MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-06-06 16:50:29+00:00
TFA mentions why academia is not the same as Bell Labs. Most researchers spend more time writing grant proposals than doing research. And the culture of publish-or-die leads to a lot of stress to just get something out the door, which leads to a lot of bad science on top of it. Especially in the softer sciences where good experiments are hard to do right.

It is debatable whether NASA has made any great leaps of discovery or engineering over the last 3 decades or so. The Apollo missions were spectacularly successful (even accounting for setbacks) and we have a great deal of insight as to why they worked so well.

I have my own thoughts about why it doesn't work today (in the West, at least) but I'll keep them to myself because they are not organized and are likely to start a political debate or three in any case.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-06-06 16:51:02+00:00
> The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as people don't infringe upon the rights of others, they don't need your permission to just go build things and exist

This is hollow sophistry, and it’s not how things actually are.

You don’t have freedom for Self dealing, price fixing, collusion, bribery, false marketing, antitrust violations, selling baby powder with lead and many other things.

In some states you can’t even legally collect rainwater.

Also the government will come after you with guns and throw you in jail if you violate some bogus and fictitious “intellectual property rights” that last for 70 years after creator has died.

It’s u helpful to pretend we live in Wild West of liberty
by dylan604 | 2025-06-06 16:51:03+00:00
That's the nuclear option though. There should be plenty of more diplomatic ways before hit the big red button. Sadly, those options that we thought were there have been shown to only be a valid option if you have people with spine to stand up and utilize the options. Instead, we've seen where kowtowing has been the norm for so long that we seem to have lost our collective spine.

Watching the Obama admin capitulate to the then speaker preventing his nominee from moving forward was abysmal. There was no valid reasoning for it, but it laid the ground work for why the bench looks like it does. There are plenty of other prior examples of the spines of the minority being brow beat to the point that not allowing POTUS to move his nominee forward was a collective should shrug
by sagyam | 2025-06-06 16:51:20+00:00
- I like bullet points, they are easy to read.

- "Working" I wanted to keep things consistent.

- Content getting cut was a limitation of iframe. Most blogging platform don't allows you to embed another page. This was best I could do given the limitation.

- I do use AI to bounce ideas, but a lot of effort went into getting the apps working as intended.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-06 16:51:22+00:00
That's because they are not a platform for education. They are a platform for ads and encouraging hyperconsumerism. They merely allow educational material, sometimes. Expect more videos to be removed over time that don't align with their goals. e.g. I would not expect playlists of hour-long MIT lectures to stay there for the long term as the platform moves more toward shorts and algorithmic recommendations. Or their vast library of people's old random amateur videos that barely get any views/generate almost no revenue while costing them money.
by dmos62 | 2025-06-06 16:51:26+00:00
I use Breathly. It's great visually and audibly. And, you can use a custom timing. It also has a few other presets, including box breathing. And, it keeps the screen on, though I wish it would work when my android is locked (in my pocket).

https://github.com/mmazzarolo/breathly-app
by swat535 | 2025-06-06 16:51:50+00:00
It's not at all difficult if you are eating junk food. For example a single Medium Pizza alone is enough to fill your entire day's worth of calories.

I know because I've experimented with this when I started measuring my weight, heck sometimes having a single Wendy's Baconator will not only fill your entire calories but even make you gain weight.

Your activity levels of course also matter but I'm assuming sedentary lifestyle.

This is much more different for healthy foods however.
by chollida1 | 2025-06-06 16:52:46+00:00
> It is a much bigger deal to say that Trump is a pedophile (under blackmail by Mossad/CIA)

Did Elon mention Mossad or the CIA at all? I didn't see that, he only mentioned that Trump is in the Epstien files as far as I know. Which I thought we already knew from the released address book and flight logs.
by ramesh31 | 2025-06-06 16:53:45+00:00
>The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

I think we massively underestimate just how much one simple fact, the absurd explosion of housing costs, have contributed to this. Take that away and just about everyone would have this kind of freedom. Look at just the gaming industry for example. Practically any great game from the past decade you can name was made in Europe or Japan; places that have kept these costs low relative to the rest of the West. When you don't have everyone terrified about how they're going to make rent next month, it frees up literally everything else. You can take these random walks and experiment when the cost of your existence doesn't necessitate bringing in huge amounts of income.
by rglover | 2025-06-06 16:53:59+00:00
Sure, but those millions of servers and devices are not directly connected (nor can be by the AI). The plot in the movie I shared necessitated the AI being able to turn any computer into extra compute for itself—what's necessary for a "we can never shut it down" scenario.

The power switch is still king, even if it's millions of power switches versus one.
by Trenthug | 2025-06-06 16:54:27+00:00
Your definition of “Truth” as only what is measurable within “existential reality” assumes a metaphysical position while claiming to avoid one. To say that only the measurable exists is not a scientific conclusion—it is a philosophical stance, one that excludes entire domains of thought, theory, and even aspects of physics that deal in probabilities, indirect observation, or emergent properties.

