MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by M95D | 2025-05-17 23:39:54+00:00
The military application of Orion Project [0] was to transport an entire army, everything included, anywhere on earth, and wipe anything close to the landing zone as it landed there.

AFAIK, China didn't sign/ratify any nuclear non-proliferation treaties. So there's nothing stopping them from building it, except a crash of their exports as another cold war begins. And the new tariffs are set up to crash their exports anyway...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
by godelski | 2025-05-17 23:41:25+00:00
> I've done it for people who used my email to sign up for Facebook and Instagram.

That's an entirely different situation though. MIT controls the domain and mail server but not necessarily the account. By this reasoning gmail, outlook, or apple could close many people's accounts on other platforms due to them being in custody of the account.

Maybe MIT does technically have full control and technically the legal right, but if they acted in that way there would be potentially larger consequences. Employers might start preferring other emails or contact methods which would make it harder for MIT to comply with certain regulations. While academia may have been turned into a business there are still high expectations that faculty have high freedom of expression. Every move to limit this, or even imply limiting it, is met with opposition. It jeopardizes the ability to do one's job as a researcher. So I'm not surprised if MIT would never act on "their right".

They can disable the email account but that does nothing to stop an arxiv account. Again this also has risks as academic emails are traditionally preserved. Your correspondence is on a physical piece of paper and changing institutions and affiliations is common. Almost every grad student does this, and nearly every professor was once a grad student.

There's just too many downsides to MIT making such a request. Unless the email was institutional, as in impersonating the institution ( e.g. "info@mit.edu"), or impersonating someone else then they really won't act that way and really shouldn't
by treyd | 2025-05-17 23:41:35+00:00
You need lifetimes in order to make the affine types ergonomic to use through borrowings and aliasing mechanics. You want the affine types to prove all kinds of things about resource management, beyond just freeing allocations, which we generally call RAII. You model file and network handles as RAII, mutex locks as RAII.

Other languages use constructs like context managers or try-with-resources to capture this, but these constructs are very limited and make it very hard or impossible for these resource types to be put into a container and passed between threads. In Rust this is trivial and actually just works.

Garbage collectors usually give much weaker guarantees about when objects are freed, so destructors (which are sometimes not even available, like in JS) might only be called much later. You can't rely on a GC to unlock a muted for you. But in Rust it happens when the guard is dropped, always, immediately after it's last needed.
by chneu | 2025-05-17 23:41:38+00:00
Social media companies have abused the "public forum" part of their rights for years now. I think it's about time we start holding them accountable for what is on their platforms.

Ai is unleashing a wave of misinformation, deepfakes, fake relationships/personalities and other lies. These companies are going to profit immeasurably off these things. Then they'll claim that they simply can't police all of it, throwing up their hands, and taking no responsibility. The amount of damage they are going to do, and have already done, to people's mental health is undeniable. Yet they claim no responsibility.
by Philpax | 2025-05-17 23:44:13+00:00
I do the same, but I find looking at my laptop to be quite distracting; I mentally "lock in" to my laptop, which defeats the purpose, and also ends up being ergonomically challenging much of the time.

I'd like to use AR glasses for this, as it means I can look straight ahead and take in more of the atmosphere, while still keeping good posture.
by murderfs | 2025-05-17 23:44:23+00:00
> In an age where all your significant opponents have nuclear ICBMs, anything which could look like a nuclear strike will be interpreted as such by your opponent in an open conflict and generate direct retaliation.

This has happened before, and we're all alive because it doesn't really look like a nuclear strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

A single rocket heading your way is not the massive salvo of missiles that you would expect for a counter-force attack, and a counter-value attack means that you still have the option to retaliate.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-17 23:45:13+00:00
Well essentially then, I agree, I find it perplexing too.

I got particularly burned by that press release a little before Christmas, where it was claimed that 4o was doing difficult maths and programming stuff. A friend told me about it very excitedly, I imagined they were talking about something that had really happened.

