MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bell-cot | 2025-06-30 18:21:57+00:00
Unless it's some "Mrs. Smith's In-home Childcare" deal, it ain't a carer staying late at $2/minute - it's randomly keeping a business open, at $120/hour. With (good bet) a mandated-minimum staff of 2+. At SF wages. Plus the extra staff churn that randomly having to stay late causes.

Parents wanting ever-so-forgiving cheap daycare need to move an idle grandma into town.
by secabeen | 2025-06-30 18:22:22+00:00
I found a similar thing on a cheap water heater. California requires an additional sensor to ensure the heating chamber doesn't overheat. It's not common generally, and the error messages when it triggers are not that helpful. After a few years of intermittent water heater failures, I finally realized that there was this sensor that was causing all the problems. I bypassed the sensor with a 1K resistor, confirming the issue, then had a new sensor sent out under warranty. Quick swap and it's been back to normal. I never found any documentation or repair advice that even considered that the sensor might be bad, and since it was California-only, most repair guides or technical documentation didn't mention it.

It's really easy to have a sensor failure that indicates a major repair is needed, when the actual issue is the $1 sensor.
by EternalFury | 2025-06-30 18:22:50+00:00
What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. The transfer function is negative. So, in my definition, no intelligence has been developed, only expertise in a narrow set of tasks.

It’s apparently much easier to scare the masses with visions of ASI, than to build a general intelligence that can pick up a new 2D video game faster than a human being.
by PollardsRho | 2025-06-30 18:23:01+00:00
Students shouldn't be treating class material as something they "do not care to know."

AI can be used in ways that lead to deeper understanding. If a student wants AI to give them practice problems, or essay feedback, or a different explanation of something that they struggle with, all of those methods of learning should translate to actual knowledge that can be the foundation of future learning or work and can be evaluated without access to AI.

That actual knowledge is really important. Literacy and numeracy are not the same thing as mental arithmetic. Someone who can't read literature in their field (whether that's a Nature paper or a business proposal or a marketing tweet) shouldn't rely on AI to think for them, and certainly universities shouldn't be encouraging that and endorsing it through a degree.

I think the most important thing about that kind of deeper knowledge is that it's "frictional", as the original essay says. The highest-rated professors aren't necessarily the ones I've learned the most from, because deep learning is hard and exhausting. Students, by definition, don't know what's important and what isn't. If someone has done that intellectual labor and then finds AI works well enough, great. But that's a far cry from being reliant on AI output and incapable of understanding its limitations.
by efromvt | 2025-06-30 18:23:03+00:00
Continuing to plug away at Trilogy, a better SQL for data consumption and analytics. Getting closer to core feature completeness, at which point can pivot to focus on integrated visualizations + pre-processing/ETL.

Most recently have been focused on better geographic visualizations in the public studio for people to experiment - getting decent automatic lat/long, want to have easy path visualizations (start/end, etc). More AI-accelerated options as well, especially around model authoring.

Repo: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy Studio: https://trilogydata.dev/studio-core/
by rorylaitila | 2025-06-30 18:23:03+00:00
Exceptions get a lot of hate, but of the three styles, I keep coming back to exceptions. Ages ago I built an application with error codes, and went back to exceptions, because I thought the ceremony of error checking was not worth it. On occasion, I'll use a get-last-error style, particularly when the error is something the user is intended to address. But for most of my applications (which are usually not libraries and are code under my control) I like exceptions.

I always have global error handler that logs and alerts of anything uncaught. This allows me to code the happy path. Most of the time, it's not worth figuring out how to continuing processing under every possible error, so to fail and bail is my default approach. If I later determine that its something that can be handled to continue processing, then I update that code path to handle that case.

Most of my code is web applications, so that is where I'm coming from.
by ok123456 | 2025-06-30 18:23:12+00:00
Is there any value added here?

Carfax exists because of the possibility of buying a car with extensive damage that looks cosmetically ok. Additionally, the service records they collect indicate that a vehicle has undergone regular maintenance.

Computers, for the most part, aren't getting in major accidents and reentering the stream of commerce. Additionally, there's no significant mechanical maintenance required, except for blowing compressed air if the environment is dirty.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-30 18:23:29+00:00
> void recip(double* aₚ, double* řₚ) > { > for (;;) > { > register double Π = (aₚ)(řₚ);

My first thought before I saw this was “I wonder is this going to be an article from people who build things or something from “academics” that don’t.”

At least it was answered quickly.
by gritzko | 2025-06-30 18:23:35+00:00
Hi. I object.

The trick#0 you mention is how I made an entire C dialect. Here is a generic binary heap, for example https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/blob/master/abc/HEAPx.h The syntax is a bit heavyweight, but a huge huge advantage is: you get regular C structs in the end, very plain, very predictable, very optimizable. Compiler would eat them like donuts.

