MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-05-15 03:33:51+00:00
"Logical states for fault-tolerant quantum computation with propagating light" (2024) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7560 .. "A physical qubit with built-in error correction" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243929

"Layer codes" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53881-3 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264340 ; 3D layer codes now instead of 2D surface codes

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723063 :

> /? How can fractional quantum hall effect be used for quantum computing https://www.google.com/search?q=How+can+a+fractional+quantum...

>> Non-Abelian Anyons, Majorana Fermions are their own anti particles, Topologically protected entanglement [has lower or no error and thus less need for QEC quantum error correction]
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 03:34:10+00:00
A little aside on story writing:

Police and Medical procedurals are the main settings for stories with the character growth flipped. Meaning, that in these procedural tragedies (typically, though some comedies do exist) the growth in the story, the change, is not in the internal lives of the characters, but in the story itself. The birth of this was with Edgar Allen Poe's detective stories [0], but most famously popularized with Sherlock Holmes. In these tales, the characters are very flat and unchanging from story to story, experiencing little growth through an individual episode. Though in recent media, we tend to see growth in characters over the course of a season, belaying the procedural model a fair bit

Some variations exist in the procedural setting with Legal, Journalism, Fire/EMT, Cybersecurity, Coast Guards, Forestry/Game Wardening, and Political setting serving as mostly variations to the Medical and Law Enforcement settings. The most novel and most recent additions to the procedurals are in Historical Restoration and Cooking/Kitchens. If I've missed any, please let me know.

So, to me, thing like copaganda more reflect the dearth of settings that the procedural model of story telling has available. The variations above really aren't as dramatic as the literal life and death stakes that Police and Medical situations come across every story. You can get close with Legal and Fire/EMT settings, and you can also have high stakes and life and death with Political procedurals, though typically off-stage. The nature of the audience's attention is just naturally going to gravitate to the most dramatic stories, and those are the Medical and Police ones, I think.

[0] https://poemuseum.org/poes-tales-of-detective-fiction/
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-05-15 03:34:21+00:00
"In its 2024 report, Retail Theft: A Data-Driven Response for California, the Commission found that despite a recent uptick, reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades."[1] (not sure why they had to post it as a PDF)

1: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee...
by dataflowmapper | 2025-05-15 03:35:34+00:00
Appreciate the detailed follow up and all this information, its been super insightful to get more real world perspective on this. Your processes all sound very well thought out and address most of the shortcomings/pain points I've experienced personally. There's definitely a lot of valuable info in there for anyone in this space. And thank you for taking the time to check out the site, feedback is limited at this stage so hearing that something resonated is great, hoping it all makes sense.
by int_19h | 2025-05-15 03:36:39+00:00
You don't need to look at the code (of LLM or otherwise) to determine if it has racial biases. You feed it a test suite of cases where literally the only variable is race, and observe the results - statistically, in aggregate. It's much easier to do with an LLM than it is with a human, too, because with an LLM, each individual interaction is separate from all others.
by josecodea | 2025-05-15 03:36:57+00:00
hi :)

> To him, submitting a long design doc where you go "I am going to use Galactor. I will make sure the project is florp-ready. I will fleem." is the exact opposite of cool.

Am I supposed to guess this much?

Do they expect me to creep on their social media to figure this out or something?

Finally, I made it abundantly clear that I am uncool, so giving me the "go ahead", simply to satisfy their curiosity... I hope they are treated the same as they treat other people.

No ill will against you, if anything you are giving me a plausible explanation where I have none. I just wish I had come across a post like mine earlier, and I hope that we, as a collective, start categorizing any job with a "take-home" as a job for the "cool kids". That way, all of us boring and experienced engineers may force companies to adapt if they actually want our labor. And those that do not adapt, we can infer the type of company that "offers" the role.
by tetromino_ | 2025-05-15 03:37:07+00:00
> I honestly don't understand the use case for it

You have 2 toddlers. You frequently wish to take them to visit friends / parks / supermarkets / libraries / doctors / coffee shops / whatever other places near your location. Such places happen to be 10-20 minutes adult-speed walk from you. Kids are young enough that they cannot reliably walk towards a fixed goal for 10+ minutes, and certainly not at adult speed; they often get either tired or distracted or decide they want to go somewhere else. Kids are old and heavy enough that neither of them can be carried in a carrier. Optimal solution: 2 toddler stroller.
by westurner | 2025-05-15 03:37:52+00:00
> FWIU treated polyurethane foam (like old seat cushions) absorbs oil (OleoSponge),

And Hemp Aerogels are even more oil absorbent than polyurethane foam.

