MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-24 19:57:21+00:00
By doing basic research on the entirely separate country and culture you're going to? Does everybody seriously just lack critical thinking and expect everyone else to pick up the slack now?

When I travel somewhere - especially somewhere I don't speak the language - I make sure I know things like basic customs, politeness, emergency numbers, unexpected laws, etc.

You are a guest in their home.
by michaelt | 2025-06-24 19:57:28+00:00
> I don’t know how you could assume this is useful unless you assume the average person is really stupid. Would you feel comfortable telling a stranger this? Would you be able to say it in a way that isn’t demeaning?

Something I've noticed from time to time in my career is the following:

1. Someone does something they know perfectly well they shouldn't have done, but they think they won't get caught.

2. They get caught.

3. They feign ignorance or confusion about the rules, hoping to lessen their punishment.

4. The organisation takes their claim of ignorance seriously, and introduces incredibly patronising training/rules/signage.

A person who doesn't notice this happening could easily get the impression their peers have room-temperature IQs.
by FredPret | 2025-06-24 19:57:40+00:00
That's a fair point, I hadn't considered it.

But it's a tough analysis to make regardless, because every widget I buy here in the West that comes from China (and that's pretty much 100% of the widgets) spits out CO2 in China. Now I look cleaner and they look dirtier than the case would be if the widget was made here.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-24 19:57:55+00:00
It sounds like you're asking what is the scope of this sovereignty?

In my experience, the scope is the establishment of a status hierarchy.

We love to put ourselves in a privileged position. In most internet discussion, the status hierarchy extends throughout the duration of the encounter. In most Thanksgivings, the crazy uncle goes away at the end of the night, in marriages, it extends for the duration of the relationship. It's fundamentally tied to the social engagement.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-24 19:58:06+00:00
The job of border control people is risky as hell. Let in the wrong person, and they’ll trace it back to you. Deny the right person and you can spin it as patriotism.

There’s no recourse if you’re uncertain. You can’t wave over a manager - you’re expected to process the huge queue with more piling in all day.

You work multiple long shifts per week. In a single shift you make thousands of decisions with huge impact to your life going forward - huge downsides for mistakes.

When you make 1000 decisions in a shift, even a 0.1% error rate is one wrong decision per shift!

And even if you are a nice person, you need to keep your job. When your biggest boss has an unsympathetic streak, you tip more into “my mistakes will be punished” mode.
by refurb | 2025-06-24 19:58:33+00:00
Do people remember during Covid how it was a “remote work revolution” and how it was going to cause sweeping changes to how people worked and how the economy functioned?

Pepperidge Farms remembers…

Not to toot my own horn or even make a pretty obvious prediction, my HN history has a comment from years ago predicting pretty much exactly what happened.

Companies would do it as long as they needed to. Once they knew they had more people than positions it would be a slow squeeze and eventual “come in to the office or quit”.
by tucnak | 2025-06-24 19:59:25+00:00
The actual lead times on similarly-capable GPU systems are so long, by the time your order is executed, you're already losing money. Even assuming perfect utilization, and perfect after-market conditions—you won't be making any money on the hardware anyway.

Buy v. rent calculus is only viable if there's no asymmetry between the two. Oftentimes, what you can rent you cannot buy, and vice-versa, what you can buy—you could never rent. Even if you _could_ buy an actual TPU, you wouldn't be able to run it anyway, as it's all built around sophisticated networking and switching topologies[1]. The same goes for GPU deployments of comparable scale: what made you think that you could buy and run GPU's at scale?

It's a fantasy.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01433
by jimbokun | 2025-06-24 19:59:28+00:00
> That's the thing, a lot of Americans really don't like this idea of being squeezed in tightly.

I think it's a large and growing cultural divide.

There is a growing class of predominantly progressive people who look to walkability scores and the variety of ethnic restaurants and music venues to evaluate the desirability of a place to live. And an older more conservative cohort who value what you describe.
by jahewson | 2025-06-24 19:59:33+00:00
I don't like the word “stupid”. It carries a moral judgement and in the context of this post is never defined. I don’t see any falsifiable claims made here.

The author seems to be projecting their own above average intelligence onto other people. He’s imaging their inner world to be somewhat like his when it’s anything but.

> but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.

