MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6stringmerc | 2025-06-12 00:05:19+00:00
Fantastic contemplation of the stakes and some grounded “what if” scenarios worth genuine consideration.

A former roommate mentioned to me “regulations are often written in blood” and with the current atmosphere, I wonder if and when that might happen. The US political system has its flaws. Firearms are a serious public health hazard and constructive mediation is consistently passed over. It’s a far more primitive technology comparatively speaking.

Very glad this type of discussion is able to be framed without hysterics or other easily dismissed rhetoric.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-06-12 00:06:43+00:00
>The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival

Source? I'm pretty sure they planted corn and wheat as soon as they could, in the first month of arrival. "The 15th June we had finished our fort... we had also sown most of our corn on two mountains. It sprang a man's height from the ground." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Maria_Wingfield

By the third year (1609) they had cleared and planted at least 40 acres https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/2/hh2b2.htm
by fidotron | 2025-06-12 00:06:46+00:00
Very very cool.

Do you have any insights into the current performance bottlenecks? Especially around dynamic scenes. That particle simulation one seems to struggle but then improves dramatically when the camera is rotated, implying the static background is much heavier than it appears.

And as a counterpoint to the bottlenecks, that Sierpinski pyramid, procedurally, is brilliant.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-12 00:06:48+00:00
That's all fine and good, but there is always boilerplate that you can't design away.

Even the most succinct cli command definition and argument parsing library you could devise is going to require a bunch of option name definition.

It's just a fool's errand to think you can stamp out everything that is tedious. It's great that we now have tools that can generate arbitrary code to bridge that gap.
by danans | 2025-06-12 00:07:51+00:00
> I'm straining to think who besides yourself might think ubiquitous American rail and walkways were imaginary

We agree with each other. I know they were real in the pre-car era (and I have lived in some of the few remaining walkable US towns and cities), but note that my comment was speaking the present tense, not the past tense like yours.

Walkability is not the average American's lived reality today. In fact, living in a walkable area tends to be a marker of heightened privilege nowadays, sadly.
by strict9 | 2025-06-12 00:08:03+00:00
That's OK. The maintenance and visual aspect of plants can be good for mental health.

If you want cleaner air you have to move air through a filter at high speed. I have some consumer grade purifiers but the Corsi–Rosenthal Box [1] is easily the most effective of what I have. Both in feeling and measured. And it costs less than $100.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
by ModernMech | 2025-06-12 00:08:26+00:00
You said:

> That entire building could have been nuked and the country would still go on just fine, with presidential elections and new presidents.

So you mean if some other country nuked Congress.

But that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm asking you is: what if the President of the United States, in some way shape or form aims to kill Congress. If he succeeds, is that a constitutional crisis?

> Fortunately it takes time to poison people against their own country, so we measure these things and react.

I would say this has easily been happening over the past 10 years. Don't you think that on the road toward a constitutional crisis, a lot of people would point out the inflection points along the way, as they've been doing? But you seem to be dismissing them as hyperbolic, rather then heeding their warnings.
by int_19h | 2025-06-12 00:08:39+00:00
I'm childless and I don't see how this parade of horribles makes much sense. The simple facts of the matter is that a sufficient number of children growing up to be adults is required to sustain functioning society (and with it, things like retirement and healthcare systems). People who have children contribute to this fund directly. It is only fair if people who can't or won't do it contribute in some other way, e.g. by financially supporting the former category. It's not "double-whamming" at all unless you don't care about the society (but then you're welcome to go live in the wilds of Alaska or wherever), and it most certainly doesn't declare infertile people a "disposable class".
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-12 00:08:53+00:00
What you're describing is human behavior and you're predicting the future based on past patterns. I get that.

What I'm saying is while you're right in that the pattern is likely to repeat with America, it doesn't have to. We are humans, we are capable of learning from history. Not only that, the amount of technology progression and destructive capability of humans has changed drastically within the past century. Lots of things are happening right now that break from historical patterns. Also consider the number of people like you that hold that opinion, your preemptive surrender is equivalent to a confirmation bias. In other words, your prophecy is self-fulfilling because of the number of people that believe in it.

If so many people like you understand history and the variables involved, is it impossible to change course? If you knew lightning will strike you tomorrow, would you not attempt to stay indoors?

Look at the US, we're all calling our country an empire but what empire in history has behaved like the US? the soft-power approach of the US is what I mean as well as using a real-time-connected global commerce/financial market where everyone relies on the US.

Rome fell, but no one depended on Rome when it failed. China has fallen many times but the world didn't depend on Chinese currency or military like it does with the US.

