicky; but, I supposed, that'd be quite a bit of the charm of a Zen computer garden?