Even in physics, what is “measurable” often depends on model-dependent realism, theoretical constructs, and instrumental interpretation. If truth is bound strictly to direct measurement or forensic account, then foundational aspects of modern science—like quantum states before observation or cosmological inflation—would also fall outside “Truth.”

You draw a hard line between reality and approximation, but approximation is intrinsic to how we access even the most "empirical" data. All observation is filtered—through instruments, through models, through minds.

To say “nothing exists which does not exist in existential reality” may feel precise, but in practice, it's circular: it simply redefines existence as what fits your framework. That may be internally consistent, but it’s hardly the final word on Truth. It limits Truth to one method of access, and in doing so, quietly excludes the very richness of reality that inspires both science and philosophy.

Good day, and thank you for the thoughtful engagement.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-06 16:54:43+00:00
I think the idea is that it gives you a declarative way to build simple adventure games with text and dialogue.

Its selling point isn't for building mechanics-first games like a more general engine (e.g. Pico-8).

But what you can do is easily make maps, a character that walks between maps, NPCs, and triggers for dialogue/text.

Consider other engines aimed at non-programmers like RPGMaker: the main games people make with it are "narrative games" where you walk around and read text/dialogue, usually with zero additional mechanics outside of the built-in map + trigger system. It's probably 90% of games built with it!

So I'd reckon they're saying "you can build those games with this tool too".
by abeppu | 2025-06-06 16:55:21+00:00
I haven't used the app and likely won't but neither article shows the mechanism by which users opt into "sharing" their interactions. Is there a dark pattern involved?

Like, in lots of other app contexts, you can hit "share" and then get a modal that gives you options (do you want to share it via WhatsApp or messages or email or ...) and only after you select a mode and a recipient does it actually get shared -- but if you make a "share" button whose behavior is "immediately publish", people might reasonably be surprised if they actually just want to share the results with a specific trusted person who they expected to select next in the interaction.
by gs17 | 2025-06-06 16:56:09+00:00
Yep, I've tried, but if I say, e.g. "let's use Matrix!" it ends up being the app they only have to talk to me, and most of what they say is "why can't you use the app everyone else uses". Most people already have a second choice that isn't much better than a Meta app (or is also Meta).
by jacurtis | 2025-06-06 16:56:40+00:00
It is for testing python projects that connect to postgres.

So often what you do is when unit testing, you need to test CRUD-type operations between the application and the database. So you generally have to spin up a temporary database just to delete it at the end of the tests. Commonly this is done with SQLite during testing, even if you built the application for postgres in production. Because it is fast and easy and you can interact with it as a file, not requiring connection configurations and added bloat.

But then sometimes your app gets complicated enough that you are using Postgres features that SQLite doesn't have comparables to. So now you need a PG instance just for testing, which is a headache.

So this project bridges the gap. Giving you the feature completedness and consistency across envs of using postgres, but with the conveniences of using SQLite.
by saqibtahir | 2025-06-06 16:56:42+00:00
I think what is more likely to happen is that how 'transformers' work may change. Or a new way of working might be introduced.

Transformer models are already reaching peak of their capabilities vs the cost to run them. All I see currently is basically the 'burn' phase, which is important to get to the 'sustain' phase.

With new stuff coming literally every week, I believe it is not a long time till either transformers get replaced, or some new version of them is introduced which is far more efficient.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-06 16:56:51+00:00
I think if the thread gets too deep, HN will cut it off, so I'll to continue in parallel here. I hope you see it so we can continue (if it pleases you).

> what level of consciousness matters?

We can start at least with the obvious distinction between "None at all" vs "Some" even if we don't know where the change happens. Asking "how much" only works if you want to investigate this dilemma within the "some" category, which we at least agree does not include embryos, and that embryos are in the "none at all" category. Investigating the "some" category strikes me as substantially more difficult because of that question about how much is enough.

For now, I say that "some" level of consciousness is required for mattering, which precludes a "none at all" level of consciousness from mattering.

Consider brain death. When a body becomes nothing more than a mass of tissue kept in motion by machine intervention without any brain activity, do we not say that it's ok for the family to decide to pull the plug? Because I say that it's ok to not keep brain dead patients on life support until the sun eventually explodes and the power runs out. But maybe you don't. And I understand that this is talking about an end rather than a beginning, but it's really just the other end of your question about how much consciousness matters. Clearly in that scenario the consensus answer is "at least some".

> There are severely disabled adults who have never been as "conscious" as some of the more advanced other animals. Do they just not count?

Question needed for me to establish a more shared understanding: Are you vegan? (I am not.)

