MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by laurencerowe | 2025-06-08 20:12:48+00:00
Much of it is built on repurposed heavy rail lines and those sections are great. The Eccles Line through Salford Quays is horribly slow and windy though which was a pain for commuting to Media City from south east Manchester.

I believe the new Trafford line improves things somewhat but Manchester really needs much more heavy rail capacity.
by marcusb | 2025-06-08 20:13:18+00:00
We also have a lot of systems (references, the tort system) that just don't apply in any practical way to LLM output. I mean, I guess you could try to sue Anthropic or OpenAI if their chat bot gives you bad advice, but... good luck with that. The closest thing I can think of is benchmark performance. But I trust those numbers a lot less than I would trust a reference from a friend for, say, a plumber.

I understand a lot of people use LLMs for things they don't understand well. I just don't think that is the best way to get productivity out of these tools right now. Regardless of how people may or may not be used to outsourcing things to other humans.
by compfingers | 2025-06-08 20:13:47+00:00
School's do not teach ideologies because Ideologies are a set of beliefs resistant to contrary fact.

Homosexuality being normal and valid is not an ideology, it's accepted scientific truth. Being against it is an ideology.

You are saying "countless ideological worldviews" are being taught, but I'm struggling to come up with even one, and my wife is a teacher

So, what is a view you personally do hold, to defend your viewpoint so firmly?
Ask HN: Is there an organization that grades the actual usability of OSS?
by mathewpregasen | 2025-06-08 20:14:16+00:00
With more and more software going open-source, sometimes for marketing reasons alone, is there an organization that grades software with how developer-friendly that the self-hosting (vs. paid managed offering) is? I feel like that could be a great way to differentiate truly OSS software from OSS software that's only OSS because it's vibe coded and otherwise has no significant moat.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-08 20:15:22+00:00
> LLMs are excellent at

Writing hint: Your last paragraph stands well on its own. Especially if this is, in fact, your actual experience.

Nothing in that paragraph requires the negativity or inaccuracies of the preceding two paragraphs.

There should be a name for the human tendency (we have all done/do it) to weigh down good points with unnecessary and often inaccurate contrast/competition.
by ajkjk | 2025-06-08 20:15:33+00:00
I imagine that that particular confounder is not possible to eliminate via randomization. Perhaps you collect a bunch of data on nurse awakeness--day shift vs night-shift, measuring alertness somehow, or measuring them on other activities known to be influenced by alertness--and then ensure your results don't correlate with that.

There is also the mechanistic side: if you have lots of plausible mechanism for what's going on, and you can detect indicators for it that don't seem to correlate with nurse alertness, that's a vote against it mattering. Same if you have of lots of expertise on the ground and they can attest that nurse alertness doesn't seem to have an affect. There are lots of ways, basically, to reach pretty good confidence about that, but they might not be as rigorous as randomized assignments can be.
by infocollector | 2025-06-08 20:16:21+00:00
The problem I see with investing in such technologies:

1. Satellites are too far to fight anything on ground (Power per unit area (i.e., intensity) decreases as the square of the distance) 2. If the Satellites are relaying to things on the ground, they are also relaying their location (easy adversarial targets) 3. In a war (they mention Ukraine in the article), first thing that is toast is these satellites.

I don't think this is the right replacement for GPS. Perhaps someone here can correct me if I am wrong?
by ckastner | 2025-06-08 20:16:57+00:00
Oh this is neat. Took me a bit.

The shell treats the first line as a comment. It executes the second line, which eventually exec's the binary so the rest of the file do not matter to the shell.

And the compiler treats the first line as a preprocessor directive, so it ignores the second line.

I initially misread/mistook the first line for a shebang.
by absurdo | 2025-06-08 20:17:03+00:00
Unfortunately a lot of this kind of writing teeter-totters between being a massive coping strategy or a circlejerk. Using the lives of exceptional people as a blueprint for the everyday person is ridiculous. I’m reminded of people following professional bodybuilding schedules and meal plans to lose a bit of weight, getting caught up in nonsense like “cheat meals” and “cheat days.” Likewise, if you don’t have any exceptional abilities such that your creativity will advance a field forward, you may want to be reasonable with your expectations and outcomes of what you actually can apply your time and energy to.

At least read Gatto’s work in education because he knows what he’s talking about as an actual teacher who has put more students through schooling than anyone writing these articles. His work contradicts some of this because he studied very non-exceptional childhoods of exceptional people. He has a better answer to how to think for oneself as well.

To actually get to the bottom of things: I think most normal folks are concerned more about getting by and making decent money in “the age of AI” than they are about being brilliant whizkid prodigies coming up with original ideas. A lot of those end up being poor anyway. But the desire to live a quality life is a more universal thing. No amount of “mind training” will help here. Just steer clear of paths that AI can dominate (they’re expanding), and failing that, use it to your advantage as best as you can.

