MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vondur | 2025-06-17 20:31:51+00:00
We do replace faculty computers every 4 years if possible. However, we tend to pass the older computers down to other areas if they are still usable, which we are not able to do. We do have a lot of Mac's in the College. I'm actually really pissed at Apple for no longer allowing to use iMac's as external displays. We have a lot of 27" iMac's that wont be usable in the near future once Apple stops supporting Intel based computers. I'd love to be able to use the iMac's as external displays since they are great 5K monitors.
by gk1 | 2025-06-17 20:31:55+00:00
In at least the case for coding agents the emerging pattern is to have the agents use containers for isolating work and git for reviewing and merging that work neatly.

See for example the container use MCP which combines both: https://github.com/dagger/container-use

That’s for parallelizing coding work… I’m not sure about other kinds of work. I still see people using workflow builder tools like n8n, Zapier, and maybe CrewAI.
by nearbuy | 2025-06-17 20:32:03+00:00
When you go deeper into physics, mass and energy don't seem real either, in that, like entropy, they're emergent properties of a system rather than fixed, localized things.

I always thought of the energy of a system (kinetic + potential) as a useful mathematical invariant that helps us predict systems rather than a physical thing. If you put a cart at the top of a hill, then the cart has more potential energy (but only from certain reference frames). It doesn't feel like that potential energy is physical. It doesn't have a specific location; it's a property of the whole Earth-cart system. And yet, it's this total energy that gives rise to the physical properties we're familiar with. In fact, almost all of the mass in your body comes not from the mass of elementary particles, but from the potential energy in the bonds between quarks. Your mass is more than 99% from potential energy.

And then when you get into Quantum Field Theory, it turns out particles (like electrons) are no longer truly point particles but rather another emergent phenomenon from ripples in an underlying field. A particle is just a model that describes it well when looked at from a distance. (I hope I'm not butchering that, as I'm not a physicist.)

So mass, matter, energy, and entropy are all emergent properties of a system rather than being localized, "real" things in the way we'd intuitively think. And at that point, I'm not sure how we would define "real" or why it would be a useful distinction. Is there a useful insight to be gained by putting entropy in a different category of realness than mass?
by hexomancer | 2025-06-17 20:32:13+00:00
Iranian here. Most Iranians use Telegram or Whatsapp, both of which are blocked right now and can only be used using VPNs (they have been blocked for years, though whatsapp was unblocked a few months ago, but it is blocked again after the Israel attack). I don't think many Iranians believe, or care about what the regime says, though there is a small minority of regime supporters that might, but they probably were not using whatsapp to begin with.

Though I must say, the regime itself seems to really believe this, for example there was some news that high-ranking officials are now banned from using electronic devices that connect to the internet like mobile phones.
by bevan | 2025-06-17 20:33:14+00:00
I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch at something on a different level than reason, a little closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or representation can capture that most fundamental reality of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it. Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be contained by reason?
by NathanKP | 2025-06-17 20:33:25+00:00
Good to see more people talking about this. I wrote about this about 6 months ago, when I first noticed how LLM usage is pushing a lot of people back towards older programming languages, older frameworks, and more basic designs: https://nathanpeck.com/how-llms-of-today-are-secretly-shapin...

To be honest I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that there is a stifling effect on fresh new DSL's and frameworks. It isn't an unsolvable problem, particularly now that all the most popular coding agents have MCP support that allows you to bring in custom documentation context. However, there will always be a strong force in LLM's pushing users towards the runtimes and frameworks that have the most training data in the LLM.
by greiskul | 2025-06-17 20:33:44+00:00
> known for funding and training militant and terrier groups globally

So does the US.

> They also call for the annihilation of the Big Satan (USA) and the Small Satan (Israel)

You are literally calling for the annihilation of their state here.

> All the while running for The Bomb.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war.

There is definitely a cold war going on between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure if it escalating to a hot war would be better. The 20th century Cold War had all the same things you mentioned, with both sides fighting proxy wars, calling for the annihilation of the other side, and had atomic weapons. And I think everyone agrees that the end of the cold war that we had was definitely better than nuclear Armageddon.