What is more constant than empires falling is people at a macro level acting in their best interest. Even China would prefer the US to have a healthy consumer market until it has it's own regional consumer market that can displace the US. China doesn't want to replace the US navy's fleet in policing the seas and it won't get Europe's trust like the US when it comes to the RMB to displace the dollar.

It's not that i don't want to believe (although I don't) the US will fall, it's just that those prediction have too many assumptions. When China,Rome and other empires were falling, there was no internet or wide spread mass education. Or even things like widespread democracy (a democratic empire?? lol).
by felipeerias | 2025-06-12 00:09:13+00:00
Planning is indeed a very underrated use case.

One of my most productive uses of LLMs was when designing a pipeline from server-side data to the user-facing UI that displays it.

I was able to define the JSON structure and content, the parsing, the internal representation, and the UI that the user sees, simultaneously. It was very powerful to tweak something at either end and see that change propagate forwards and backwards. I was able to hone in on a good solution much faster that it would have been the case otherwise.
by mstridder1 | 2025-06-12 00:10:00+00:00
>I do not understand your unwillingness to provide a response ... as to whether or not you think a miscarriage is a normal occurrence

Why would I? It's such a rude question. We are discussing the nuances of suspicious "miscarriages" that appear to be home abortions constituting valid reason for investigation and possible prosecution, and you are hung up on ridiculous strawmen as if you're the only person who understands the issue so everybody else who disagrees must be an uninformed sociopath. It's disrespectful and immature. Yes, I have the basic concepts of mammalian biology well understood. And this will be my signoff to you and this discussion.
by capyba | 2025-06-12 00:11:18+00:00
I honestly feel that LLMs have been a net negative for me rather than a positive, *especially* with software development. Most of the time I end up coaxing it through a series of prompts, only for there to be some bug in the code it generated for me that takes me longer to debug than if I had just read the relevant docs and examples myself.

I’m sure there’s utility now, and I’m sure it’ll (ever more slowly, asymptotically) improve, but at the moment it (and the Google that performs worse than that of 5 years ago) has been costing more time than the alternative web search, study, then write it myself. And don’t get me started on non coding technical subjects.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-12 00:11:39+00:00
It is though, because it can do a pretty good job of every template.

I remember what I revelation it was a million years ago or so when rails came along with its "scaffold". That was a huge productivity boost. But it just did one specific thing, crud MVC.

Now we have a pretty decent "scaffold" capability, but not just for crud MVC, but for anything you can describe or point to examples of.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-06-12 00:11:42+00:00
I don't have enough of the background to speculate about the numbers. Dark energy feels "big" if we think of it in terms of the actual energy it would take to accelerate the universe away from itself at the rate that we see.. but the rate that we see is affected by our frame of reference, along with distances and everything else.

I'm gonna pull out my lay understanding again. An evaporating black hole, as it gets smaller, should get more dense and be associated with a higher local spacetime curvature, no? The effect of which would be to slow down apparent time for observers within the system. Maybe that affects observed distance and rates of speed at which things seem to be happening when we look out into the sky?

Sometimes I regret not caring enough about calculus in university.
by nielsbot | 2025-06-12 00:12:01+00:00
Let me guess: “all taxation is theft”?

Absolutely we aren’t a Christian country. I personally don’t need Christianity to tell me charity for our fellow humans is a good thing. Plus, richest country in the history of the world remember?

The rich in the US enjoy their wealth at the “pleasure” of the lower classes. (And not just the American lower classes.) Those dollars they’re hoarding? Those were created by the people and have value because of the people. So, I’m all for confiscatory taxation to fund humane charitable endeavors and eliminate wealth hoarding. Someone will have to make do with one less yacht I suppose.

Finally, the amount we’re taking about here is a mere pittance. Let’s cut some other wasteful spending first (Pentagon) if you’re looking for savings.
by wccrawford | 2025-06-12 00:13:20+00:00
As an obvious foreigner, you are 100% exempt from all this. In fact, if you get it right, it'll make them feel weird and they'll try to avoid that.

I read a story once about someone who went to McDonalds in Japanese, and the clerk flipped the menu to the English side. The person flipped it back over, and the clerk flipped it to English again! They simply couldn't believe the foreigner could read it.

And I've read stories of people who didn't act like a "gaijin" (foreigner) and people didn't know how to interact with them, and the person finally just accepted it and acted like they expected a gaijin to act, and then everything was fine.

Seriously, just go. They were incredibly nice to us while we were there visiting.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-06-12 00:13:30+00:00
Huh, I don't know why I thought it did. Looking into the link below briefly I see it uses a PKI scheme with CAs.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

So I guess if you provide a key for the bootloader, the firmware will sign it when it's in setup mode? I guess that private key is embedded directly in the firmware then? I presume that's made invisible once control is handed to the bootloader somehow ...
by WalterBright | 2025-06-12 00:14:33+00:00
Is blowing on it really good enough? People don't have that much breath, and you'd have to put your face right up to the heat.

