MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by levocardia | 2025-06-14 19:09:52+00:00
>It's a profession we want to see disappear

Really? Next time you take an Uber, ask your driver how much they'd like it if they abruptly lost their job. Nobody is forcing people to drive Uber, unemployment is incredibly low, it's not like there aren't other opportunities. Some people actively value being able to set their own hours and not constantly have a boss breathing down their neck.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-14 19:11:31+00:00
> We have progressed fantastically on the common medical conditions, but once you get into more rare stuff it gets a lot harder.

At about 10% of women of reproductive age, endometriosis is way over on the “common medical conditions” side, not the “more rare stuff” side.

There's a bias here, but its not about how common the disease is, but who it affects and how.
by cpgxiii | 2025-06-14 19:11:35+00:00
> the best solvers are just a large ensemble of heuristics for very specific sub-problems

The big commercial solvers have the resources (and the clients interested in helping) to have invested a lot of time in tuning everything in their solves to real-world problems. Heuristics are part of that; recognizing simpler sub-problems or approximations that can be fed back into the full problem is also part.

I think a big part is that the OSS solvers are somewhat hamstrung by the combination of several issues: (1) the barrier to entry in SoTA optimizer development is very high, meaning that there are very few researchers/developers capable of usefully contributing both the mathematical and programming needed in the first place, (2) if you are capable of (1), the career paths that make lots money lead you away from OSS contribution, and (3) the nature of OSS projects means that "customers" are unlikely to contribute back to kind of examples, performance data, and/or profiling that is really needed to improve the solvers.

There are some exceptions to (2), although being outside of traditional commercial solver development doesn't guarantee being OSS (e.g. SNOPT, developed at Stanford, is still commercially licensed). A lot of academic solver work happens in the context of particular applications (e.g. Clarabel) and so tends to be more narrowly focused on particular problem classes. A lot of other fields have gotten past this bottleneck by having a large tech company acquire an existing commercial project (e.g. Mujoco) or fund an OSS project as a means of undercutting competitors. There are narrow examples of this for solvers (e.g. Ceres) but I suspect the investment to develop an entire general-purpose solver stack from scratch has been considered prohibitive.
by steelframe | 2025-06-14 19:11:54+00:00
The last time I was in SF I used Waymo to get around town and Uber to get to the airport.

The Waymo rides were near-perfect. At one point when a delivery truck was blocking 3 lanes, the vehicle assertively merged over into the free lane to get around. A couple of people on e-bikes were all over the place, but at no point did I feel that the vehicle put them in any kind of danger. Starts, stops, and turns were all smooth. End-to-end time was good, the ride itself was comfortable, and the price was reasonable.

On the other hand the Uber driver picked me up in a Tesla that had regen cranked up. They continually accelerated and decelerated the entire way to the airport, rocking the car back and forth the whole time, as if it were a nervous habit to continually press and release the accelerator or something. I felt sick by the time we got to my terminal.

For me at this point, technology like Waymo can't carpet every metropolitan area quickly enough.

One caveat: I should be able to use it (and, hence, pay for it) anonymously.
by radley | 2025-06-14 19:11:57+00:00
I think you're over-thinking it. Camera power is extremely cheap. Amazon's Ring cameras run for months on a single charge. It's the display, refreshing content at 24–60 Hz (or more) that consumes power.

The camera will have to turn on for the glasses to show you metadata, right? The camera will see what you see, just from slightly different angles from each eye. A simple video matrix can warp the image to match each eye again. Cut out what you don't need, and just keep what's needed for the UI element. The AR glasses could simply have a dedicated chip for the matrix and other FX. I imagine view depth could take extra work, but iPhones do that now with their always-on lockscreen.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-06-14 19:12:01+00:00
That remark is probably caused by a lack of empathy, but not in the way I assume you think.

I think those remarks were unwise, because he should understand how they will be heard by a lot of people.

Empathy is imagining yourself in someone else's position, not necessarily to hold or agree with or approve of that position, but to understand that position.

It's an example of employing the facility of empathy to understand why a killer killed for instance. Until you put yourself in their positon, you don't know if it was a murder or self defense. You actually had to empathise with a murderer simply to interpret the act and decide that it was murder.

You never had to like or agree with them, but you had to understand them.

So it requires a capacity for empathy to imagine how a lot of people will interpret statements like those, in the context he wrote them. I would say the statements themselves are not automatically wrong, but the context is that he is both a public figure with a lot of people that don't like him because his positions hurt their ability to abuse everyone else, and so everything he says anywhere will be used for all it's worth (and statements like that are worth a lot), and he is not a clinical human sexuality researcher or doctor etc just talking to other doctors in some research paper.