And I don't know if the 20th would have been better if only the US had atomic weapons. MAD might have saved millions of lives in both sides.
by drob518 | 2025-06-17 20:33:49+00:00
Well, then you need some diversity strategy such that you aren’t just building more stuff that also goes offline. And you would need it to be able to flex up in a controlled fashion to make up for losses in other geographies. That’s hard with wind and solar. They don’t flex very well. When things are going well, you get what you get. There’s no way to make the wind blow harder or make the sun shine more brightly when you want it. You need well controlled base load capacity. Of nuclear, gas, and coal, nuclear is clean and basically renewable for all intents and purposes (it’s not, but it might as well be).
by jdenning | 2025-06-17 20:33:55+00:00
That's fair, and I'm not "blaming" meta for anything here. They're well within their rights to EEE ActivityPub, but I think it's naive to complain about people calling it out. This new is only really relevant to people who care about Fediverse content, and I see two potential responses from that group:

1) Yay! That's great that meta is helping popularize Fediverse!

2) It's a trap.

I'm in camp (2) - just trying to show people the trap before they step in it. It doesn't matter anyway, these kind of warnings have never, ever worked. Just let the old man shake his fist at the clouds FFS :) Where else am I supposed to do it? Threads?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-17 20:34:28+00:00
That's just begging the question.

In order for the device to display the content on the screen, some part of the device has to have access to the plaintext. That part of the device is controlled by Microsoft -- it's their DRM system, they wrote that code and have the keys to update it -- so they inherently have access to it. Saying "that part is outside the scope of the DRM" is just defining your way around the fact that they can still do it.

Or to put it another way, if some court orders Microsoft to extract some DRM-protected content, what do you think happens?
by philipkglass | 2025-06-17 20:34:53+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
by daxfohl | 2025-06-17 20:35:13+00:00
Nothing works automagically. You still have to build in all the operational characteristics that you would for any traditional system. It's deceptively easy to look at some AI agent demos and think "oh, I can replace my team's huge mess of spaghetti code with a few clever AI prompts!" And it may even work for the first couple use cases. But all that code is there for a reason, and eventually it'll have to be reckoned with. Once you get to the point where you're translating all that code directly into the AI prompt and hoping for no hallucinations, you know you've lost the plot.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-06-17 20:35:17+00:00
Python is just a beautiful, well-designed language - in an era where LLM's generate code, it is kind of reassuring that they mostly generate beautiful code and Python has risen to the top. If you look at the graph, Julia and Lua also do incredibly well, despite being a minuscule fraction of the training data.

But Python/Julia/Lua are by no means the most natural languages - what is natural is what people write before the LLM, the stuff that the LLM translates into Python. And it is hard to get a good look at these "raw prompts" as the LLM companies are keeping these datasets closely guarded, but from HumanEval and MBPP+ and YouTube videos of people vibe coding and such, it is clear that it is mostly English prose, with occasional formulas and code snippets thrown in, and also it is not "ugly" text but generally pre-processed through an LLM. So from my perspective the next step is to switch from Python as the source language to prompts as the source language - integrating LLM's into the compilation pipeline is a logical step. But, currently, they are too expensive to use consistently, so this is blocked by hardware development economics.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-06-17 20:35:24+00:00
There absolutely is a per-conversation cost for marketing messages.

https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?coun...

See also here

>With marketing messages, you pay for each message that is delivered to a receiver you chose within five days of being sent.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241...
by matsemann | 2025-06-17 20:35:27+00:00
The opposite is true as well. If someone pings me hello, I might not answer immediately because I don't know if what follows will be a big or small thing, but after having replied I feel obligated to continue answering. So my decision is to not answer until I'm less busy.

If they however ask a question no hello style, I can quickly gauge if I can answer it immediately, or I should wait until a better time for me.

So the no hello might get an immediate response, the hello will wait until I can handle whatever.
by StillBored | 2025-06-17 20:35:53+00:00
Wayland is architecturally garbage. Not for technical reasons, but social ones. Although social isn't the right word to describe a technology that encourages toolkit/DM/etc fragmentation which in turn breaks core functionality in the wider application ecosystem. Some of this isn't the fault of wayland directly, but it makes it worse. AKA by design there isn't a standard way to iterate windows and detect buttons/lists/various control types/etc which massively complicates if not outright breaks screen readers, while at the same time continues to fragment simple things like theming (and copy/paste is even worse than it was 10 years ago) if an application isn't using the blessed GUI toolkit. And in say fedora, the gnome folks seem to be designing to a device type that doesn't exist, its terrible out of the box with multiple monitors/etc while at the same time being terrible on touchscreen devices. I don't run it that much, but was showing my daughter who is perfectly competent in windows and macos (she carries both around all day!), how to navigate gnome, and jut shocked how absolutely none of it is intuitive to someone who has 'expert' level knowledge of all the common OS/phone UI's. Sure it looks slick, because its not cluttered with 'garbage' like you know, maximize buttons, scroll bars, and other things one might click on with a mouse. All the while doing cool things like reflowing the terminal text whenever the scrollbar appears/disappears. Its this complete lack of supervision/understanding. Sure on a phone touchscreen scroll bars might get in the way, but on a large screen laptop with two 30"+ 4K monitors?