Right now working with one’s hands seems to be in vogue because it’s one of those things that people are unaware of is actually dominated by robotics in the industrial/manufacturing sectors, so the ignorance there can probably get people through some hard times. But eventually even that will be shown for what it is and we’ll have to find better ways to spend our time.
by lesostep | 2025-06-08 20:18:55+00:00
Geniune question: did you ever tried making pixeled games? Or maybe stack existing pictures into a bigger enviroment picture?

The main issue I can see is the pixel inconsistency. Since sprites move around the screen, whatever misaligments could become noticible in between sprites would be noticible.

The most noticible thing that would make all this sprites unusable in one game — cacti don't fit. Like, visually, they pop. Useful if you make a game about collecting cacti, maybe, since "popping" something will make it appear important.

Another huge problem — all your man have wildely different proportions. It looks jarring, and you will have to rig them into game engine separetly. Spaking of, you will have problems describing what a collision with an object is to an engine the second you will try to add the sprites to a game. People usually just use the non-transparent part, but you have floating almost-transparent pixels in the mix

So if you make this thing for game devs, it would be a great idea to try and make at least one basic game with them. You can always work out kinks that way.

Also, try to make styles more consistent. Most pixel devs already have a style in mind (and most have some sprites as well), and you had to generate in that style perfectly from first few tries, or else they will just draw it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-08 20:19:20+00:00
> More importantly valueless code stops being a liability because you can abandon it. Calling it a liability implies it has value.

This is kind of missing the issue though.

Suppose you pay a million dollars this year to develop something that will also cost a million dollars a year to maintain, but is worth over a million dollars a year, so you do it anyway.

So this year you spend a million dollars, make $1.1M, have a profit of $100k. Next year you'll spend a million dollars, make $1.1M, have a profit of $100k. But if you don't do the maintenance, it ceases to comply with changing regulatory requirements and not only has to be shut down but causes you to incur criminal penalties, or develops public security vulnerabilities and then criminals break in and destroy your business and cause you to be sued into bankruptcy by your customers.

In other words, the code creates an obligation that offsets the value of the asset. These two things can easily cancel out so that the total value is ~0 -- or even negative in ways that don't allow you to walk away, e.g. because you entered into a contract to supply this thing for a defined price but underestimated the maintenance cost.

But now the government is telling you that you have something worth most of a million dollars even though it's not worth a dime without putting another million dollars into it -- and even then it still wouldn't be worth two million dollars.

The reason you continue to do it is that the continued development made you $100k this year, not because what you had left at the end of the year that would be worth something without further investment.
by leakycap | 2025-06-08 20:20:08+00:00
On the other hand, I can also see AI being used as the core/foundation/cultural touchstone of an organization, as sad as that sounds.

Even teams with fewer than 100 members know what to ask, where to get supplies, how to fill out forms. So much busywork and what we call admin could be handled by a central AI for companies, like an intranet with a brain.

Easier said than done well.
by bastard_op | 2025-06-08 20:20:11+00:00
The article is not wrong, it's exactly what they're doing, but so does Google with their 8.8.8.8 servers, and you thought Google was doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (after they removed the do not be evil clause).

At least Cloudflare offers their 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3 resolvers with built-in content filtering or full adult content filtering as as unfiltered 1.1.1.1, which is better than others. Normally folks pay Cisco OpenDNS or other enterprise-y products for this, and I applaud them doing it in general, for free. I'd set my mother to use it if something I had to do still. Cloudflare is probably one of the less-evil companies today, and is a good engineering company if you follow their blogs.

Apple is actually worse in that they forced an entire DNS AND Web Proxy solution to get ALL traffic every apple users do in the name of "privacy", but in the end it's really more for their marketing and analytics they can sell at will. Funny Google tried to offer a VPN service and everyone shunned it, but Apple people just drank the kool-aid as something nice Apple did just because they're a lovely company like that.

As the security guy that runs enterprise firewalls, I tend to block the Apple's VPN/proxy stuff as proxy-avoidance by default, which creates a ton of noise in terms of denied apple proxy and doh drops, but it keeps them using my internal dns and internet that I can see when l-users happen to get themselves infected and start exfiltrating data to China. Otherwise with Apple's VPN/Proxy privacy bs, I have no ability to see or stop it, and neither do their users. Thanks for the fish Apple.

I just assume all VPN companies do this now as their real revenue stream.

I also happen to do work for Firefox's primary advertising partner, and I can tell you it brings me no comfort as a Firefox user myself.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-06-08 20:20:13+00:00
Decker has a range of primitive UI widgets like buttons, fields, sliders, spinners, and grids. Decker's font editor[0] is a moderately complex application which uses a variety of widgets.