A few days later when I'd time to look into it, it turned out that essentially we'd internal testing and press releases to go off, I couldn't believe it. I said - so, marketing. A few months later it was revealed that a lot of the claimed results in those world-changing benchmarks were due to answers that had been leaked, etc etc. The usual hype theatre, in the end
by upghost | 2025-05-17 23:45:31+00:00
This is a consequence of the fact that any argument not responded to "flows across" the score sheet and is automatically a win for the team making the argument, no matter how silly. So a "natural" tendency would be to ignore ridiculous arguments like "not paying for school lunches will cause children to hyperventilate, and by the butterfly effect will lead to infinite hurricanes in developing nations causing a collapse of the global economy and intergalatic war and genocide". But if the opposite team fails to acknowledge the argument then that is the same as conceding it will happen.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-17 23:45:59+00:00
As a long-time cyclist and former bike courier, I think most of the proximity concerns are probably of my own doing. I wonder if the device somehow accounts for this.

My initial reaction is that an accelerometer might be a better data-point, or combining this with accelerometer data.

I'm working on the assumption that a smoother path means I am interacting less with traffic or other hazards.
by godelski | 2025-05-17 23:46:05+00:00
What happens when you submit a password reset? If they're using your account does this not get sent to you?

I understand it might be a bit hostile but it seems there should be some means to transfer the account. I'd try contacting them first, but if they're non responsive or the account is abandoned then do a take over. They impersonated you anyways. If necessary delete the account and recreate after the cooldown period
by actinium226 | 2025-05-17 23:47:26+00:00
a) You can always get them, try them, and return them in the given period if you don't like them. That's what I did with these same glasses and I didn't get any crap about it

b) There are monitor arms that extend quite far, and are easy to install. I use this one: https://a.co/d/fV5llce. Granted I don't keep it 6" away from my face and my desk is a bit too big for that, but I could get it really close if I wanted and my desk was smaller.
by ghaff | 2025-05-17 23:48:44+00:00
>The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then

Breaking Bad is almost certainly one of the best series of all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably get canceled too quickly. Then there's Grey's Anatomy because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in each week.
by seltzered_ | 2025-05-17 23:50:44+00:00
> Can someone please make a good folding keyboard? This little $18 piece of plastic is decent for what it is, but this was the weakest part of the whole setup, and it feels like it should be the easiest.

You may want to consider the Protoarc xk03 https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/1akevd... or adding a Bluetooth mod to the old palm folding keyboard: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/sqvrsg...
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-05-17 23:50:51+00:00
I remember more than a decade ago I used this [0] keyboard on my HP Jornada Palm Pilot. Surprised to see it's still being sold. Folds up into a nice case.

[0] https://eshop-cy.com/en/product/targus-pa820u-stowaway-porta...
by vunderba | 2025-05-17 23:51:06+00:00
It really isn't - from the docs themselves:

FreeBASIC gives you the FreeBASIC compiler program (fbc or fbc.exe), plus the tools and libraries used by it. fbc is a command line program that takes FreeBASIC source code files (*.bas) and compiles them into executables. In the combined standalone packages for windows, the main executable is named fbc32.exe (for 32-bit) and fbc64.exe (for 64-bit)

The magic of QuickBasic was that it was an editor, interpreter, and help system all rolled up into a single EXE file. Punch F5 and watch your BAS file execute line-by-line.
by Philpax | 2025-05-17 23:51:13+00:00
To add to this: I have a Vision Pro and a 34" curved ultrawide. The latter is much more usable in this regard, because the effective resolution per degree is higher, which means you can keep your head static and use your eyes to look around.