And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
by FeloniousHam | 2025-06-17 20:35:56+00:00
Counterpoint: I had a Tesla with HW3 and FSD is absolutely a wonder and a delight (I now have a Tesla with HW4, and it's a noticeable improvement on my M3). It drives me through traffic on my commute everyday, in all kinds of weather, and is a better driver than me (say) 95% of the time.

As I frequently mention in these "sanity response" posts, it's not perfect. Sun in the camera will sometimes cause it to bail. Maybe once a day, I take over because I'm not sure of its decisions. I share the skepticism that the same FSD I'm using can be fully autonomous, but with deep, current map data like Waymo has, maybe they can pull it off.
by rietta | 2025-06-17 20:36:04+00:00
A major plot of my fictional book is going to be the resurrection of data from a DVD recovered from an archaeological site in from the ancient North American period (from the pov of the characters). It is a significant challenge fraught with perils, including the professor responsible being threatened with failure after failure in the field, budget cuts, and political barriers. But success will be the first glimpse after thousands of years into the unknown dark age that so little is known about.
by opan | 2025-06-17 20:36:05+00:00
>do you remember acquaintances from a few years ago who you haven't seen since?

This is tricky, because the first couple people I think of are people who sort of "exist" in some sense online. Maybe I haven't seen them physically in 5-10 years, but I see their handle on a friends list or maybe I've messaged them in that time. I can remember things from back when I did see them in person, but perhaps their presence in some form since then has kept things more active. (Maybe they're more friends than acquaintances, admittedly it's hard for me to draw a line there without a clear definition)

I'm leaning toward "yes", though. I can remember old people who I fixed computers for once or twice and never really talked to again otherwise. They weren't related to me or anything, it was purely business, but I can remember things like them offering me a drink or asking certain questions or that they pronounced a word in an unusual way.
by dack | 2025-06-17 20:37:20+00:00
personally i think DSLs could be helpful if they are really good at: 1. explaining the syntax clearly 2. providing a fast checker that provides good error messages 3. prevents errors

LLMs seem pretty good at figuring out these things when given a good feedback loop, and if the DSL truly makes complex programs easier to express, then LLMs could benefit from it too. Fewer lines of code can mean less context to write the program and understand it. But it has to be a good DSL and I wouldn't be surprised if many are just not worth it.
by Nition | 2025-06-17 20:37:27+00:00
Yeah this is the big benefit of current LLM AI even with the mistakes and hallucinations IMO. All the things that are hard to answer but easy to verify.

Not just programming. e.g. You have a complex medical problem. Hard to ask Google. Ask AI, it gives you some possible answers, then you can search up those. Or you want to identify a plant. AI looks at your photo and tells you what it is, then search that name to verify.

There were existing ways to do some of these things, but this covers all of them.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 20:37:49+00:00
> LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge impact for the better.

If anything, they'd have the reverse impact, unfortunately. The thing is, the companies whose sites/apps/resources would be accessed by LLMs don't want this. That's the entire point of the article we're discussing.

All I'm saying is, accessibility is the only interoperability wedge they can't just close off, without a huge community backlash and in some cases because of compliance reasons.
by ricardobeat | 2025-06-17 20:39:07+00:00
Honda has historically invested heavily in R&D. They are robotics pioneers, have made jet skis, power tools, sell a commercial jet [1], and are responsible for the engine powering the winner (RB) of the last four F1 championships,

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_HA-420_HondaJet
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-17 20:39:18+00:00
>Because it's HN not /r/politics

Poltical stories that show "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" are not against the guidelines. A few years back someone said nearly half the YC batch was non-US. I think stories about city comptrollers and mayoral candidates getting arrested at immigration court would have some bearing on whether someone would want to base a company in the US.

