MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-11 21:40:05+00:00
What's worse is how much the modern world and software quality has trained them to just be so helpless.

My mom has been using Windows computers since before I was born. She would spend all sorts of time working on the computer, creating tests for her classes, researching my sister's illness on the pre-2000s internet (with great success even!), had no problem adopting software over the years as things upgraded and changed, had no problems pivoting to using a Macbook at work, had extremely few problems adapting to remote learning, to the point of asking me for advice using OBS to improve her ability to run a virtual classroom (for things like different "scenes" and control over her output video). She broadly understands the concept of "files" and directories and how to move them and transfer them and manage them well.

But at some point, she forgot how the "Start" menu worked! You put her at a Windows desktop and she doesn't know how to start the program she needs to use! Do you know how much goddamned money Microsoft spent ingraining the start button in people's heads in the 90s?

But it's just gone. Because modern web based stuff follows no patterns. It makes no sense. Shit just happens sometimes, with no feedback, with no warning, and sometimes breaks while only leaving a damn error message in the javascript console, and the behavior changes from one day to the next. The only way people who aren't experts can hope to navigate this hellhole is to learn EXACT workflows and never change them and never think of changing them and never attempt to do anything novel in case it breaks everything without warning and don't pay heed to any dialogs because they don't contain useful info anyway.

Like, what did we expect to happen when we punished people for trying to build mental models of this stuff? You cannot build simple mental models of webapps. Companies don't want you to, because then you might not be as bamboozled and you might be less susceptible to advertising.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-11 21:40:11+00:00
Social structures still exist in social situations. I don't really see what the alternative would be.

I found an interesting interview on youtube of someone who grew up in Japan and moved to Korea:

> What is your favorite thing about Korea?

> I find it comfortable that Koreans are honest about their thoughts.

> In the beginning I was hurt a lot and it was hard because of how honest Koreans are

> What do you think is the difference between Korea and Japan?

> First of all I think there is a difference in personality

> Since I was living in Japan, up until I was 18 years old, I had a typical Japanese personality

> Back then I couldn't speak my mind [...] and dancing was the only way I could express myself

> [...] and I also couldn't reject [someone/something]

> when my friends said we should do something, I always said yes

> after living in Korea, I felt a lot that I need to say what I want and don't want to do

Given that it's unacceptable to reject what a peer wants to do in Japan, I can see where making suggestions to a superior would cause problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqqwrZqjK8
by jofer | 2025-06-11 21:40:29+00:00
Mud isn't just to flush out cuttings. It's also to support the borehole. At large depths, you can't keep an open borehole and the "high energy" methods can't work because the borehole will collapse in on itself as it's created. Rocks are quite weak in tension. Drilling mud is dense and offsets the stresses trying to close to borehole as you get deeper.
by egberts1 | 2025-06-11 21:41:14+00:00
Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University.

I like to see that with known drone sounds, maybe missiles and rockets too.

But that is closed-source.

One viable open-source alternatives is written in Python and uses CNN algorithm.

https://github.com/LonesX/Bird-Song-Recognition

That LoneX lets you add new sounds
by prlambert | 2025-06-11 21:41:19+00:00
Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spending as children age through different phases are quite predictable and the spending is huge and touches almost every aspect of the person's life.
by kurthr | 2025-06-11 21:41:28+00:00
Sorry, it's not true that "initial drying is absolutely 100% not different than any other time".

https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pub/em-8600-wood-m...

Fiber saturation is a thing and it rarely exceeds 30% for usable lumber.

I'm mostly going on what I've read though I went outside to measure a 30" fir just now and it's 100% (REED Pinless). The 100 yr old apple trees were over 80%, but that's not peer reviewed (nor is it pay walled). Maybe people can cut down trees and toss them straight into an Alaskan for exactly this reason? Firewood sitting covered outside is <10%.

As for pretty shocking. Yes it would be, if the 36" door (flat sawn book matched) to my house didn't open, because it was an inch too big (it accommodates <1/4"/ft). It's about a hundred years old, and I'm pretty sure that's never happened.
by didibus | 2025-06-11 21:41:58+00:00
> But I get skeptical when I see claims that we know how the universe began or how it will end

Absolutely, but you are interpreting it in the rewritten headline money making attention grabbing version.

The original version of the claims always say that from some observation, experiments, and projection from known models it derives that the universe likely began this way, or will end that way, etc.