"Hemp plastic door panel sledgehammer test"; History Channel: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hx8OTH0eEM0&
by thomasfromcdnjs | 2025-05-15 03:38:10+00:00
"Written by a human [0]"

I've been playing around with this on my own blog.

I'd like the blogging community to have a consensus on a nice badge we can put at the top of our blog posts, representing who/what wrote the post;

- human

- hybrid

- ai

Some might hate the idea of a fully "ai" post, and that's fair. But I like to sometimes treat my blog as just a personal reference, and if after a long day of chasing an esoteric bug down, I don't mind an AI just writing the whole post and I just press publish.

This adds, a reference for me, more data for AI's to train on, more pages for people to search and land on.
by p_ing | 2025-05-15 03:38:26+00:00
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325717460_Officer_i... It’s even worse. The entire system covers up the gang members crime. And even when convicted, it’s often for a lesser crime. There gang members walk back to the street, fully armed and ready to kill the citizens they’re legally not liable to protect.

Apparently HN hasn’t gotten their fill of humans hiding behind a piece of paper murdering other innocents, yet.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-15 03:39:57+00:00
I think it maps perfectly onto the halting problem: just say one of the requirements of your program is halting. Humans can decide whether a program halts in a lot of cases, including more-or-less all of the programs we're likely to encounter. But for the overwhelming majority of possible programs, we can't figure it out.

A useful bug detector doesn't need to overcome this because it would be detecting bugs in the kind of code we write, but there is no bug detector which gives the correct answer for all inputs.
by evanelias | 2025-05-15 03:40:20+00:00
It's a completely ridiculous answer though. They're linking to High Performance MySQL's 2nd edition, which came out in June 2008, and was written for users of MySQL 5.0 running on 2008-era hardware.

My take, as a MySQL expert: that advice is totally irrelevant now, and has been for quite some time. It's just plain wrong in a modern context.
by Reebz | 2025-05-15 03:40:33+00:00
Essentially, yes. Different DB’s, federated queries (aka delta sharing, zero copy), definition/semantic layer tools, data engineering/pipelines, model training and notebooks, governance, data lineage, row/column/whatever access control.

It’s basically a luxury minivan. It’s may not be the fastest or prettiest or cheapest, but it’s a safe way for a large family of “data and AI people” to traverse a large organisation.

More seriously, I like to call it an “analytics workbench” in a professional setting.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-05-15 03:42:08+00:00
yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the machines even come from would be nice

> There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic

also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have living counterexamples
by Benjammer | 2025-05-15 03:43:50+00:00
That's some impressive prompt engineering skills to keep it on track for that long, nice work! I'll have to try out some longer-form chats with Gemini and see what I get.

I totally agree that LLMs are great at compressing information; I've set up the docs feature in Cursor to index several entire large documentation websites for major libraries and it's able to distill relevant information very quickly.
by tomhow | 2025-05-15 03:44:16+00:00
> It's the fucking truth of it. And you're all bizarrely delusional if you can't or won't see it.

Please avoid personal swipes like this in HN comments, and the general style of commenting on display here. It's against the guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-15 03:44:44+00:00
> They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...

That article doesn't say any such thing in the way you are strongly implying it does.

In that it doesn't discuss retail theft at all. Violent crime is down. It refers to property crime, but only one (relatively small, about 11%) segment of property crime is retail theft.

The government threw money to combat "organized retail theft" and you point to a reduction in violent crime as being a result?

Indeed, California itself seems to believe it had no effect: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee... - "reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades"
by vivzkestrel | 2025-05-15 03:45:34+00:00
did you try using the native pg library or postgres or pg-promise library and scrap the ORM completely to see what effect it has? If you are looking explicitly for migrations, you can simply use node-pg-migrate https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-pg-migrate and scrap the rest of all the FLUFF that ORMs come with. ORMs in general are horribly bloated and their performance for anything more than select from table where name = $1 is very questionable
by danpalmer | 2025-05-15 03:46:29+00:00
I think htere is a future for AI tools in learning, and I think they could be hugely valuable, the problem is that we aren't teaching anyone (or learning as a society) how to use these tools well, and using them well will require discipline.