By contrast, you have to use a giant screen on the Vision Pro to get equivalent resolution, which means you have to move your head. It still has its advantages (you can take it wherever you go, and the resolution of the virtual screen can be higher), but it's not yet comparable to a physical monitor, to my chagrin.
by ThrowawayP | 2025-05-17 23:51:34+00:00
> " ...I have to be about 6 inches from a 27 inch screen. I'm tall, and I'm almost bent in half to do it ... The part that makes it so tough is monitor arms come in standard sizes and are nowhere near long enough or extend far enough for me to sit comfortably ... "

Google for "long reach" monitor arms; some models have a reach of 30 to 40+ inches. They're not exactly cheap since they come from ergonomics vendors but they allow you to bring a large monitor as close to your face as you like and, depending on the model, clamp to a table like a standard monitor arm. I've had various models of them for a couple of decades now.
by jwagenet | 2025-05-17 23:51:54+00:00
I don’t know Seattle so I’d be curious to know if the proximity and accident hotspots are also high traffic zones in general, whether they have a bike like (and how it’s placed), and if the routes are even bike routes or just routes that riders comfortable jostling in traffic like me took. Comfortable riders may also skew the data by being willing to “lane split” at red lights to pass stopped cars rather than waiting at the back in lane.

Having biked a lot in SF, my impression is the best protected bike lanes are on wide roads like Folsom/Howard, Fell/Oak, etc. where proximity isn’t generally an issue, but I’d expect intersections to be riskier due to higher car speeds. While cars passing on isn’t an issue on the Wiggle with a critical mass of riders, on neighborhood streets where sharing the road is obligated the drivers can be scariest, especially in the Sunset. In NYC, an abundance of one lane, one way streets make controlling an entire street easier.

The reality of city design at the moment is almost any bike route will require the sharing the road with cars at some point, usually at the start and end of a ride, because bike lane and “bike route” coverage is often poor in residential areas and business districts.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-17 23:52:14+00:00
It's okay as long as there is a way to opt out. Windows has a "compatibility mode" which users can enable for any executable. That could restore the old API behavior.

The single biggest strength of Windows is its ability to run most applications from 30 years ago, and practically all applications from 20 years ago, without a hitch.
by Philpax | 2025-05-17 23:53:24+00:00
It's the best possible headset that could have been built with the technology at the time, but the technology at the time was insufficient for the experience that it's designed for. It still has its uses (it's incredible for watching movies and doing work in environments where you don't have a suitably sized monitor), but I agree that it's not a product anyone other than extreme enthusiasts should buy.

I certainly hope it'll get smaller, cheaper and more efficient. I would love more resolution, of course, but I'd be more than happy to keep the existing resolution if the actual ergonomics were improved.
by aeonik | 2025-05-17 23:53:43+00:00
This gets messy though because the deeper you dig the more the word "live" loses meaning. Is "live" data something emitted within milliseconds? Seconds? Is it "live" if it’s replayed from a buffer with minimal delay? Real-time systems aren’t always real-time. Some "live" streams are just batched updates in disguise. You blink and suddenly you’re in temporal quantum soup.

And once you push the boundaries—high-frequency trading, deep space comms, even global-scale latency—you run into the brick wall of physics. At certain speeds and distances, simultaneity stops being objective. Two observers won’t agree on what "just happened." Causality gets slippery. Streams bifurcate.

At that point, "live" isn’t just fuzzy—it’s frame-dependent. You’re not streaming reality anymore. You’re curating a perspective.
by timewizard | 2025-05-17 23:54:49+00:00
Except you can await on non-Promise objects which just returns the original object. Most other typed languages do not appear have this convenience. C# (the apparent source of the color rant) does not. It sets JavaScript apart.

Likewise Promise.resolve() on a promise object just returns the original promise. You can color and uncolor things with far less effort or knowledge of the actual type.
by subpixel | 2025-05-17 23:54:52+00:00
The answer is to become a digital-only, subscription service, and to keep producing the good stuff.

Basically, combine what Britbox does today in some countries and what TheBox used to do for BitTorrent.

First and foremost, be the only place current British tv can be seen. On top of that, have a deep, exhaustive archive of past British content.