That means, of all the going hypothesis, this might be the one with the best chances of being true, or close to the truth. It's not an absolute, but its the one that has the most chances due to the evidence behind it.
by eichin | 2025-06-11 21:42:00+00:00
We had a "smart display" that was a wall-projector that someone was throwing out, a raspi zero and some python code that used SDL to display some numbers (in a huge font) from a requests fetch of a csv file. Once we moved out of incubator space and into a real office, we duplicated it so that it was visible in more places (at the time, terribly under-spec projectors were $150ish and melted/burned within a year of 24/7 operation; after a couple of iterations of that we'd grown enough to have an actual analytics team that got a big screen and a dashboard up in the kitchen - but noone really looked at it, the thing about the projector version was that it had One Big Number that Went Up and so it was easy to care about.)

Since it was widely visible it occasionally got augmented with "N days to <critical deadline>", usually conference appearances.

Also, originally it was unfunded (free raspis, trashpicked projectors) but when it first went away due to projector meltdown, the legendarily cheap CEO showed up with a replacement, because he really liked having The Number on display.

(Didn't have build status, but it did change from green to red on certain kinds of infrastructure failure, which wasn't as useful as it sounds.)
by hellisothers | 2025-06-11 21:44:22+00:00
I “search” (using this word liberally here) by using a newsreader and adding sources to it over time that I find to have a high signal (whether I agree with them or not). This way new things come to me without having to explicitly look for them, often before others have heard about it, usually from several different angles. If I have to explicitly go search for something the results are usually low signal chum :(
by mrandish | 2025-06-11 21:44:38+00:00
I used to hang out with Penn back when I was a castle member and he never mentioned that to me. I guess it's possible that happened but it would have been a very long time ago. The Magic Castle was founded in the late 1960s by two brothers, Bill and Milt Larson. Since then it has gone through quite a few different regimes. There was a brief time back in the 1980s when P&T were first breaking nationally when some older magicians made an issue about what they heard the P&T show contained (most hadn't actually seen it themselves). But this was a minority of magicians, mostly older hobby-types, and never the working pros. Every club tends to have some older cranks who focus on policing hall passes or whatever. If P&T wanted to go to the Castle in recent decades they'd be gladly welcomed. I'm pretty sure Michael Close, who's been the senior technical coordinator running the behind-the-scenes of P&T's Fool Us show for many years was on the Magic Castle board of directors at some point.

It would make more sense if perhaps P&T were "uninvited" from the UK's Magic Circle, which is a very different, much smaller and entirely unrelated private magic club. The Magic Circle only very recently started allowing female members, so I'm pretty sure P&T would be delighted to be banned there.
by nathan_compton | 2025-06-11 21:44:51+00:00
> It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never to return. Maybe like a black hole evaporating as observed from the inside?

But in this story the black hole increases in size as matter falls into the horizon and shrinks as it evaporates, so cosmic expansion would be associated with more energy falling into the black hole than leaving it.
by sureglymop | 2025-06-11 21:44:56+00:00
I don't understand GitHubs popularity in the first place... You have git as the interoperable version control "protocol" but then slap proprietary issue, PR, CI and project management features on top that one couldn't bring with when migrating away? At that stage what is even the point of it being built on git? Also, for all that is great about git, I don't think it's the best version control system we could have at all. I wish we'd do some serious wheel reinventing here.
by math_dandy | 2025-06-11 21:45:36+00:00
Could you give more details about what precisely you mean by interpolation and generalization? The commonplace use of “generalization” in the machine learning textbooks I’ve been studying is model performance (whatever metric is deemed relevant) on new data from the training distribution. In particular, it’s meaningful when you’re modeling p(y|x) and not the generative distribution p(x,y).
by umbra07 | 2025-06-11 21:46:01+00:00
> Just the fact that they lived so much longer.

But... why does living longer in and of itself command an extra degree of respect?

> And are usually more wise in life experience.

assertion ;)

> That doesn't mean I tolerate old farts shouting at my children for being young. Or excuse shitty behavior in general.

> But the default for me is paying respect for the elders.

> Offering them my seat in the train if there is no other, etc.

I offer old people my seat because they'll likely feel pain if they have to stand up for a while, they might fall down if the bus goes bump, etc. I won't be pained by standing up for 45 minutes so it doesn't really come at any cost to me.

i.e. I'm not giving up my seat because I respect old people for being old.
by kulahan | 2025-06-11 21:46:22+00:00
I saw a thing once where a guy would make 3 large cuts at the bottom of a tree, in a particular pattern. This would kill the tree, and it would essentially air-dry over the course of a year or two. I wonder how that compares.

I should note he was a homesteader doing this to provide dry wood with easy access during cold months.
by robocat | 2025-06-11 21:46:29+00:00
Car reliability was assessed in this finding using member survey responses concerning personal car issues during the previous 12 months

In other words, their results are not cost based and are kinda bullshit.