In the other cases, it is void* and runtime memory sizing and you have to define macros anyway.
by Kapura | 2025-06-30 18:23:47+00:00
Here's an idea: make the AIs consistent at doing things computers are good at. Here's an anecdote from a friend who's living in Japan:

> i used chatgpt for the first time today and have some lite rage if you wanna hear it. tldr it wasnt correct. i thought of one simple task that it should be good at and it couldnt do that.

> (The kangxi radicals are neatly in order in unicode so you can just ++ thru em. The cjks are not. I couldnt see any clear mapping so i asked gpt to do it. Big mess i had to untangle manually anyway it woulda been faster to look them up by hand (theres 214))

> The big kicker was like, it gave me 213. And i was like, "why is one missing?" Then i put it back in and said count how many numbers are here and it said 214, and there just werent. Like come on you SHOULD be able to count.

If you can make the language models actually interface with what we've been able to do with computers for decades, i imagine many paths open up.
by tlogan | 2025-06-30 18:24:54+00:00
This does not match the KBB.com: https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla/2005/

I’m just saying that I 100% understand that you think it was “cheaper before” but there is no data to show that. I honestly feel the same. Toyota Corolla was 13k in 2000: https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla/2000 - 25 years ago.

The core of my argument is this: today’s news manipulates perception by playing on emotions, which ultimately distorts the truth.

This article isn’t overly political, which makes it easier for us to debate without resorting to calling each other Nazis or communists. But when it comes to politics, distortion of truth happens all the time.
by galaxyLogic | 2025-06-30 18:26:03+00:00
Great statements. It seems clear to me that people who argue for the truth of religious statements do that not because they want other people to know the truth, but because they want to keep on believing what they already believe in. And they want other people to believe them so they can exert power on other people. If they are right then surely we must do what they say.

It is illustrative that people arguing for religious truths never bona fide accept the possibility that they might be wrong. They might say for argumentative reasons: "I don't assume God exists ..." but then they in effect continue with "But let me proove to you why it must be true that "God" exists". :-).

I put "God" in quotes above because it is not clear what people using that word in fact mean by it. Oh, God is "everything". Oh, God is "perfection". God is Love. God is Pure Goodness. What have you.

The problem with such arguments or "definitions" is that if God is Love, then Love must also be God. If God is everything then everything must also be God.

So they are arguing about properties and attributes of "God", but they are not defining clearly what it is they are arguing about.
by gwbas1c | 2025-06-30 18:27:16+00:00
When I lived in California, it was common for restaurants to allow dogs in outdoor seating, especially sidewalk seating. My wife and I took full advantage of this; with full permission of the restaurant staff.

I was rather surprised about 12 years ago when we were looking to move in together, and someone told us, "oh, you can get around this building's no dogs policy with a doctor's note." That really bothered us.

We ended up moving to a place that was within walking distance of a great dog-friendly (on the patio) bar. I walked our dog there nearly every weekend!

There's now a restaurant in town (Massachusetts) that proudly claims their patio is dog friendly. I might take advantage of it when my puppy is a little calmer.
by alexpotato | 2025-06-30 18:28:24+00:00
This reminds me of an old story about Hertz and Ford Mustangs.

Goes something like this:

- Ford makes the original Mustang (which everyone loves)

- Ford makes different versions of the Mustang (some more powerful than others e.g. the Shelby)

- Hertz had a special custom Shelby model made for them

- You could rent that special model from Hertz

- So, people would buy a lower end Mustang, rent the higher end Mustang from Hertz, swap out the engines and return the Hertz Mustang

There is actually a lot of extra detail in this article if people are interested: https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2024/rememberi...
by kennywinker | 2025-06-30 18:28:40+00:00
99.99% of the time it’s a way to bring your dog in the cabin instead of sedated in a crate (not something I want to do to my dog, so i get it).

But for the other 0.01% of the time - your statement is quite prejudiced. Barring people with a disability from the main way travel distance is not the world i want to live in. Everyone is entitled to reasonable accommodations for their differences. Might as well say children can’t fly - they’re “emotionally unstable”.

I’ve sat next to people who’re afraid of flying. It looks awful. If a dog on your lap helps you avoid a panic attack it seems like we can find a way to make that work without too much trouble.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-06-30 18:29:12+00:00
I think the groundswell of support from the ultra-low-end is the only thing that I think can help it overcome ARM's headstart. It will not be abandoned by embedded users because of the lack of the ARM licensing fee, so it will always have some major users and thus some funding to keep supporting the community at the low-end and not letting the tooling bitrot and disappear. It's taught in universities as well. That is fertiliser, still not sure if it will bloom.
by neilv | 2025-06-30 18:29:18+00:00
> By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation.