This is cosmically untrue. My cleaners can’t work my vacuum. I’ve spent a year constantly re-explaining it. They can’t put the oven racks back the way they found them, just force them in the wrong way around every time. No number of reminders seems to help. My landscaper could not work out he had our landscape wiring crossed, spent days coming back replacing bulbs, digging up wires and replacing them, randomly rewiring sections. 5 minutes with a multi-meter and I had it solved. I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.

The average person tries to memorize a handful of things from someone smarter and then stays in their lane. That’s fine, I don’t think we should call them “stupid” but capable thinkers and problem solvers they are not.
by bpt3 | 2025-06-24 19:59:53+00:00
There's the objective definition of stupid, which can approximately be defined as: is your measured IQ too low to be acceptable to the US military?

Then there's the more subjective ones, such as: 1. Does it appear this person has fully thought through the short term and long term ramifications of their actions? 2. Would I have done that specific thing in that specific scenario? 3. Would a member of my peer group reasonably concluded the same thing?

The author seems fixated on subjective definition 1, claiming that people should be assumed to have made decisions rationally and thoughtfully and that people are too harsh on those who lack specific domain knowledge.

I'm not sure why he thinks that all the empirical evidence we have of what I will summarize as nutritional illiteracy in the US should ignored or that high school and college students (two groups with a well documented history of ignoring long term consequences of their actions) should be assumed to be rational, thoughtful agents, but my only guesses are that he has never interacted with any of these people or that he doesn't care because this is just a leaping off point for his defense of AI (my money is on the latter).

Subjective definition #2 seems to be what most people use, which I feel is unfair.

I added subjective definition #3 because it's one I've talked about with my friends a lot. Due to the removal of human interaction from most menial tasks (self checkouts at grocery stores, delivery of most goods via Amazon, etc.) and the fact that everyone I work with and nearly everyone I live near has at least one advanced degree and a high income, I literally can go weeks without interacting with a single person with an IQ of less than 115, which must skew my definition of stupid somehow, and I believe I am far from alone in this bifuraction of society.

IMO, contemplating that would be a much more interesting article than creating a very self-congratulatory method to chastise those who aren't all-in on AI as our future.
by ccie_fr | 2025-06-24 20:00:15+00:00
HODL.Bar is a super minimal Bitcoin dashboard that just works-on anything from a Kindle to an old tablet or browser sidebar.

No login or ads. You get live price, stats, sats per dollar, block height, a simple chart, and 30+ currencies. Dark mode, fullscreen, and landscape for Kindle are built in. All data’s public API, loads fast even on old hardware.

It’s something I wanted for myself, but maybe you’ll find it useful too. Feedback or hacks welcome!
by doctorpangloss | 2025-06-24 20:00:15+00:00
see, but if you ask a copyright attorney: Google lost. This is what I mean by aspirational. They won something, in very similar circumstances to Anthropic, "fair use," but everything else that made what they were doing a practical reality instead of purely theoretical required negotiation with Authors Guild, and indeed, they are not doing what they wanted to do, right? Anthropic has to go to trial still, they had to pirate the books to train, and they will not win on their right to commercialize the results of training, because neither did Google, so what good is the Fair Use ruling, besides allowing OpenAI v. NYTimes to proceed a little longer?
by qsort | 2025-06-24 20:00:35+00:00
Regrets are mostly irrelevant to this discussion. A "regret" is either:

- I now have information I did not have at the time I made a choice that binds me now.

- I changed my mind.

Whether I believe it or not makes no difference because it contains no information.

As an aside: none of this is supposed to invalidate the experience of people having regrets, or struggling with addictions. If I see a friend getting drunk every night I won't go "ah, yes, they are correctly maximizing their utility according to their own discount rate and inter-temporal budget constraints". They are separate conversations, though, and we can have the kind of conversation where I help you solve problems or the kind of conversation where I just listen to you. They don't tend to mix well.
by alwa | 2025-06-24 20:01:18+00:00
Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill:

https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/

The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.
by skissane | 2025-06-24 20:01:29+00:00
> Granted, the work of a programmer is derived from computer science, like the work of a janitor is derived from chemistry,

Nobody enrols in a chemistry degree with the intention of pursuing a janitorial career

Most people who enrol in CS degrees do so with the intention of pursuing a career as a professional programmer. At the undergraduate level, people studying CS because they want a career in CS research are a minority

A person who wants a career in programming, enrols in a CS degree because they believe it will help get them there, graduates and then gets a programming job, far from being “underemployed”, is employed in the exact job they did the degree in order to get
by bhattisatish | 2025-06-24 20:01:33+00:00
Just a query, how do people who are going through the certification process manage their endpoint management? Do you use any MDM solution?