The best data I've ever seen is from YourMechanic in 2016 https://archive.is/Tpizp :

we have a massive dataset of the make and model of the cars we have serviced and the type of maintenance done. We decided to use our data to understand which cars break down the most and have the highest maintenance costs

Have a squiz at the table of "Which Car Models Have the Lowest Maintenance Cost? Based On Total Maintenance Costs Over 10 Years". A Subaru model only just squeeks in at the last line (20th place).

Hard to actually compare manufacturers because you'd have to weight the per model costs. I've bought 4 second-hand Toyota's since reading that and my personal experience has been reliability and that Toyota part costs are reasonable and mechanics are affordable and they like to work on Toyotas. I've bought 96 high mileage 4WD still going great, 2006 van going great, 2011? station wagon which I've now sold, 96 high mileage station wagon (used for commute every day by cousin - going great).

Anybody know of any better source of information, based on real maintenance cost measurements?
by serf | 2025-06-11 21:47:09+00:00
I think the phrase 'believe in science' is weird; it's nearly as problematic as "I have faith in science".

It can be, but generally the concept of 'belief' isn't attributed to ground truths; it's just 'the truth', you rarely hear the phrase "I believe 2 and 2 is 4." , it's just '2 and 2 is 4.' -- I think that's important.

In fact, a lot of people insert the word 'believe' to insert a concept of self-doubt. "What was our last test results passing rate?" "I believe it was around 95 percent.."

But semantics aside here's the real question : Why do you have some kind of notion that you should 'believe' anything without being able to understand it? Just trust in the world and those around you?

We haven't figured origin yet, so let's get off that, but when a scientist of some sort makes a discovery, they release evidence and methods , and you decide to believe the conclusions without an understanding of the work -- well that's just a display of faith. Faith in the scientist themselves, the system they work within, and the society you're in.

Which leads me to say this : If you make an effort to begin to understand the frameworks and systems which lead to scientific conclusions you can largely remove the faith and belief elements up until you hit the very highest spectrums of each field where speculation comes back into play.

tl;dr : if you 'cant understand a shit', you don't put any leg-work in and make an effort to speak the language, you'll probably end back up in beliefs rather than an ever increasing codex of knowledge -- regardless of the field. That's okay -- but it doesn't offer the same benefits as knowledge -- it just lets one say things like "I don't believe in any theory..."
by belter | 2025-06-11 21:47:09+00:00
We can claim to simulate the first femtoseconds of the universe...model nuclear detonations in software down to quantum effects....but 340 million citizens buying gas and groceries? That’s somehow beyond our grasp... :-)

Maybe the problem isn’t complexity, but that science gets arrogant when it drifts into realms where its claims can’t be falsified ;-)
by LinAGKar | 2025-06-11 21:47:14+00:00
From what I understand, it used to be similar here in Sweden, but that change with the du reform in the 60s and 70s, when people started saying "du" to everyone, and "ni" became purely plural (unless you're speaking to royalty).

We also pretty much always use first name, at least everywhere I've been. Would feel weird to call people by their last name.
by account-5 | 2025-06-11 21:47:21+00:00
There was a thread a while ago on here where the hypothesis for why things are moving apart at faster rates is down to time moving at different speeds due to mass.

So time in the void between galaxies is moving quicker than time in the galaxies, but on the grand scale of the universe the differences as up a lot.

I quite liked this theory, think is make sense, at least from my very limited understanding of this stuff.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-11 21:47:57+00:00
I'm still highly skeptical of gaussian splatting as anything more than a demo. The files are too large. The steak sandwich is 12meg (as just one example)

There was a guassain splat based Matterport port clone at least year's siggraph. To view a 2 bedroom apartment required streaming 1.5gig

Cool demo
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-06-11 21:48:15+00:00
"We want to do this the right way" felt possibly genuine when we waited for them to launch their AI in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and they finally said they will.

But then they didn't.

So this is just pure cringe now. The "right way" isn't to ship garbage like AI emoticons and let Siri be a lobotomized voice command tool, while there's stuff like Gemini, Copilot and GPT out there, for free.
by Vetch | 2025-06-11 21:48:33+00:00
This contains a common misstep (or misgeneralization of an analogy) among those who are much more familiar with computers than with the brain. The brain is not digital and concepts like frames per second and resolution don't make much sense for vision. First, there aren't frames, neuron activity is asynchronous with changes to sensory neuron firing rate responding to changes in the environment or according to saliency.

Between the non-uniformity of receptor density (eg fovea vs peripheral vision but this is general across all senses), dynamic receptor fields and the fact that information is encoded in terms of spike rate and timing patterns across neural populations, the idea of pixels in some bitmap at some resolution is beyond misleading. There is no pixel data, just sparsely coded feature representations capturing things like edges, textures, motion, color contrast and the like, already, at the retina.