I think he's perfectly allowed to have those opinions internally and that he is not any sort of danger to kids or women because of it, and with him doing no harm to others there is no justification for harming him.

But he should have known where & when it's sensible to say such things.

And maybe he did. It's possible he employed a fully working empathic facility to imagine how a lot of people would hear that, and did it anyway because he just wanted to say it and accept what comes. I myself had to make that choice to write this comment.

But it does seem more likely a failure of empathy to fail to predict what people will make of someone in his position (not a doctor, in that field, speaking purely clinically, only to other doctors in that same field) saying anything even remotely like that at all. It's either that or stupid and he's not stupid.
by eszed | 2025-06-14 19:12:16+00:00
> I’ve always identified with my thinking—I have value because I’m smart. Turns out, as with all attachment, this is a mistake.

I experienced a period of severe cognitive deficit while recovering from a medical episode. We didn't know whether it would be permanent or not. I also discovered - as a fellow my-IQ-is-my-identity person - that it didn't matter anywhere near as much as I'd have expected it would. I was still able to experience love, and joy, and humour. Some things sucked, and were frustrating, like not being able to retain enough information to read a moderately-complex piece of prose, but the point is that I still felt like myself, even at a very low cognitive level. I'm immensely comforted. I expect I'll experience that again, as I (hopefully!) age, but it holds no particular terror anymore.
by greybox | 2025-06-14 19:13:58+00:00
This doesn't surprise me at all. I work in the EU but recently the Americans we hire are very hesitant to have conversations with service providers. They will pay more to use a service that has an app, rather than call up another taxi company by phone for example (and it's not a language barrier problem, because everyone speaks english). I can see this extending to not wanting to have a driver in their taxi.

I see this with UK people recently too. I'm not sure what it is. I'm not saying it's not an EU thing at all, but from my vantage point, the behavior is most prevalent in Americans

Edit: After reading this thread, it's possible this could be sampling bias and more of a cross-country generational thing from mellennials down. (I am a mellennial too)
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 19:14:52+00:00
(All this assumes some some not-yet-here future where "AI agents" are less flaky than today's LLMs.)

Things like "call center jobs" are where "superior" gets muddy.

They can be superior for the business. The business does not want to spend money. Now they aren't paying a person, and they have to worry less about a sob story convincing their agent to make an exception. Health insurance company, for instance, where the life-saving treatment was declined. Refund of plane ticket because the flight was delayed and normally the policy would be to deny it but this particular person missed his father's funeral as a result, so the agent takes pity. So it's "superior" for the company because it entirely IS about saving money.

Hard to say those are superior for the customer. And most of us aren't the megacorp-owners here. We're the customers.

So yes, AI agents could be the logical next step in the "turn people into robots" march of bureaucracy. But that's not a good thing.

Human interactions, human judgement, human empathy - these are features, not bugs. Consider also that loneliness epidemic. Let's make it even worse! (In the short term "not talking to people" is being seen as a positive here - because we've already raised a few generations of scared, not-socially-equipped kids, since these are old trends. How is people-avoidance-maximization working?)
by ben_w | 2025-06-14 19:15:20+00:00
> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft.

Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.

> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.

So do that?

Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.

But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.

A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
by timewizard | 2025-06-14 19:16:03+00:00
I wonder if that simulator was OV-095 at SAIL.

https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/ov-095-...

EDIT: Ah. It almost certainly was:

https://www.superstock.com/asset/oct-astronauts-frederick-ri...
by dotancohen | 2025-06-14 19:16:31+00:00
Waymo could develop some type of modular docker-type container that would significantly fill the interior of their vehicles, or maybe even replace the interior of their vehicles. So equipped, a Waymo vehicle could be used to deliver supplies and stock to small businesses throughout the city throughout the week. Think small chains such as convenience stores, they could lower the per-store inventory and refill from remote, cheaper-rent areas, if they had three Waymo deliveries during the work day.

Those vehicles would then be fitted with the human interiors for the high demand periods you state.
by Retric | 2025-06-14 19:16:50+00:00
> less tedium

That may eventually happen, but most of the time current AI systems need a lot of handholding to reach human levels of accuracy. I personally find this kind of supervision extremely tedious, it’s more stressful to use a poor level 2 system than just drive yourself. Driving has surpassed that point, but it’s taken billions so extrapolating into other fields without that kind of investment is premature.
by moffkalast | 2025-06-14 19:17:21+00:00
> phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible

That's interesting, but I think that only applies if the consciousness is actually consistent in some wide set of situations? Like you can dump a few decent answers into a database and it answers correctly if asked the exact right questions, a la Eliza or Chinese room, does that mean SQL's SELECT is conscious?