NYTimes.com is a good model. If you want what they got, you subscribe, no matter who or where you are. The model works.
by joshvm | 2025-05-17 23:55:23+00:00
You can get switches that aren't any louder than typing on a laptop, these days "clicky" is just sub-category. The low profile 'choc' switches from Kailh are probably a good option to try.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHAK1kJtMVQ - have a listen. Some of them are inaudible under a mic, but really you need to buy a grab bag and play around at home to see what works.
by rezapped | 2025-05-17 23:56:43+00:00
That’s got me wondering:

How deep can the recursion go? Could Claude use Evolve to build a meta‑tool that composes other tools, gradually ratcheting up abstraction like a miniature AutoCAD for software?

What’s the right blast‑radius guardrail? The README flags a security doc, but in practice do we need sandboxed micro‑VMs à la Firecracker, or is human‑in‑the‑loop code review still feasible once the tool chain snowballs?

Does tiny‑tool granularity beat monolithic “agents”? Each plugin is just a plain Python function with a manifest—feels easier to audit/reason about than the sprawling state machines we see in AutoGPT land.

License experiment: It’s under the “Sovereign v1.1” license—free for individuals, paid for corp use. If recursive self‑programming catches on, does this model become a new norm for AI‑generated utilities?

I’m stoked about the possibility that my assistant could one‑click evolve from “helpful code reviewer” to “on‑device tool‑smith,” but equally terrified that I’ll wake up to a laptop that’s spent the night for‑looping rm -rf. Curious what the HN hive‑mind thinks: stepping stone to personal automation nirvana, or a future malware authoring kit?
by WalterGR | 2025-05-17 23:56:52+00:00
People in Sacramento and to and from the Bay have driven like they're trying to kill each other for the past 2-ish years. Driving has suffered since the pandemic, certainly, but there's been a marked decline more recently. The cynical part of me wonders if the... let's be charitable and call it "untimeliness"... of this extremely overdue change in enforcement by the CHP was motivated by people being such meanies to the police.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-17 23:57:07+00:00
This isn't what I expected from this article, this seems to me less about "alternative devices", and more about devices that are aiming specifically to keep kids safe, which deserves a focus in and of itself.

But also, most of these devices are just implementing software, the device isn't the important part.

There is truly some interesting work happening in device world atm, and I think it is a combination of the desire for a change of behaviors from our phones, as well as new possibilities of what devices can do.

I work in the neurotech/sleeptech space, and we're one of a few companies that are building consumer level EEG devices. The others are trying to sell, "fall asleep faster" tech (with limited scientific backing), we're focused on enhancing the restorative function of sleep (https://affectablesleep.com). Neurotech in general is really interesting right now with a few other use cases around measuring focus and specifically re-training focus (https://www.neurodelabs.com/), depression treatment (https://www.flowneuroscience.com/), and many more.

I also find the augmented reality glasses space really interesting.

To me, these are "Alternative Devices", the article really just points out "different phones".

Part of the reason, I believe, we are seeing these new devices, along with the need, is that it is getting less expensive to develop and prototype small scale devices.

When I started programming, the LAMP stack was new, and people we raving about how easy it was to get started, then came RoR, then node, and with each new change in language, from download to working code got easier and easier.

Hardware is still challenging, but I suspect we may be at the LAMP stack level, and over the next decade, it will also become easier.
by OJFord | 2025-05-17 23:57:54+00:00
Hamdiddle-eedah-hamdiddle-ah (do do do do dodododo expi-ali-do-cious)

What is the point of that? They're incomprehensible. (For those who haven't watched it: the video just shows people talking very fast, it doesn't explain why, kind of implies it's somehow good or impressive.)
by Philpax | 2025-05-17 23:59:46+00:00
This is a real problem, but it's fine for most VR use cases as you're usually looking at content that's rendered at a distance greater than the focal plane. The problems start to occur when you look at nearby content - that is, content less than 2m away - as it ends up being extremely uncomfortable for your eyes.