If so, most people in the world are not, and that means if we're comparing to animals then clearly, at least en masse, we do discount lesser animal consciousness even if good vegans don't. But at least this framework would be consistent with a view that a threshold of human-level consciousness shouldn't matter.

If not, do you have a basis other than degrees of sapience for believing that a human embryo is worth worrying about but a chicken embryo is not that doesn't stem from egocentric instinctive queasiness? (I mean "egocentric" neutrally here, not negatively) Because the only other option I know of is "the <religious_book> says so", which is thought-terminating and we won't be able to move past that.

> If this tech had been commonplace when my parents decided they wanted to have a baby and conceived me, they would have had to look at this graded set of their offspring, one of which was me, and pick me out of the group

I get what you're saying but people actually already do this decision-making and have been doing so for a very long time. They just do it ahead of time by choosing who they reproduce with. Couples all over the world make decisions literally all the time about passing on negative potentially-heritable traits, from mild Autism to Scoliosis to Tay-Sachs.
by gizmo686 | 2025-06-06 16:57:07+00:00
Based on how the number of open files dropped down to 15 or lower after the error, I doubt the issue was caused by an actual leak.

I have had issues with not quite FD leaks, where we would open the same file a bunch of times for some tasks. It is not a leak because we close all of the FDs at the end of the task. In particular, this meant that it slipped past the explicit FD leak detection logic we had in our test harness. It also worked flawlessly in our long running stress tests.

For a while people assumed it was legit, because it only showed up on tasks that involved thousands of files, and the needed FD limit seemed to scale to the input file count.
by mitkebes | 2025-06-06 16:57:15+00:00
Does double VPN get around these kind of blocks? My understanding is the VPNs are expected to block the websites for french users, but it sounds like people could use VPN #1 to appear as a non-french user to VPN #2. VPN #2 can then allow the user to access the blocked websites, because the law only applies to french users.
by okwhateverdude | 2025-06-06 16:58:01+00:00
It's difficult to do but demonstrably possible. That's why it is hard to consider any non-willpower solution. And why it is very easy to be consumed by ego if you've done it. I used to be in the militant-willpower camp because I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, so to speak. I had to study... me, in order to make it work. I had to be smarter than default mode network me and anticipate my behavior.

To change my lifestyle meant somehow incorporating all the good behaviors I wanted to do but within the limitations of being me. It took a lot of work. I carefully measured my caloric intake (gram scale all the things) and expenditure (fitness watch with optical HR, fancy schmancy scale that does body fat estimation) plus doing things like: always taking the stairs, combine my morning run/cycle with my commute (shower at the office), taking the longer way, etc. Dropped 40kg. Went from couch to running half-marathons and cycling centuries. I had to completely change my relationship with food and study all of the nutrition stuff that was never taught to me. I had to unlearn habits instilled by my parents (emotional eating, boredom eating) which meant finding different ways to deal with stress and relieve boredom. ADHD is a bitch. And weed is awesome. Learning how to accommodate munchies without putting on weight also requires forethought.

No. It really isn't all that realistic for everyone to do what I did much less have the same privileges and opportunities. I had to treat my body like a biologist studying a critter. I was incredibly lucky to be at the right spot in my life where I hit a glass ceiling at work and had so much fuck you energy pent up from feeling out of control of my life. I chose to exert maximum control over my body in order to cope and prove something.

It was a monumental amount of effort over a two year period. It is extremely unrealistic to ask people to use a gram scale for their food consistently. Or to log/track their food intake for every bite. Or to always monitor their heart rate to estimate/track your caloric output. Hyper monitoring your body is a weird hobby.

I really do think instead we should be legislating and regulating food more strictly. Labeling isn't really enough. Food science is being weaponized, much like psychology has been with advertising. We shouldn't allow that kind of manipulation for profit.
by btown | 2025-06-06 16:58:44+00:00
I'm not sure about this specific situation, but from Google Docs to ChatGPT to Notion, there's a clear distinction between "make this a shareable link to only those who have the link" and "also make that shareable link searchable/discoverable by the public."

If Meta is turning that "searchability/discoverability" on by default when a share button is activated on an AI chat - or worse, if they're not even giving this industry-standard option - that would both explain the confusion, and be a terribly unexpected dark pattern. As the parent notes, the activation of a share icon is not informed consent.
by yousif_123123 | 2025-06-06 16:58:49+00:00
Also just more accessibility in terms of being able to pay for it. As a viewer in Canada, there was no service whatsoever that was showing the Real Madrid vs Barcelona Spanish cup final a few months ago (Copa del Rey). I had to signup on a Spanish state tv website and use a VPN to access it for free.

I would have gladly paid, but there was no opportunity.

Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem.
by Arnavion | 2025-06-06 16:59:26+00:00
You want to optimize for specific chips because different chips have different capabilities that are not captured by just what extensions they support.