With LLMs it's not entirely clear if we've expanded that database to near infinity with lossy compression or if they are a simplistic barely functional actual consciousness. Sometimes it feels like it's both at the same time.
by michalpleban | 2025-06-14 19:17:34+00:00
One important detail the article omits: it is possible for the software running on the Commodore 64 to prevent being "frozen" by this technique. Because the processor needs the NMI interrupt to run the freeze routine, the software can pre-empt it by pulling down the NMI line on its own. This can be done using the second CIA I/O chip, whose interrupt output pin is connected to the NMI line. By making the CIA chip generate the NMI and never acknowledging it, the software will ensure that the NMI line is always pulled low and the freezer will not work.
Show HN: US Protest Map
by throwaway-cusc | 2025-06-14 19:18:20+00:00
Throwaway here from a long time lurker.

I've been frustrated by the media coverage of the protests since February - first the lack of it, then the overemphasis on inevitable flashpoints. It all misses the point that it's a broad, organic, mostly peaceful, and increasingly growing movement.

Recently I ran across a great data source from an individual backed by a hard working team of 20 volunteers, We (the People) Dissent. They've been building a Google Sheet, tracking event locations from multiple sources with source links. Which inspired this interactive map - it attempts to illustrate where protests are happening across the country, how they're growing over time, and at least to some degree how they span the political spectrum. (The map sadly doesn't (yet) include crowd counts.)

It's still a work in progress, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

For the technically curious, the repo is here: https://github.com/concerned-us-citizen/protest-map

With the help of GitHub Actions and Pages, it's built without a hosting server. A daily action scrapes/sanitizes the google sheet, synthesizes 2024 precinct voting data from the NY Times using RTree, geocodes locations with Nominatim, pulls city data from Wikidata, then generates a sqlite database. This is then wrapped in a Sveltekit static website.

A few technical shoutouts:

sql.js - sqlite in the browser has been a great experience for a read only, small-ish data set. The combined data size of the WASM/js and the .sqlite file is currently a bit over 1.1Mb. Any performance issues you see on heavier days (like 6/14) are the result of map marker generation, not sql - the intent was to keep cluster sizes small to visually emphasize the volume, and that makes the map more sluggish.

Svelte/Sveltekit/Vite - while it's only a single page app, this stack has been a refreshing delight, both for development and configuration. Turn key, highly extensible, very few surprises, easy to understand and debug, love the dynamic dependency model.
by ho_schi | 2025-06-14 19:18:29+00:00
That airports are usually not an effective destination for the B747/A380.

Connect major hubs like FRA with JFK and it makes sense. You need capacity, it is a long route and slots are rare and expensive. And for Emirates the hub concept is crucial.

But yes. The luxury thing is also part of their show. But it fills the plane ;)
by culopatin | 2025-06-14 19:18:32+00:00
Most drivers are not conscious about rolling the gas or keeping it stable and drive by pulsing it on and off to maintain speed because they don’t have the attention, finesse, or both to drive smoothly. Also rolling on the inputs is not something most do. I used to train drivers for racing and not stabbing the gas or brakes is a learned skill that takes some time. Where a person will likely accelerate for too long having to then brake harder, a Waymo smoothes out the curve, preserving energy, which also means less jerk.

Not to mention that in SF you have the hills that add to the math.
by autobodie | 2025-06-14 19:19:04+00:00
> One caveat: I should be able to use it (and, hence, pay for it) anonymously.

I assume you mean this as a moral claim and I can agree in that case. However, it's meaningless of course and kind of infuriating in any other light, because this is the world everyone has been mindlessly begging for and there is no chance that it comes without extremely severe consequences. An automated world like this means even less power for working people than ever before, so how on Earth do you expect to realize any of these desires? Do you still think capitalists care about your privacy? Even if they did "care" it wouldn't matter because they have to compete.
by bitwize | 2025-06-14 19:19:09+00:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md:

> 404

lol

May as well get MikeeUSA as a co-maintainer. Not many other people are likely to be interested in contributing.

If the maintainers of Xorg are, every one of them, so intent to raze it to the ground and salt the earth where it once stood, maybe, just maybe, they have good reasons why?
by unconstrastive | 2025-06-14 19:19:47+00:00
This is why GenAI exists. GenAI took the good people, the money, the resources and the scope. Zuck tolerates entertains ideas until he doesn’t. It’s clear blue sky research is going to be pushed even further into the background

I agree with most this, I just think we have different meanings of failure. FAIR has "failed" in the eyes of Meta leadership in that they have not converted into a "frontier AI lab" like Deepmind, and as a result they are being sidelined (much like Google Research, which I admit was a bad example). But the orgs were founded to pursue basic research and I think it's not the a failure of the scientists at FAIR that management has failed to properly spin out GenAI. Of course, it sounds like your metric is "AI/LLM competitiveness" and we have no disagreements that FAIR is failing on that end (I just don't think its only important or right metric to be judging FAIR).