There are solutions being developed for this, but they have not been successfully miniaturised and/or cost-reduced for productisation. It's unclear how far away it is at this time, but Reality Labs has several generations of solutions that physically change the distance between the lenses and the displays, and alternate solutions like lightfields capable of simultaneously displaying content at different focal planes are being investigated.
by mh- | 2025-05-17 23:59:53+00:00
Happy to (hopefully) help. I have the Fully Jarvis monitor arm[0]. But it looks like you can find substantially more options here[1] from Uplift, some of which might have better range.

Back to the Jarvis, though: see how the photos of it show the arm in a typical "bent knee" shape? You can totally use it with both halves of the arm pointed in the same direction. I just did a quick measurement on mine and each of the arms is about 25 cm long, and they're fixed at a ~45° angle. So if you center its mount on your desk, you should be able to bring the monitor around[2] 35 cm closer to your face and still retain a lot of height adjustment (~34 to ~50, as measured from your desktop to the center of the display).

If you go this route (and your desk doesn't have an existing grommet hole you can use), they sell a drill bit to bore one in the right diameter.

[0]: https://store.hermanmiller.com/office-furniture-desk-accesso...

[1]: https://www.upliftdesk.com/desk-accessories/monitor-arms/

[2]: cos(45°)*50cm
by zdragnar | 2025-05-18 00:00:06+00:00
I'm not the person you replied to, but if you get a monitor arm made for an ultra-wide monitor, it will be longer and taller than most.

I use this one myself: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00B21TLQU

It can go far taller than I need it to, and the length of the arm itself should be enough that, positioned well, I imagine you could get it situated however you wanted.
by rcarmo | 2025-05-18 00:00:07+00:00
This reminds me that I cannot run BasiliskII at a decent resolution under GNOME at 125% - the thing apparently tries to set the window size several times, then goes into a black-bordered resolution mode that is _not_ what I asked for (and I'm used to setting the prefs directly, so I have mag_rate, scale_nearest, etc. all set "correctly"
by kayodelycaon | 2025-05-18 00:01:31+00:00
I see two major problems just from a surface reading:

1. Sending multiple large rockets on a ballistic trajectory might look like a nuclear attack.

2. Landing a rocket on a flat concrete pad in clear weather is vastly different from trying to land something on terrain while dodging surface to air missiles.

I also think the surprise factor is overrated. Any nation state with satellites would be able to spot you moving a lot of equipment around.
by thethirdone | 2025-05-18 00:02:40+00:00
I'm not sure what effect you think I want. The suggestion was just to increase the "interestingness" of the study. It seems to be like the main difference between LLM and human shown was length of response. Controlling for that variable and rerunning the experiment would help show other differences.

I do think its distinctly possible that LLMs will be much less convincing due to increased hallucinations at a low word count. I also think that may have less of an effect for dishonest suggestions. Simply stating a lie confidently is relatively effective.

I would prefer advising humans to increase length rather than restricting LLMs because of the cited effects.
by paleotrope | 2025-05-18 00:02:49+00:00
Re: 2, That's definitely another part of it. There's this timelessness about the current culture that I am not sure where it's coming from.

I find myself encountering bits of culture (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10 years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's so much of it now.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-18 00:03:58+00:00
> "This has nothing to do with regulatory capture, this is libertarian philosophy in action."

You mean libertarian "philosophers" enacting their libertarian philosophy by means of a successful regulatory capture... has nothing to do with regulatory capture?

> "And the belief that if businesses are ever doing something most view as wrong, a new company will spring up to make money on fixing it so the problem will go away... No matter how many times that's been shown to be wrong, many people still believe it."

"Many people" is quite an euphemism for "people who benefit from such believes" which includes all business people of any significance along with everyone they pay to spread said believes.
by markoman | 2025-05-18 00:04:07+00:00
What exactly are the 'unsafe anti-Semitic actions' that Harvard Univ has committed? Is this whole thing about how Harvard hasn't suppressed the free speech rights of its students as they protested the wholesale bombing of Gaza? Its not like Harvard is rife with far-right activists denying the Holocaust and such. I can't imagine that Harvard wouldn't win their case quite roundly. Law firms & universities have to stop bowing to the wanna-be dictator.