A simple example is that the CPU might support running two specific instructions better if they were adjacent than if they were separated by other instructions ( https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/macro-operation_fusion ). So the optimizer can try to put those instructions next to each other. LLVM has target features for this, like "lui-addi-fusion" for CPUs that will fuse a `lui; addi` sequence into a single immediate load.

A more complex example is keeping track of the CPU's internal state. The optimizer models the state of the CPU's functional units (integer, address generation, etc) so that it has an idea of which units will be in use at what time. If the optimizer has to allocate multiple instructions that will use some combination of those units, it can try to lay them out in an order that will minimize stalling on busy units while leaving other units unused.

That information also tells the optimizer about the latency of each instruction, so when it has a choice between multiple ways to compute the same operation it can choose the one that works better on this CPU.

See also: https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1/ https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1.5/

If you don't do this your code will still run on your CPU. It just won't necessarily be as optimal as it could be.
by bityard | 2025-06-06 17:00:02+00:00
I once worked for a company that was very much like this in spirit. The whole management culture was: hire smart people, tell them the company's priorities, give them a general direction, remove any obstacles that stand in their way, actively encourage cross-team communication and collaboration, and in general leave them the fuck alone so they can work.

Unfortunately it was bought by another company whose management style was entirely the opposite and it became a shell of its former self and all the smart people left before me.
by mikem170 | 2025-06-06 17:00:19+00:00
What about taxes?

The corporate tax rate was much higher during the 1950s and 1960s [0], which would seem to encourage companies to invest in research to grow their business instead of giving the government the money.

I don't have a strong opinion on this, but it seems like it could be a factor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
by echelon | 2025-06-06 17:00:23+00:00
> There is already a beautiful, exciting world out there full of animals and plants and we don't need AI or some computer crap to experience it.

I'm glad that this works for you, but I want more.

We're temporary apes on a soon to be permanent addition of metallicity to our sun's outer atmosphere. I don't think we should romanticize or hold anything sacred about our very temporary place in the universe.

We are metastable and ephemeral. Everything in this world is.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 17:00:31+00:00
> Meanwhile Nvidia is charging $20k+ for an A100 GPU with 80GB ram.

Or, sometime in the next month or so, NVidia GB10-based miniPC form factor devices with 128GB (with high-speed interconnect to allow two to serve as a single 256GB system) from various brands (including direct from Nvidia) for $3000-4000 depending on exact configuration and who is assembling the completed system.
by taylodl | 2025-06-06 17:00:40+00:00
Big talk and lots of hand-waving.

I call BS.

Those integrations? That is the problem in the enterprise. I don't see how you can wave your magic AI wand and make it all go away. In fact, one of the limitations I see in AI is it doesn't understand those integrations. That's the local training I want to augment my AI system with: I need a service catalog and a data catalog, with services defined in terms of data nomenclature. Once the AI knows that for my particular enterprise, then it can go to town and start producing useful code. Then my prompt can be "I need to get <such and such data> and cross-correlate with <some other data> and filter out based on parameterized criteria and send the result to <blah>." Then the AI has everything it needs to actually generate the needed code.

THAT is how you revolutionize enterprise development.
by ac29 | 2025-06-06 17:00:51+00:00
> Put another way, the bag of chips at the American grocery is _designed from concept to factory_ to be unable to support living beings.

This is a weird leap. Yes, there is some degree of modern engineering in packaged food to prevent spoilage but "unable to support living beings" is the wrong conclusion. You're implying the food lacks nutritive value, which is not true.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-06-06 17:01:46+00:00
I'm not really sure, but I've always assumed early primitive UNIX implementations didn't support dynamically allocating file descriptors. It's not uncommon to see a global fixed size array in toy OSs.

One downside to your approach is that kernel memory is not swappable in Linux: the OOM failure mode could be much nastier than leaking memory in userspace. But almost any code in the real world is going to allocate some memory in userspace to go along with the FD, that will cause an OOM first.
by sahilagarwal | 2025-06-06 17:02:05+00:00
Me too! I am a data engineer so whenever I have pipeline jobs running, I have a script that monitors them. When the jobs finish, an audio plays stating the job has finished and its status. Thats just one convenient script out of dozens.

Makes life much more easier when I can play video games or read books without having to check status every 20 mins.

Though I haven't created as many as you have. Would you mind sharing some of them??
by intermerda | 2025-06-06 17:02:47+00:00
Early in my career I had this naive starry eyed vision of tech industry being “one of the good people.” Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, companies building stuff to actually help people, solving interesting problems, good work/life balance, etc.

Then I grew up. But after post covid boom layoffs and the last election, I realized it’s no different than any other industry including tobacco and oil who actively harm the public for short term gains. I hate that upper strata with a passion.