What I see are more technological affordances for closed firmware behavior of the device, increasing complexity, and providing additional opportunity for, and cover for, secret surveillance, backdoors, and other malware.

The used laptop market is very healthy already, and sellers already make money doing their own n-point tests before selling. Some use turn-key diagnostics software packages that work with the state of the laptop as it is (and drive SMART data). It's worked fine, AFAIK.

I've personally bought and used ~40 used laptops, mostly from random sellers on eBay, and not knowing the laptop's dating history hasn't been a barrier. The only significant, rare problems have been dirt and strange odors, which presumably aren't sensed and recorded in this "telemetry".
by elif | 2025-06-30 18:29:22+00:00
One is background radiation we co-evolved along with and the other is targeted toward my brain in an instant.

But even if you're comparing mSv to mSv like it's all the same, I'd rather take 33 hours of flight time per year.

There is also a problem in dentistry with chasing ghosts that only exist in imaging and doing unnecessary work.
by Mars008 | 2025-06-30 18:29:58+00:00
> You a joking. Nobody talks about it to not to harm 'suffering minorities' business. However there are researches that show harm from marijuana is significant and likely permanent. It's no better than tobacco. But you'll never see it on CNN for political reasons...

Two downvotes so far. Any explanation? Can't please everybody, especially Kamala voters.

But my advice: if you value your cognitive abilities, blood vessels health, and I'm sure it's snowballing, stay away from any form of marijuana.
by coffeecoders | 2025-06-30 18:30:14+00:00
I have been building something like this but for personal use.

As of now, I use SentenceTransformer model to chunk files, blip for captioning (“Family vacation in Banff, February 2025”)) and mtcnn with InsightFace for face detection. My index stores captions, face embeddings, and EXIF metadata (date, GPS) for queries like “show photos of us in Banff last winter.” I’m working on integrating ChromaDB for faster searches.

Eventually, I aim to store indexes as:

{

"filename": "/Vacation/Banff/Wife.jpg", "chunk_id": 0, "text": "Family at Banff, February 2025", "caption_embedding": [0.1, 0.2, ...], "face_embeddings": [{"name": "NT", "embedding": [0.3, 0.4, ...]}, ...], "exif": { "DateTimeOriginal": "2025:02:15", "GPSCoordinates": "18.387, -65.992" }

}

I also built an UI (like Spotlight Search) to search through these indexes.

Code (in progress): https://github.com/neberej/smart-search
by TulliusCicero | 2025-06-30 18:30:23+00:00
> I was rather surprised about 12 years ago when we were looking to move in together, and someone told us, "oh, you can get around this building's no dogs policy with a doctor's note." That really bothered us.

That's a federal rule around emotional support dogs I think?

Honestly I think landlords should just be banned for having those kinds of rules against common pets like some saner countries, so I don't have a problem with people getting around it. Landlords in the US have too much power over tenants.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-30 18:30:25+00:00
If this is an app backend, you aren't dealing with Golang channels directly. Your webserver or whatever it is spawns a new goroutine (greenthread) for each incoming request, then you use blocking calls without worrying. Looks similar in JS but the event loop handles it instead, and you async/await stuff. JS webpages and app frontends also don't worry about this.

If this is systems programming, yeah you're reasoning about channels, but that's mostly the same in any language. Golang has slightly nicer support for that if anything.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-06-30 18:30:42+00:00
I think the main problem with old laptops being discarded is one of software & OS release cadence more than hardware relatability.

My accountant has used the same 4 apps since the turn of the century. Yet the industry has created a situation where they’ve needed to buy 10 new computers to keep up, even though they still just use email, spreadsheets, web, and a word processor. They’d happily be in XP if it were still on offer.

The only meaningful productivity boost from the hardware side of things for the overwhelming majority of knowledge workers over the period was the introduction of SSDs and wireless network cards.
by dinfinity | 2025-06-30 18:30:42+00:00
The key problems of glycemic spikes:

1. The excess glucose is turned into fat. This is a causal link with obesity.

2. To turn the excess glucose into fat, insuline spikes (there is also an insulin index, which can be different than the glycemic index). This is a causal link with developing diabetes (the insulin insensitivity variant).

3. The associated glycemic crash (which is very significant) causes a desire to eat more, especially more quickly digestible food. Again, a causal link with obesity.

In a relatively nutrient-poor environment the effects make complete sense: Get as much of the cheap energy providing stuff as possible and store the energy for later. In the Western world it leads to issues.
by pyuser583 | 2025-06-30 18:31:11+00:00
Im split minded about this.

On the one hand, academia has been taking sides for a long time.

On the other, there are elements that should be non-controversial.

I wish academia were more rigorous about not taking sides. I feel like they’ve been injecting their own ideology unnecessarily for a while.