In education today there's a lot of focus on knowledge and testing, and therefore it's fairly natural for AI to be used to just answer questions instead of as a learning aid. If we had a focus more on understanding, I'd hope that use of AI would be more exploratory, with more back and forth to help students learn in a way that works for them. After all, if LLMs are basically just text calculators, every student having a concept explained to them in exactly the language they need would be pretty amazing.
Ask HN: How do you use Amazon shipping notifications, if at all?
by normalocity | 2025-05-15 03:49:31+00:00
Amazon can send a lot of notifications for orders: order placement, shipment, delivery, delays, returns etc. I personally enable the email notifications for order placement and delivery, I receive then via email, and when I receive one of those emails I see the notification on my phone and almost always delete the email immediately, knowing that there's a package outside or something happened with my order.

If I'm not at home when I get a package delivery notification, then maybe I'll snooze the notification until I get home so I don't forget to go get my package from the front door.

What Amazon notifications do you get, and what do you do with them/how do you handle them?
by frosted-flakes | 2025-05-15 03:49:34+00:00
Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.

For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.
by Klasiaster | 2025-05-15 03:49:43+00:00
So great that they worked on it! It seemed to be part of the arti work for a couple of years but I wasn't sure it was really on the roadmap. Wanted to do something like this since 2017 with smoltcp and also had a glued together version of it via badvpn/tun2socks (large DNS responses were broken though).
by gnabgib | 2025-05-15 03:49:44+00:00
Popular discussions in

2020 (326 points, 282 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933113

2016 (122 points, 153 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933113

2014 (275 points, 149 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7070944

2012 (381 points, 182 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3906253
by rayiner | 2025-05-15 03:49:56+00:00
It’s responsive because it addresses the pretext of “disinvestment” and other abstractions urbanists like to use to justify their choices.

A lot of urbanism boils down to wanting dense, walkable cities with transit, parks, and shopping, but not wanting to live in the myriad such cities that are already like that because of who else lives there. They want the layout and infrastructure of downtown baltimore or center city philadelphia, but with the population of Brookline, MA.
by Groxx | 2025-05-15 03:50:02+00:00
They're closer to a client side certificate - you never send the server your passkey, you sign data that proves you have it without exposing it. (Or something semantically equivalent anyway)

Other than that, which is mostly only a benefit for edge cases around partially compromised devices or servers: yeah they're not much different than random unique passwords. Except they have vendor-lock-in.
by westurner | 2025-05-15 03:50:32+00:00
... NewsArticle: "New ultra stainless steel for hydrogen production" ; SS-H2 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231117102539.h...

ScholarlyArticle: "A sequential dual-passivation strategy for designing stainless steel used above water oxidation." (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697... .. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%22...
by alganet | 2025-05-15 03:53:20+00:00
Honestly, it reminds me of "All Tomorrows" by C. M. Kosemen.

The "emotions" part is kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think emotional responses are one of the more mechanical parts of a human being.

Ability to demonstrate empathy: that's a good human trick. It can sort of transcend the hard problem of consciousness (what is to be like...) by using all sorts of unorthodox workarounds on our inner workings. It must have been very hard to develop. It doesn't always work, but we'll get there eventually.

edit: fixed book and author name to proper reference
by retlim | 2025-05-15 03:54:06+00:00
Thanks for the question. Since HN doesn’t support markdown, I kept the key features list minimal to give a quick overview and point readers to the repo for more details like:

Everything is a modular package

To keep things simple and easy to use, Fusion handles everything, including your project, its dependencies, and even the package manager itself, as a modular package that can be standalone, a nested dependency of another, or both at the same time. This is possible since each package has its own custom directory structure, which you can define in the metadata file as you like.

For example, you can install a release of your project as a standalone, self-updatable package out of the box.
by westurner | 2025-05-15 03:54:12+00:00
SS-H2 resists Chloride ions (in saltwater) with Manganese and Chromium in order to maintain hydrolysis.

Aluminum requires Gallium to maintain hydrolysis FWIU. Is there a laser or other treatment of aluminum to achieve the same effect as Gallium? Could low voltage be required to maintain hydrolysis; like an air brake?
by godelski | 2025-05-15 03:54:35+00:00
I'm an engineer and researcher, it is my job to find problems, so that they can be resolved. I'd say this is different from being cynical as that tends to be dismissive. I understand how my comment can come off that way, though it wasn't my intention, so I'm clarifying.

You're right that there's subjectivity but not infinitely so. There is a bound to this and that's both required for language to work and for us to build these models. I did agree that the data one was tricky so not really going to argue, I was just pointing out a critical detail given that the models learn through pattern matching rather than a dictionary. It's why I made the comment about humans. As for ruler minus crown, I gave my explication, would you care to share yours? I'd like to understand your point of view so I can better my interpretation of the results, because frankly I don't understand. What is the semantic relationship being changed if not the attribute of ruler?