A user who has enough karma to flag stories has flagged it for whatever reason, maybe they think the story is flamebait or without merit, who knows. It is not possible for a user with equal or higher karma to unflag it I believe. Only a moderator can unflag it, and if you want them to do that you have to email them (address in guidelines, no guarentee of success).
by opan | 2025-06-17 20:39:18+00:00
>I think you're assuming more people are like you than actually are.

What I'm trying to say is that from his perspective, how he imagines people with more "normal" memory recall things, might be a bit exaggerated. He doesn't know what he's missing exactly so he might imagine it to be better than it really is. I'm not trying to say that everyone else is like me or that he's like me. Like if he can't imagine an apple in his mind at all and he hears other people can, he may imagine it's as clear as staring at an apple in real life or a picture of an apple on a computer screen, while the reality is somewhere in the middle. I do believe his claims about himself, but his claims about me or people like me don't seem entirely accurate.
by dsr_ | 2025-06-17 20:39:33+00:00
Wheels continue to support a load without power.

Wheels are vastly superior to hover technologies in the crucial areas of steering and controlled braking. (For uncontrolled braking, you just cut the power to your hover fans and lift the skirts...)

It turns out to be remarkably difficult to get a hovercraft to go up an incline...

Wheels are both suspension and traction in one system.

There's no particular physical advantage to JPEG over the others mentioned; it's just currently ubiquitous.
by philipkglass | 2025-06-17 20:39:58+00:00
Texas is building more grid scale battery storage than any other state:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-us...

This year EIA again expects Texas to outpace California, only now by an even wider margin than last year. The Lone Star State could build nearly 7 GW of utility-scale storage in 2025 compared to California’s 4.2 GW.
by anticodon | 2025-06-17 20:40:24+00:00
Russian soldiers participating in SMO reported multiple times that after they exchange texts and photos with their relatives in WhatsApp, that information ends up in Ukrainian military HQs next day. With photos. And later used, for example, to harass the relatives of the soldier.

Could be some other mechanism (e.g. Google Drive or some other kind of malware), hard to be sure in the world, where since 2011 Snowden's revelations, bugs are placed my NSA and CIA everywhere, starting from hardware and firmware.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-06-17 20:40:29+00:00
KWin/Plasma have a switch in the settings where you can toggle vaseline on or off. If you run modern X11 applications that are HiDPI-aware, or you can crank the size of fonts and controls however you want, you may turn it off. If you have that Athena widget application that is tiny otherwise, you turn it on (alas, there is no possibility to have two sets of X display and putting apps on the one you need).

The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?

(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)
by Centigonal | 2025-06-17 20:40:35+00:00
> the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history

This is a good read: https://www.mypersiancorner.com/death-to-america-explained-o...

The phrase is ugly, but it's how you say "fuck the US government" in a very melodramatic and poetic language where the most common way of calling your friend's baby cute translates to "let me martyr myself for this child."
by drob518 | 2025-06-17 20:40:47+00:00
Chemical batteries are one possibility. They’re expensive and it’s not clear how reliable they are going to be at scale, but yes, the could help for some periods. There are also capacity limitations. They are probably better for day/night scenarios, not weeks-long weather patterns.

Some of the ideas like using energy to pump water uphill into a reservoir and then generating hydro power when you release it back down into a lower reservoir are interesting in terms of reliability, but they aren’t great for efficiency (hydro generation inefficiency). You can do that without having a natural river, which reduces some of the ecological issues with dams.
by gspencley | 2025-06-17 20:41:01+00:00
That's a very fair point.

I think the difference is that Iran has been actively trying to follow through with its threats and this has been demonstrated through its actions towards an American ally over the past year. This gives reason to believe that Iran's threats are both credible and, while a full-scale war between Iran and the USA might not fare well for Iran ... you don't need to demonstrate that you are capable of wiping out a population or winning a war in order to represent a credible threat. If only one of Iran's missiles manage to land in a densely populated area... people die. And that's enough to warrant a response IMO.
by Buttons840 | 2025-06-17 20:41:33+00:00
> have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program

The US Director of National Intelligence testified to congress a few weeks ago that no US intelligence agency believes that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and that they believed Iran was at least 3 years away from having the ability to build a nuclear bomb even if they tried.

What you are saying directly contradicts what US intelligence agencies have said.

A couple sources: https://jewishinsider.com/2025/03/gabbard-iran-is-not-curren... https://www.newsweek.com/tulsi-gabbard-iran-nuclear-weapon-2...