Am I supposed to ignore that?

The best approach is some kind of grand bargain, and carefully considered compromise.

I have experience in academia. I’ve heard how they talk. They see their mission as transforming society.

There are exceptions, but even the exceptions are under pressure to conform.

It’s hard to address two problems at once. And I feel there are two legitimate problems: an overly ideological academy, and the need for both support and independence.

Solving one problem is hard enough. Solving both is impossible. So we will probably go back and forth for a while.

My default is to look at foreign countries. But I don’t see anywhere else that’s solved these problems.
by jayd16 | 2025-06-30 18:31:51+00:00
Its a bit more complex than that. Its more about baking out the dataset into heuristics that a machine can use to match a satisfying result to an input. Sometimes these heuristics are surprising to a human and can solve a problem in a novel way.

"Thinking" is too broad a term to apply usefully but I would say its pretty clear we are not close to AGI.
by crabl | 2025-06-30 18:31:58+00:00
Interesting! My first thought looking at the scribble chart was "isn't this Monte Carlo simulation?" but reading further it seems more aligned with the "third way" that William Briggs describes in his book Uncertainty[1]. He argues we should focus on direct probability statements about observables over getting lost in parameter estimation or hypothesis testing.

^[1]: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-39756-6
by stego-tech | 2025-06-30 18:32:09+00:00
> It clashes so strongly with what I consider to be calm, reasonable writing that I can't justify continuing to spend my time reading it.

Which makes the author’s point for them. It wasn’t calm, reasonable writing at all, and it’s your mistake to assume all writing must be calm and reasonable in order for it to be valid or of import. It was written with passion, zeal, distress, and rage. It was shaking the reader and demanding an answer: do they not see what the author does? Do they not connect the puzzle pieces in the same way? Is the reader not seeing the same visage as the author?

That’s the entire point of its length, its tone, its language. It was meant to appeal to humans, not machines, and to be an exasperated plea for others to either acknowledge what the author sees and act upon it, or to rebuke the author’s viewpoint with supporting evidence.

Instead, the response is a bunch of “too long and emotions are bad” whinging. It neither refutes the author nor critiques the piece as written, simply vapidly complains the message wasn’t delivered in a way they personally preferred.

Which, if I were to extrapolate, is its own damning indictment of a technology industry so focused on designing around niche edge cases and shareholder demands that it neglects fundamentals. If that also holds true, then it’s of no wonder LLM summaries are so celebrated:

Content without context, in as dry and inoffensive a format as possible. Never a threat to someone’s thinking, never a challenge to their positions, never complex enough to warrant consideration.
by rorylaitila | 2025-06-30 18:32:37+00:00
Incidentally, I have come across few vintage ads containing or targeted to black people explicitly. Most of the vintage publications I come across are Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Look. I am on the lookout for regional and local publications which may be different, but they're hard to find because they were not really circulated enough to have survived. But there are so many publications I randomly find it's sometimes daunting how much I feel I'm missing out finding!
by jjmarr | 2025-06-30 18:32:40+00:00
Most countries do not mandate accessibility in public accomodations to the extent the United States does.

Since the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, any disabled person can sue a business and get statutory penalties for a lack of accomodation. Wrongfully denying a service dog can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Europe doesn't have this mechanism. There's less abuse of accomodations as a result. But nothing is wheelchair accessible.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-06-30 18:33:09+00:00
This, I think, is the part that confuses me. While there is a level of uncertainty, when buying used computer, the cost tends to magnitude smaller than a new car and even for fancish lappies likely sub 1k ( maybe that changes when we start accounting for gaming laptops, but those are unlikely to be corporate fleet, which I assume is the consideration here? ).

I initially though HP found some new way to fleece data out of its users, but looking at what is proposed, I don't see anything that obviously bad so I am lost here too.

And this is all before we get to how difficult HP has gotten to repair. My last HP ( consumer grade after which I swore no personal HP machines ever ) did everything short of soldering hdd to the board ( ridiculous placement, non-standard screws ).

The idea has some, limited merit, but I just don't see it being useful.
by uslic001 | 2025-06-30 18:33:29+00:00
I had a 2001 Tundra. When I looked at a new Tundra in 2016 it was basically the same interior with the same knobs and controls as my 2001. I ended up with a Ford F150 instead. I think they made changes to the 2017 Tundra interior. Toyota just sticks with what works once they iron out the bugs. Other car manufacturers go for the bling to get people to buy.
by marcusverus | 2025-06-30 18:33:38+00:00
Medical bankruptcies are vastly overstated.[1] And while the US may be unique in our exposure to medical debt, we're doing much better than other developed countries in terms of overall household debt, which would seem be a more useful metric if you're concerned about the impact of debt on prosperity.[0]

[0] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-debt.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793926