It's also possible to build new widgets with arbitrary appearances and behaviors like date pickers, radio buttons, or tab-bars via "Contraptions"[1]. The community forum has a collection[2] of Contraptions to suit various applications; sharing or re-using them across decks is as simple as copying and pasting a widget.

[0] https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html#font

[1] http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#contraptions

[2] https://itch.io/t/2690007/the-contraption-bazaar
by djhworld | 2025-06-08 20:20:34+00:00
With system builds like this I always feel the VRAM is the limiting factor when it comes to what models you can run, and consumer grade stuff tends to max out at 16GB or (somemtimes) 24GB for more expensive models.

It does make me wonder whether we'll start to see more and more computers with unified memory architecture (like the Mac) - I know nvidia have the Digits thing which has been renamed to something else
by const_cast | 2025-06-08 20:20:51+00:00
> How can we fix American industry?

Well first off, I think we need to implement basic accountability. American industries routinely fail in the long-term because they're allowed to. They know they're basically invincible and can absolutely run their companies into the ground and leadership will fly away with too much money than what they know to do with.

The American school of business is make short-term decisions now, over and over again, forever, until you eventually blow up. This is how basically every company is run. It's an almost debt-driven mindset. It's a greedy algorithm. Take on any amount of loan now, and say "fuck it" when it comes to interest. When the chicken comes home to roost, who cares, you can leave.

That's why American industries will be competitive for a couple decades and then quickly be so far behind it seems it's impossible for them to catch up. They get a tiny little taste of market success, and they immediately stop investing into their future and start cashing in right now. We're even seeing this with Tesla.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-08 20:23:46+00:00
This is very cool indeed, but I laughed when I got to the conclusion:

> A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; yttrium can influence the mechanical and chemical properties of titanium alloy. After solving the yttrium contamination problem…

So the process removes the oxygen but then adds yttrium to the metal in significant amounts. That’s not quite the ultra pure titanium I was promised in the headline.

As always, I hope someone figures out the rest of the problem space. As-is, this looks like trading one problem for another.
by godelski | 2025-06-08 20:23:55+00:00
It's not a complete answer but I've seen talking about the costs help. That's what's making them overlook things anyways.

What they see is dollars now but not dollars later. Often these data issues can rise to the level that it could destroy the entire business. You might be called a party pooper, but truth is people like this want to keep the party going. It's hard to understand that sometimes keeping the party going means saying no. But it's just the same dealing with drunk people, say no by saying yes to something else. Like presenting another solution. Though that's way easier said than done...

Just remember, everyone is on the same team. People don't say "no" because they don't want to make more money. A good engineer says "no" a lot because your job is to find solutions. It usually sounds like "I don't think that'll work but we might be about to...". If you stop listening without hearing the "but" you can't solve problems, you can only ignore them. Which *that* is not being a team player.

We're always rushing and the truth is that doing good is much harder than doing bad or "evil". I put it in quotes because it's very easy to do things that are obviously evil post hoc but was done by someone trying hard to do good. So I find this language to be a problem because it is easy to dismiss with "I'm not a bad person" and "I'm trying to do good". Truth is that's not enough. Truth is mistakes happen. We work with asymmetric information. It only becomes your fault when you recognize and don't take steps to fix it (or active ignorance).

Sometimes things take nuance. Sometimes it takes more than a few sentences to convey. But who reads longer anyways?
by dzhiurgis | 2025-06-08 20:24:39+00:00
Im NZ too. BYD Tang L is pretty impressive technically (coming soon).

I almost want even larger, more powerful vehicle than my Model Y. But can’t imagine dealing with its software and uncertain future. Also I’d rather support Musk than Chinese.

I drove Atto3, which is older vehicle now. UX is nowhere close to Tesla, but I’m keen to try newer ones.
by const_cast | 2025-06-08 20:26:29+00:00
> This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.

It's worked in America longer than it hasn't worked. Car-centric infrastructure is actually pretty new, and we basically burned down a lot of rail infrastructure to build it.

The fundamental problem with automobiles is that they're orders of magnitude less efficient per person, so they can't scale. You hit a wall, and then you're just fucked and the only solution is to pivot away from automobiles. No amount of self-driving, or more lanes, or toll roads, will fix that - it's a fundamental problem with the technology itself and how it exists in the world.

I mean, try driving around in Houston today. It's shit, but more than that, it's completely unfixable. 14 lane highways don't magically resolve the problem of everyone having their own little box on wheels they control.

Also, on the topic of urban centers and city dwellers: most Americans live in major metropolitan areas and those areas also make up almost all of the economy in the US. Yes, rural areas are important, but nobody is "targeting" them, so to speak. Those areas are already heavily subsidized by denser areas because that's just how infrastructure how.
by leakycap | 2025-06-08 20:27:56+00:00
I was a big believer in Consumer Reports until I started following their advice. Beginning in 2000s, CR has been repeatedly wrong about which brand of TV is reliable, which dishwasher, which car. I spent a decade following their advice and having nothing but trouble.