You could use a blowpipe of some sort. But better, a bellows. Was there any evidence of either?

Although the South and Central Americans worked bronze, the North Americans did not. I doubt a leap directly from nothing to iron smithing could occur.
by krisoft | 2025-06-12 00:15:31+00:00
> Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google

Sounds like it should be very easy to counter their argument then.

For my education could you tell me which part of their message is inaccurate? The “Google was founded in 1998” or the “and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000.” part?

> You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.

I did not make such an assertion. Where in my comment do you think i’m making that assertion?

> You proclaiming “it’s always been this way”

I’m sorry but who are you quoting? Did you perhaps misclicked which comment you wanted to respond to?
by tptacek | 2025-06-12 00:18:06+00:00
I think this is directionally and importantly true, but, for the record, the notion of a "settler colony" was invented to capture the distinction between colonies that exist to shuttle resources and colonies that exist to create new homeland.

(The Mizrahim fatally complicate any effort to sum Israel up as any kind of simplistic entity, and the term "European" to describe it is practically a slur.)
by big-nacho | 2025-06-12 00:19:52+00:00
GIF rendering is a big use case.

pngquant was a big comparison subject during development (it's a brilliant piece of work, and a mature tool that does a few things more than just quantizing). Take it with a grain of salt of course, but in terms of raw quantization performance, patolette had the edge, particularly when dealing with images with tricky color distributions. With that said, pngquant's dithering algorithm is way more sophisticated (and animation aware, I think). In fact, one thing where it really shines is that it spots with pretty good precision where adding noise would actually hurt instead of helping.

Another thing is that patolette can quantize to both high and lower color counts (the latter particularly with CIELuv), whereas pngquant is more well suited for high color counts.
by anigbrowl | 2025-06-12 00:20:19+00:00
Woman gets pregnant, flagged as such in business intelligence database, she doesn't start buying baby stuff and instead travels out of state, suddenly treated as criminal suspect.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...

I cannot fathom why you think that highly personal data like this should be sold or shared with law enforcement.
by krisoft | 2025-06-12 00:20:24+00:00
> Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him.

I believe I have covered that case in my comment. Let me quote the relevant part here for you: “What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.”

That being said could you help me by pointing out the inaccuracy in jkaptur’s comment? It seems fairly simple and as far as I can see well supported by the source.
by WalterBright | 2025-06-12 00:20:25+00:00
1. I have no trouble at all hitting the light switch when I enter a room, and hitting it again when I leave. Even when the power goes out for a few days, I still reflexively hit the switch.

2. I tried landscape lighting once. The local fawna chewed it to bits. I decided I didn't need it.

3. I don't need to control the lights when I'm not home.

4. I have seriously no need to light according to the seasons.

Sure, a more automated system would be great for disabled people. But I'm not disabled, and intend to lift my sorry heiny out of the chair as long as I am able to.
by gbacon | 2025-06-12 00:20:33+00:00
A fascinating chapter in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg describes market-basket analytics at Target. They wanted to be able to determine whether a shopper is pregnant because that is an event that they believed women to be willing to reconsider their otherwise steadfast shopping brand loyalty. They got too good at their target ad mailers and so had to throw in decoys like motor oil and lawn equipment.

The tipoff for expecting women was purchases of larger quantities of lotion and washrags.
by drdaeman | 2025-06-12 00:21:07+00:00
The article is a mess, mixing everything up in a single issue, without saying anything about scale or frequency of them happening:

- Targeted advertising.

- Job prospects and workplace monitoring.

- Insurance discrimination.

- Abortion-related issues.

- Cyberstalking.

Targeted advertising is weird thing, but I believe it's not the particularly important issue here. At least I fail to see the severity of seeing more ads for cosmetics (or sweets or home loans or whatever children stuff) correlated with one's hormonal cycle. I'm not saying it's certainly not an issue (or is an issue), but I don't think it's particularly high on most people list of ethical questions to ponder about. Could be considered benign, could be mildly unethical, but most likely not a huge deal. The way I understand it, much worse problems are in the rest of the list.

It seems that - according to the research linked by the article - some people seem to try to step around the legal barriers on discrimination. While those folks can't (legally) directly discriminate on pregnancy status, they use statistical models to discriminate on a probability of such status, based on the data they can currently buy from app developers. Or maybe not the models but a self-reported goal of becoming pregnant - as it's not a pregnancy per se, so I guess they consider it' s a fair game until a lawmaker or a court says otherwise.