While hundreds of trillions of photons might hit our photoreceptors, > 99% of that is filtered and or compressed before even reaching retinal ganglion cells. Only a tiny fraction, about 10 million bits/sec, of the original photon signal rate is transferred through the optic nerve (per eye). This pattern of filtering and attentive prioritization of information in signals continues as we go from sensory fields to thalamus to higher cortical areas.

So while we might encounter factoids like: on the order of a billion bits per second of data hit photoreceptors or [10Mb/s transferred](https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...) along optic nerves, it's important to keep in mind that a lot of the intuition gained from digital information processing does not transfer in any meaningful sense to the brain.
by com2kid | 2025-06-11 21:49:11+00:00
IMHO we are at the point now where ambient computing is fully possible using locally self hosted AI and LLMs.

I explore the ideas more in a post at https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-... but the tl;dr is ~24-32GB of VRAM in a server shoved in a basement can do a lot. Imagine a machine that is fully owned by the user with no corporate spying. It can listen 24/7 to everything in the house, using technology like wifi location sensing it knows what room people are in (it is a thing now!) and can relay messages for a person to the closest speaker.

Even 8B parameter LLMs are great at ambiguous inputs, and new TTS models are weighting in under 1B parameters.

Connecting the LLM up to everything a person wants to do is the real issue. Homekit integrations exist, but Homekit isn't exactly a mass consumer technology. What RabbitOS aims to do is IMHO the proper path: Drive an android phone to accomplish tasks.
by afarah1 | 2025-06-11 21:49:20+00:00
>follow-up thought I'm hoping somebody else has also thought about [...] dark energy as _negative energy_ [...] Maybe like a black hole evaporating

Another layman's thoughts: Isn't the energy theoretically lost by black holes so faint it's currently undetectable? And isn't the amount of dark energy theorized to be the major component of the observable universe? It seems like the numbers wouldn't add up?
by strangattractor | 2025-06-11 21:49:30+00:00
I think there is case to be made that AI companies are taking the content - providing people with a modified version of that content and not necessarily providing references to the original material.

Much of the content that is created by people is done so to generate revenue. They are denied that revenue when people don't go to their site. One might interpret that as theft. In the case of GRRM's books - I would assumed they were purchased and the author received the revenue from the sale.
by arp242 | 2025-06-11 21:49:49+00:00
User is banned for repeatedly posting bollocks such as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887087 – and that just barely scratches the surface. You might want to check your facts before engaging in these rants.

As for your other complaint about moderation, this is obviously just basic rate-limiting that exists on many platforms to prevent (or last least, limit) spam. You've been around long enough that you should have been able to figure that out on your own.
by nathan_compton | 2025-06-11 21:49:49+00:00
I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same.

I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.
by radicalbyte | 2025-06-11 21:51:54+00:00
Can I ask why you use it? We used test strips - they're really cheap and way more accurate as women's bodies aren't clocks. That was effective for getting pregnant.

Using anything except some kind of active measures to avoid pregnancy doesn't pass my engineer brain and certainly doesn't pass my wife's Pharmacologist brain (i.e. she actually knows what she's talking about whereas I'm using applied probability theory with assumptions).
by cubefox | 2025-06-11 21:52:00+00:00
> There's then evidence of what's called Predictive Coding. When that future happens, a higher level circuit decides how far off we were, and then releases appropriate neuromodulators to re-wire that circuit.

Yes, and ideally there would be whole backpropagation passes which update the entire model depending on how much the current observation diverges from past predictions. (Though brains use an updating mechanism which diverges from the backpropagation algorithm.)

Edit: Apparently the theory of this is broadly known (apart from "JEPA" and "predictive coding") also under the names "free energy principle" and "active inference": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
by Mizza | 2025-06-11 21:52:09+00:00
Demos here: https://resemble-ai.github.io/chatterbox_demopage/ (not mine)

This is a good release if they're not too cherry picked!

I say this every time it comes up, and it's not as sexy to work on, but in my experiments voice AI is really held back by transcription, not TTS. Unless that's changed recently.
by inerte | 2025-06-11 21:52:35+00:00
Or the judge who sued his condominium demanding its employees call him "doutor" (Your Honor)...

As a Brazilian raised to not care about this stuff, I would say even rebelled a bit, it was weird to basically be required to do so once I reached adulthood. I remember getting in front of a sheriff and having to address him as "doutor". I remember talking to an intern in law firms and he corrected me when I addressed him by name saying, "No, it's DOUTOR Adriano".

Gee, let's not even mention the medical field... veterinarians and nutritionists want to be called "doutor"...