Maybe CR gives something a good review and demand goes up and quality suffers a as a result; but they seem useless and as good as a shot in the dark.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-08 20:28:11+00:00
I'm skeptical. If you are moving at the same speed as (or slower than) traffic in the right lane, or if the right lane is clear, then sure, no doubt. Drive on the right, pass on the left. But in this scenario you are currently passing on the left. The traffic on the right may even be gridlocked. In which states must you clear the lane even when you yourself are presently passing on the left of slower traffic in the right lane?
by Levitating | 2025-06-08 20:29:45+00:00
It's the same Kevin Dahlgren. I don't know the complete story, but he allegedly wrote off transactions under fake names when doing work for the municipality of Gresham. I did remember reading somewhere that the goods he bought were given to the homeless but I don't remember where I read it.

Regardless I still really enjoy reading his blog.

> also this seems a really entitled take to say, "there is no homelessness" when there clearly is.

He's never said that and that's not the point of the article I linked either. Kevin has dedicated his life to recording the life of homeless people so he's clearly aware of it's presence. I think his work is quite important. There doesn't appear to be many people researchig homelessness who actually spend time on the street interviewing them. His posts and videos have given me a whole different view of homelessness, most of which in more vein of what the first commenter here was talking about. But it has also taught me that homelessness can be quite diverse.

If you're interested in the life of the homeless at all you should definitely read some of his blog. His collaborations with Tyler Oliveira on YouTube are also extremely interesting.
by const_cast | 2025-06-08 20:30:21+00:00
> Removing zoning (and I think they should - let people build what they want), will not make cities more dense

IMO yes it will, because it just makes sense. Denser cities are more efficient for everyone, normal people included. Transport price per unit drops, rent drops, all infrastructure costs per unit drop. I think most people will happily take a reduction in expenses in exchange for density.
by NohatCoder | 2025-06-08 20:31:18+00:00
If you calculate ELO based on a round-robin tournament with all participants starting out on the same score, then the resulting ratings should simply correspond to the win count. I guess the algorithm in use take into account the order of the matches, but taking order into account is only meaningful when competitors are expected to develop significantly, otherwise it is just added noise, so we never want to do so in competitions between bots.

I also can't help but notice that the competition is exactly one match short, for some reason exactly one of the 561 possible pairings has not been included.
by asdefghyk | 2025-06-08 20:31:57+00:00
How did ships navigate 200 years ago? Not sure how accurate it was ?

How about using the stars? ... only at night ?

Use triangulation to known RF transmissions ( ie like direction finding of RF signals )

Geography recognition , rivers mountain's . towns etc ( Lidar ? )

Broadcast this info on some other secret frequency - drones only need to listen to the info

Use radar to track drone and broadcast its position to the item ...
by svara | 2025-06-08 20:32:15+00:00
This thread started from the question of where the experts with the ability to use LLMs effectively would still come from in the future.

I was making the point that it's still easy to find great information on the internet despite the fact that there's a lot of incorrect information as well, which was an often mentioned 'danger' on the internet since its early days.

I wasn't speaking to broader societal impact of LLMs, where I can easily agree it's going to make misinformation at scale much easier.
by const_cast | 2025-06-08 20:33:13+00:00
> Copyright and labor laws are very different concepts.

I agree, with the similarity of course that both concepts are explicitly related to humans. Not machines or programs.

If we want to extend these concepts to machines or programs we can, but that's naturally complicated and there's a lot of questions about that. That, to me, needs to be a deliberate thing we do - not some foregone conclusion like people treat it. I mean, these people talk about AI fair-use as if it's obvious. It's not even obvious for humans...
by FridayoLeary | 2025-06-08 20:33:30+00:00
What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually there is another plaque attached in memory of WW2. It's hard to imagine the scale of deaths. The tragedy is how little was accomplished by the sacrifices of ww1. It had none of the moral clarity of ww2 nor did most of the deaths achieve any strategic purpose.

On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
by beAbU | 2025-06-08 20:34:31+00:00
He is one of the few truly gifted communicators on youtube. He manages to convey complex topics in a way that makes it easy to understand, and his optimism is truly infectious.

I want to also commend him for never criticizing when covering disasters/accidents. He's objective, points out the facts, and explains it all in such a way that at the end if feels like a positive teachable moment for everyone.
by smeej | 2025-06-08 20:34:42+00:00
In general, I see a significant difference between "this happens because of me" and "this happens regardless of me," even when whatever happens isn't that big of a deal. The difference between 0 and 1 is significant, even on a scale from 0-1000, because one of the options is zero, not because the difference between the options is only 1.