We are completely remote with no office. Most of our developers are on Ubuntu, and we use rented laptops which gets shipped to them by our vendors (we have couple of them, and we select one depending upon which is closest to their area of operation).

Due to this, I couldn't figure out a proper MDM based solution. We evaluated Fleetdm, Kaspersky, eSet, ...) But none of them worked well with Ubuntu laptops.

What do you guys use?
by resters | 2025-06-24 20:02:50+00:00
Tokenization as a form of preprocessing has the problems the authors mention. But it is also a useful way to think about data vs metadata and moving beyond text/image io into other domains. Ultimately we need symbolic representations of things, sure they are all ultimately bytes which the model could learn to self-organize, but things like that can be useful when humans interact with the data directly, in a sense, tokens make more aspects of LLM internals "human readable", and models should also be able to learn to overcome the limitations of a particular tokenization scheme.
by djoldman | 2025-06-24 20:03:12+00:00
The referenced study is quite the doozy:

> We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants...

> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent).

> We discovered a consistent homogeneity across the Named Entities Recognition (NERs), n-grams, ontology of topics within each group. EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support...

And then: "...in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study."

I'm not sure "likely decrease in learning skills" is quite right here.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1
by TeaBrain | 2025-06-24 20:03:24+00:00
It's not a new idea. The posted article is just about Voyager apparently observing the phenomena more closely. Voyager 1 had already reached the termination shock of the heliosphere in 2004 and Voyager 2 in 2007. The heliosphere containing a heliosheath, past the boundary of the termination shock, composed of compressed superhot solar winds had been hypothesized, due to the compression of the solar winds that begins at the termination shock.

Reading the article, the wall is referring to the heliopause, which is the boundary past the heliosheath. Also, it looks like both voyagers traveled past this over a decade ago.
by dragontamer | 2025-06-24 20:03:24+00:00
With the onset of cheap 16-bit, 18-bit or even 24-bit sigma delta ADCs, it isn't a very hard circuit to shove a 1 Ohm sense resistor, 2.048V reference and have sensing down to 31uA (16-bit), 8uA (18-bit) or less for 24-bit ADC.

SigmaDelta gets pricy if you want higher speeds though. But it's possible.
by groby_b | 2025-06-24 20:04:31+00:00
I mean, all of those depend on how much was imported as third party dependency, how much was not addressed at all, and what was actually solved manually.

They're all doable if you focus on the core problems. He's got a github with many of the examples up, it's instructive on how to keep things small.

And I think it's important that (based on the code) he had a solid understanding of the problem space before starting to write code. You don't write that tight when you explore a new space.

Edit: https://github.com/ssloy?tab=repositories for the shortcut link :)
by danans | 2025-06-24 20:04:41+00:00
> But not without having to travel. And once travel is in the picture, you can be to the same places just as fast from a farm as you can from another point in the city.

Your phrase "having to travel" is painting with a very broad brush.

There are naturally huge variations in transit time depending on where you live in a metropolis, where you are going, and how you are getting there.

I can walk 15 minutes to a coffee shop and grocery store, drive 20 minutes to a Walmart, and take a train 35 minutes to the office.

All are very convenient and the latter two require transportation.

> Where do you get the idea that farm work is a necessary condition to realize an income from farm land? Most farmers (in the legal sense) don't farm their own land, they have other farmers work it through sharecropping/rental agreements.

Even if you aren't doing the hard labor, you have to want to manage that kind of business. Most people evidently prefer not to, and instead like urban jobs. The last 150 years of urbanization isn't a fluke.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-24 20:05:08+00:00
If you'd read both the article and my post, you'd realize it does actually address the article. It's a quote from the chapter about X-Windows I wrote in the Unix Haters handbook in 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook

https://web.archive.org/web/20201120053257/http://www.simson...

And a description of the screen spanning ruler app (or rather "Desk Accessory") that the Mac had around 1987 or so (I specifically remember Hugh showing it to me a few months before Black Monday).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)

Just like the article you apparently didn't read mentioned:

>With my new knowledge, I also wrote an onscreen ruler using the shape extension. Somewhat tautological for measuring the two inch circle, but in the event anyone asks, I can now tell them my terminal line height is 1/8”, and yes, I measured.

https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/xtoys/v/tip/f/ruler.c

Now 38 years later, is there a ruler app for X-Windows that can span multiple screens yet? Or Wayland, even? Why don't you write one!
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-24 20:05:08+00:00
> Ignoring the escape sequences a terminal doesn't understand, or doesn't want to deal with is explicitly allowed (required, even) by the ECMA-48 standard.