The architecture part was a miscommunication. I hope you understand how I misunderstood you when you said "this doesn't do embedding math like OP!". It is clear I'm not alone either.

> Actually, to be VERY pedantic, that would not even be true, because ChatGPT's tokenizer embeds tokens, not words.

To be pedantic, people generally refer to the tokenization and embedding simply as embedding. It's the common verbiage. This is because with BPE you are performing these steps simultaneously and the term is appropriate given the longer usage in math.

I was just trying to help you understand a different viewpoint.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-15 03:55:51+00:00
> The claim is that catching these errors at compile time results in more reliable code.

For me, the most important reason is that static typing makes the code much more self-documenting.

I can see what that function is returning, and if it's something unknown I can go to the type declaration and see what I can do with that type.

This is entirely unlike dynamic typing where you have to pray the docs are very good and up to date, which frequentlyis not the case.
by danbolt | 2025-05-15 03:56:56+00:00
I appreciate you voicing your feelings here. My previous employer requested we try AI tooling for productivity purposes, and I was finding myself in similar scenarios to what you mention. The parts that would have benefitted from a productivity gain weren’t seeing any improvement, while the areas that saw a speedup weren’t terribly mission-critical.

The one thing I really appreciated though was the AI’s ability to do a “fuzzy” search in occasional moments of need. Or, for example, sometimes the colloquial term for a feature didn’t match naming conventions in source code. The AI could find associations in commit messages and review information to save me time rummaging through git-blame. Like I said though, that sort of problem wasn’t necessarily a bottleneck and could often be solved much more cheaply by asking around coworker on Slack.
by vvpan | 2025-05-15 03:57:08+00:00
I am in a startup that's using Prisma and it we really wish we had not:

- The query objects can become hard to read with anything more or less complex.

- If you need an unsupported Postgres extension you are out of luck.

- One large file in a schema, impossible to shard.

- We have many apps in a monorepo and they cannot have separate prisma connections cause the schema gets baked into "@prisma/client"

Basically the only thing useful about it are the TS types which is something SQL-builder libraries solve better. Long story short, use Kysely, Prisma provides no value that I see.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-15 03:57:16+00:00
Self-driving cars are the magic pixie dust of transportation planning, brought out to justify noninvestment in public transit.

As a mode of transportation, self-driving cars already exist--they're basically a taxicab service, the main difference being that some people hope that self-driving might magically make the cost of providing a taxi service cheaper.

> Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.

"Lots of small things going point-to-point" is a much more difficult problem to route, especially at high throughput, than "bundle things into large containers that get broken apart near their destination." In the space of transit, your idea is known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), and PRT systems have invariably underwhelmed every time they've been built, as they struggle to live up to their promise.

Rail transit is incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people--a metro line can easily move a dozen lanes of highway traffic--and there is nothing that you can do to roads to make them approach that level of efficiency, in part because the routing problems are insurmountable.
by FiatLuxDave | 2025-05-15 03:57:45+00:00
I've gone with people I've known (friends, basically) rather than finding partners at meetups etc. I know I'm lucky in my choice of friends. This worked really well one time and not so well another.

Case 1: I started Fiat Lux with my friend Nick, who I met in college. We worked together on it for eight years. He was fully committed and put in just as much work as I did. Even when things were tough and not working well, I knew I could count on him, and he stayed to the end.

Case 2: For a superresolution radio app I recruited a small team of friends who I had worked alongside before for years. I knew they were all great people and very competent. For the first year or so it went well, but when we didn't get any momentum going, life got in the way and most of the team found other things more important. In the end I was the only one still working on it and we dissolved the partnership.

The differences between those cases, as I understand them:

1) Younger vs middle aged - family responsibilities get in the way

2) Prior interest - I think Nick would have worked on fusion if any opportunity had come his way, while my later team wasn't nearly as interested in superresolution as I was

3) Unequal previous time investment - when I brought Nick in, it was still pretty early in the project, so it was a journey together. But when I recruited the team, I already had a patent, basic code and years of work done, and I think this left them with less of a feeling of shared ownership.

4) Team dynamic - with the team, when one person was excited, it got everyone excited, but when one person was discouraged, it made everyone else discouraged. Managing this dynamic was difficult and distracted from the work. With just me and Nick things were simpler.
by godelski | 2025-05-15 03:58:28+00:00
I'm a bit confused. It sounds like you are disagreeing ("TBH") but the content seems like a summary of my comment. So, I agree.

Fwiw, they did say they got up to 20x improvement but given the issues we both mention this may not be surprising given that this seems to be an outlier by their own omission.