Plus there's also an issue, that some governments have different ideas on personhood, and try to equate abortions (and even miscarriages) with homicide, then try to detect "crime" based on this data, is certainly a major concern.

And there's also something about cyberstalking. I can't say I entirely get it, but a distressed mind can do really weird shit.

Summarized:

1. Menstrual cycle data is sold publicly and is not currently considered a PHI.

2. Some people use this data in ways other people could consider unethical.

3. The article doesn't mention how much of it is arguably harmless or less harmful (such as targeting ads based on predicted hormonal changes) and how much of it is severe abuse. It merely mentions the potential of such abuse, but I haven't found anything about its scale.

I could be, of course, wrong about it all. This is just my current understanding of it after reading for a bit. (My initial understanding was much less than this, like GP I just wondered "there are millions of menstruating people, how is data when they have their periods could be possibly so much valuable to be compared to a gold mine?" as IIRC individual demographic and behavioral data is generally of a very limited value.)
by thorum | 2025-06-12 00:21:11+00:00
This GitHub issue says 6-7 GB VRAM: https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox/issues/44

But if the model is any good someone will probably find a way to optimize it to run on even less.

Edit: Got it running on an old Nvidia 2060, I'm seeing ~5 GB VRAM peak.
by Lammy | 2025-06-12 00:21:29+00:00
> There was also the uproar at Leopard’s […] glossy dock

“Seriously, pseudo-3D? Really? If a compulsion for gaudiness must be quenched, at least try to confine such exercises to more obscure features. Don't scribble all over the second-most visible interface element in the entire OS like a nine year-old girl putting make-up on her dollie.”

It's funny because Apple very brazenly ripped off the glossy 3D Dock from Project Looking Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
by Teever | 2025-06-12 00:21:33+00:00
Why I brought up space as it reminds me of the Apollo guidance computer story. The military had cutting-edge ICBM targeting technology, and within a few years, more powerful computers were in people's homes. Once a capability exists, it spreads. The idea that companies could successfully lock down self-repairing robots when the US government couldn't even keep ICBM guidance systems exclusive seems... optimistic.

And you're right about planned obsolescence in theory, but self-replication is fundamentally different from a smartphone. It's like having a genie that grants more wishes. Once someone demonstrates true self-replication even in a proprietary system then the cat's out of the bag. Open source communities, countries with different IP laws, hobbyists -- eventually someone will reverse engineer it. The economic incentive is just too massive. It's not like trying to copy a luxury handbag. It's copying the means of production itself.

As for space applications, yes, mass matters, but that's exactly why modular, self-repairing systems make sense. Instead of one giant redundant system, you'd have swarms of smaller units that can reconfigure, repair each other, and even combine into larger structures when needed. Much more mass-efficient than traditional redundancy. And regarding humanoid form sure you're right it's not optimal for space, but it's optimal for working in human environments. Our entire infrastructure is built for human bodies. Any robot that can use our tools, navigate our spaces, and interface with our systems has an immediate advantage. They don't need to be perfect copies - maybe four arms instead of two, different joint configurations - but roughly humanoid makes sense for terrestrial applications. And space applications that are designed and built by humans or for humans.

The question isn't whether this will happen, but when. What's your estimate for when we'll see the first truly self-maintaining robotic systems, even if they're not fully self-replicating?
by h4kunamata | 2025-06-12 00:23:12+00:00
Those tools/features are more ways to collect data easily.

I have a Pixel 7 Pro running GrapheneOS , I am never going back to an AndroidOS, period. The level of privacy and control GOS provides is like no other, and the security update is always ahead of Google. GOS in fact has found and reported vulnerabilities which we get released to our phone faster than Google.

I am too biased to say anything, I went De-Google years ago, I am using web version instead of apps, if only people knew how much crappy is running in their phone. However, I still access YouTube coz TV sucks and there is no better service, and YouTube Music coz any other service sucks with poor content.

Mobiles releases from some time now have been more of the same, it is even worse on Apple side lmao, but now things are getting worse with AI everywhere.

AI IMHO means more data being collected, more features and services that are cloud based instead of locally, meaning, soon or later since everything is running on the cloud, you must pay a subscription. Remember, when it comes to big tech nothing is free, you either pay for a subscription or your personal data is the payment.
by mikestew | 2025-06-12 00:23:32+00:00
Your point is well-taken, but I've addressed two CEOs (that you might have heard) of by their first names, one named "Bill" and another one named "Steve". I still had a job for years after. But I was so low-level, they probably didn't even know who to fire.

Smaller companies, OTOH, have proven to be a bit hit-or-miss.