* Normatively, I think that it's good to have monopolistic big tech firms be funding basic open research as a counterbalance to academia and also because good basic research requires lots of compute these days. It feels somewhat shortsighted to reallocate all resources to LLM research.

* DINO and JEPA aren't particularly useful for language modeling, but are still important for embodiment/robotics/3D, which indeed seems to be the "next big thing." Also, to their credit, FAIR is still doing interesting and useful work on LLMs for encoders [1], training dynamics [2], and multimodality [3], just not training frontier models.

** GenAI took the money, scope, and resources, but not sure about the good people lol, that seems to be their problem.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01017 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24832 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14164
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 19:21:30+00:00
I've long thought this for economy tickets.

But if you really want to pay more, and are flying on higher fares, getting on the plane first turns back into a perk cause you get some free booze. And your seat is now more comfortable than the airport seats (even many airport lounge seats, where the best seats can go quickly when it's busy).
by FridayoLeary | 2025-06-14 19:22:16+00:00
You put that quite bluntly but i agree with you. Just look at all the dumb mistakes would be terrorists make. If drone warfare was so easy then hamas - a (once) decently competent militant organisation would be using it as a great equaliser against israeli troops. The truth is that besides for on october 7 when they were used extremely effectively they have been absent. Israeli troops on the other hand are all using them for surveillance. It looks like only states have the abilities to maintain drone tactics.
by christina97 | 2025-06-14 19:22:31+00:00
It’s mostly that they work closely with clients in a very hands on way to implement problem-specific speedups. And they’ve been doing this for 10-20 years. In the MILP world this means good heuristics (to find good starting points for branch & bound, and to effectively prune the B&B tree), as well as custom cuts (to cut off fractional solutions in a way that effectively improves the objective and solution integrality).

It’s common that when researchers in Operations Research pick a problem, they can often beat Gurobi and other solvers pretty easily by writing their own cuts & heuristics. The solver companies just do this consistently (by hiring teams of PhDs and researchers) and have a battery of client problems to track improvements and watch for regressions.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-06-14 19:22:31+00:00
I have this at my work. One system requires SSO so I go to the SSO gateway, touch my yubikey to login to SSO, and then I am redirected back to the original app, and it also wants my yubikey so I touch it again, and then I am finally granted access.

The root of trust is my yubikey in both cases but the implementation was lazy.

I brought this up to our security team and they shrugged.
by rossdavidh | 2025-06-14 19:23:03+00:00
The last time I got an Uber, it was driven by a young fellow who looked to be in his first year of driving (I could be wrong), the car smelled like mothballs and was obviously in poor shape, and he accidentally drove on the wrong side of a divided road for a block or so (he was apologetic). The last time I tried a regular taxi stand, the car looked even worse, and it broke down. So, we called Lyft, and the driver could not find where we were because it was not a normal address (she was trying her best, but her English was not up to the task of understanding our explanation).

Waymo's selling point might be that its cars are all in good shape (right now), and customers know this.
by tough | 2025-06-14 19:23:11+00:00
I didnt link them but several similar cases around mental illness.

IMHO a state shouldn't give individuals the right to off themselves.

Nature and physics already do, providing laws and a framework around it perverses it to push that people that feels out of society to bad decisions some times

Maybe its better to have them be able to do it -cleanly- and legally, but that also means more of them do?

I don't see mental health, or disabilities, as granting ending your own life, my worry is this discourse around euthansia is actively against that view and detremines the experience of humans that are considered not optimal to society as they where a throw away toy
by greybox | 2025-06-14 19:23:34+00:00
> Are the American's you're referencing living in the EU or back in the US?

The EU

> Could the language barrier be a reason for their hesitancy?

No:

> (and it's not a language barrier problem, because everyone speaks english)

>I've heard stories about gen-z/alpha being more app brained

I think you might be on to something there, maybe it's more of a generational thing than a cultural difference between American and EU citizens.
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 19:25:03+00:00
Americans have been raised for a couple generations to be afraid of people. "Stranger danger." Apocalyptic news media. A general millenarianism-run-amok "the final battle between good and evil is coming and evil outnumbers us" assumption that permeates much of American culture across the political spectrum. Catastrophizing.

Somehow that had an impact on our social skills! It takes a lot of work to de-program that if you're not a natural extrovert.