Indeed, but what's that got to do with my comment?

I've written a terminal emulator so very familiar how escape sequences are parsed. However your comment doesn't relate to my previous comment at all. At no point did I claim that unsupported codes wouldn't be ignored. What I said was Kitty's codes here are a pointless addition given we already have codes that more widely supported in terminal emulators and have been for several decades now.

> And DECHDL is not "standard" by any means

I assume you meant DECDHL not DECHDL ;) There's also DECDWL for double width too.

I never actually said they standardised.

What you've done here is conflate "standard" (typical/normal/de facto) with "standard" (ISO/ANSI/et al). It's a common way people misconstrue comments when they're looking for arguments rather than reading other people's comments charitably.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way I used the term "standard" -- it's pretty clear from the context that I wasn't claiming it is part of ECMA-48.

The reason I did use that term is because DECDHL and DECDWL are both supported on pretty much all DEC terminals (ie vt100 onwards) and xterm. They're a standard part of any hardware terminal or terminal emulator that seeks vt100 compatibility...which is most terminals arguably ostensibly anything created in the last 30 years in fact.

It would be more weird to advocate the use of some uncommon sequence created for one specific graphical terminal emulator that is a toddler in comparison. Yeah I get Kitty is popular, but it's hardly a de facto standard like vt100. Yet here we are -- people reinventing the wheel and thus making the already needlessly complicated problem of feature detection even harder still.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-24 20:05:12+00:00
Nukes or ground invasion, the point of the attack wasn’t to knock out the facilities, it was so that Trump can be dragged along ‘reluctantly’ so he can sell the conflict to his base. It is a persuasion technique called mirroring. Trump mirrors the position of the anti-war base, then slowly piece by piece he changes his position bringing his base with him. I guess how far it’ll go will depend on how effective the state is at suppressing anti-war sentiment. If history is a guide then the state can be surprisingly effective at this.
by ordu | 2025-06-24 20:05:37+00:00
I'm going to explain my views on this in a full. It is a lot of text, but I hope it is ok.

People don't have an innate ability to distinguish truths from lies, they need to learn this skill. Before Internet and LLMs they were relying on authorities to dictate what was truth and what was falsehoods. Those authorities included newspapers and other media, but there were also courts, government officials, politicians and others. There were no easy way to spread misinformation wide, so people were shielded from them. The system worked to some extent.

Now, however, people are swimming in an ocean of lies. They haven't magically acquired skills needed to navigate in this environment. Their own judgments about truthfulness are no better then coin flips. The results are obvious: people experience learned helplessness[1], they avoid making judgments altogether. People instead are picking some "authority" and stick to it. In USA politics, for example, there are two authorities Democrats and Republicans, so it comes to choosing your side. It allows people to avoid psychological burden of making a judgement (they are afraid of failing again). Consequently, people never feel that they were mistaken, because even if they are, it is not their fault, but the fault of an authority. At the same time they see other people who firmly believe in opposite views. Here comes "post truth world". Truth is no longer universal, you can choose any "truth" you like.

However, it is possible to avoid learned helplessness, all you need is to be better than a coin flip at predicting in advance which statements are true and which are false. You need an ability to avoid traps at least in cases when you make an effort. I make an effort when I feel it is important. Moreover in the most cases I do not need to make an effort, because all previous efforts trained my skills that works by themselves. I just see symptoms and guess, and my guessed are often correct.

I think, I need to add one more important ability to have: one needs to get rid of an irresistible urge to have an opinion. It is ok to have no opinion on some topic, to keep yourself in undecided state. Moreover it is a preferred state, if you are not 100% sure or if the topic is not important enough to you to invest time to do some research and to keep an eye on it.

In light of this I do not see the world to be "post truth". I see the most of people seeing the world as a "post truth world", but it is just their rough approximation of the world, their model of it. My model-approximation is not the real thing either, I don't know a lot of truths and keep myself undecided. Yes, I make mistaken judgements also. But the probability of my mistake goes down when I make an effort to avoid it. I feel myself in control. I don't experience learned helplessness. I know that the Truth exists and oftentimes I could reach it, if I wanted to.

So your sarcastic tone is misplaced. I know my limitations and I strive to know them more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness