MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amelius | 2025-06-30 13:49:20+00:00
You'd use a two-step approach.

1. First create a model that can evaluate how well a task is going; the YT approach can be used here.

2. Then build a real-world robot, and train it by letting it do tasks, and use the first model to supervise it; here the robot can learn to rely on extra senses such as touch/pressure.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-30 13:50:34+00:00
I think the best way to go about optimization is to maintain a constant baseline level of mechanical sympathy with the computer's architecture.

If you burn into your soul the table of NUMA latencies and really accept the inevitable conclusions regarding practical computation, a lot of the optimization discussion simply boils down to keeping the closest cache as hot as possible as often as possible. Put differently, if you can get the working set to ~fit in L1, then you have nothing to worry about. The CPU is faster than most people can reason about now. You can talk to L1 1000x before you can talk to the GPU 1x. This stuff makes a ridiculous difference when applied correctly.

Context switching and communication between threads is where most developers begin to lose the rabbit. Very often a problem can be solved on one physical core much faster than if you force it to be solved across many physical cores.
by Koshima | 2025-06-30 13:50:47+00:00
Appreciate that, and glad Flexprice showed up at the right time. We’ve seen the same pattern: credit systems always look simple with one plan, but as soon as you introduce volume tiers, expirations, or promo logic, it turns into fragile code fast.

We’re building Flexprice specifically to avoid that constant rewrite cycle, good to know it resonates. Happy to chat if you run into edge cases while scaling those new plans.

Good luck with your GenAI launch!
by bluGill | 2025-06-30 13:50:56+00:00
Err, you sound like alcoholics I know who won't use ice in their drinks because they "had a bad icecube once". That is trying to justify your habit by finding anything you can to blame the issues on something else.

I have no idea what the truth is here. However it sounds like your mind won't be open to it if it doesn't allow for your drugs.
by pxc | 2025-06-30 13:50:58+00:00
> Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me.

I got an iPod Nano when I was in 8th or 9th grade, and I loved it. I loved it for its slickness, its fancy display, etc.

Even so, I didn't want iTunes, as I had a much superior player anyway. And I couldn't run it on my own computer even if I wanted to, because by then I was a habitual Linux user. That was okay! Libgpod had good support for syncing with iPods, even though their on-disk format was needlessly obscure.

But I noticed something, after plugging my iPod into the school computers (which had iTunes) to copy some music onto it updated its firmware. Syncing stopped working!

In the lifetime of that device, I went on to witness a series of firmware updates that made no improvements at all, but broke syncing with 3rd-party apps. My previous MP3 player experience was with the excellent MuVo TX FM, which was basically a USB stick with a battery, and let you load music onto it just by naively copying files. Apple's behavior struck me as extremely user-hostile, coercive, condescending, and irritating, and I never forgot it.

I decided then and there that that iPod Nano would be my last Apple purchase. I kept that promise for more than two decades, even after deciding I wanted to own an Apple computer, making sure to always buy used, even for recent models. I finally caved this year, when I bought a gift for someone else based on their preferences and needs, and wanted to give them something properly brand new.

As for the iPod: it, too, eventually received a Rockbox port, which I installed on it and quite enjoyed for a while, before eventually giving it away.
by phoronixrly | 2025-06-30 13:51:44+00:00
While theoretically you can get certified food-safe blend of PLA, the rest of the extrusion path must also be food-safe... I personally am not fond of eating hot degraded PTFE... Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle... Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...

It's just a black hole that I choose not to get into by not printing stuff that's expected to be in contact with food.
by mort96 | 2025-06-30 13:51:49+00:00
Really? But the whole idea behind the space/time trade-off is that in a bunch of cases, if you want to compute something in less memory, you need to solve it in more steps; or if you want to solve something in fewer steps, you need to use more memory.

This seems to wildly contradict the idea that the amount of memory needed is roughly proportional to the number of steps.
by dfxm12 | 2025-06-30 13:51:52+00:00
but to share the gains from new technologies

AI has nothing to do with this. Worker productivity has already been shooting up and workers have been given nothing to match their efforts. As long as capitalism is the default economic system, any pro-worker change will have to be taken. Most corporations can't even allow workers to toil anywhere but under their direct supervision. Giving people more free time is clearly out of the question.
by pickledoyster | 2025-06-30 13:51:53+00:00
I sincerely hope this is his best attempt at dignity, it's so quotable:

Thiel: Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is ——

Douthat: I think it is not — in its current form.

Thiel: I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.

[...]

[Tiel:]And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted.

Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over ——

Douthat: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. We’re ending in the apocalyptic, and you’re ——

Thiel: But my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.
by TimPC | 2025-06-30 13:52:14+00:00
Salary inflation is much trickier to measure because it is confounded by years of experience increasing, getting promotions, etc. The distribution of the working population by seniority also changes over time so it's not self-correcting across the distribution. Assuming you have a good way of measuring it, (salary inflation/price inflation) would be an interesting Financial Quality of Life measure.
by lnsru | 2025-06-30 13:52:14+00:00
Old brick house is just another old house. Moisture problems in the foundation area, no heat insulation on the roof and walls. Probably wooden beams in the floor. Everything is old and outdated decades ago. I am certified electrician in Germany as a hobby and work in such properties very often.

Meanwhile new house is cool in summer and warm in winter. It’s silent with spacious rooms. It is also not affordable for most people too. Old house is a middle ground when one doesn’t have enough money. There is no way to upgrade in sane way old house to modern standards.
by corimaith | 2025-06-30 13:52:19+00:00
>"If you were given remote control of two robot arms, and just one camera to look through, how many different tasks do you think you could complete successfully?"

There are an infinite number of scenes that can be matched to one 2d picture. And what is a scene really? The last time I checked, RGB was not a good way of input in Computer Vision and rather relied on increasing levels of gradients via CNNs to build a compositional scene. None of that is paticularly translatable to how a LM works with text.
by asveikau | 2025-06-30 13:52:24+00:00
The problem is that Reagan/Thatcher's failed experiment is now considered an inevitable law of the universe. Taxes can only go down. Anything else is crazy. You get people talking about taxation's effect on the economy as a baseline assumption without any evidence that it actually works like that. The 1950s was a period of huge economic boom with very high tax rates for top earners, which is a counterexample to popular narratives about how high taxes supposedly hurt the economy.

In the private sector, obsession with short term profits and "shareholder value" is the corollary.

Both of these are now polite consensus, inevitable, but have wrecked government, wrecked our economy, and wrecked people's minds.
by ai-christianson | 2025-06-30 13:52:47+00:00
We just shipped a major feature on our SaaS product. We, of course, used AI extensively.

The thing is, this feature leaned on every bit of experience and wisdom we had as a team --things like making sure the model is right, making sure the system makes sense overall and all the pieces fit together properly.

I don't know that "4x" is how it works --in this case, the AI let us really tap into the experience and skill we already had. It made us faster, but if we were missing the experience and wisdom part, we'd just be more prolific at creating messes.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-30 13:53:18+00:00
The workweek does shorten, in those quiet moments when workers are not doing much of anything. Lord knows that software engineers, who already spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, are now doing even less thanks to improvements in AI automation. I’d bet that software engineers are down to about 3 day work weeks when you sum up all the time they spend actually doing something. It doesn’t feel like it for some people though because they are imprisoned in offices, where they are restricted from doing anything with their time that isn’t work. It is a cruel condition that leads to burnout and long term loss in productivity. It only gets worse as even more efficiency in automation results in having to perform even more office theatre to fill the down time.

My advice to would-be CEOs and managers is to just let people be, don’t try to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s good to have some slack in the workline for when you need it, because the workers who have been treated well are far more likely to jump into an emergency and dump massive loads of work all at once, since they have a lot in reserves. Those emergencies are moments that make or break companies.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-06-30 13:53:39+00:00
The Mazda 3 has gotten nicer too. I test drove one that had a HUD, adaptive cruise control with lane keeping, heated seats and paddle shifters among other features that are standard on all models.

Those are all things that were only available on luxury cars, if at all, in 2005.

In 2025 the base option package would have been a five figure option package in 2005.
by frantzmiccoli | 2025-06-30 13:53:59+00:00
To offer (maybe European) perspective.

The industrial revolution coincides more or less with when starvation started to disappear from the developed world.

In many countries, holidays and PTO are a norm. I personally know a few people that choose to work 4 days a week, I know another bunch that actually retired early or simply don't jump from a job to another because they can free ride for a bit (no judgment).

That also means that you 1/ have to actually prioritize leisure over money 2/ have actually something leisurely to do.
by atonse | 2025-06-30 13:54:08+00:00
Even though I majored in CompSci, I still remember my college essay class and learning about primary and secondary sources and their relative quality, how to craft an argument, and how to articulate your argument to be persuasive. Outside of just writing, those skills have been useful in other scenarios too (like when subconsciously evaluating someone else's argument)

Of course, I still treated it like a lazy college student: I did it in 2.1 or 2.2 line spacing to hit the page requirements, and flipped my thesis because it was easier to research (I started out arguing against the US invading Iraq, but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion... well, we all know how reliable those sources were).
by antisthenes | 2025-06-30 13:55:01+00:00
> In other words, I had been blinding oncoming traffic.

Most modern cars blind oncoming traffic anyway. Either that or 20%+ of morons riding around with high beams and blue/purple LED retrofits.

You may have been defeated by the inspection, but the battle for headlight brightness/alignment was lost years ago.

Or maybe their "alignment" tool was a scam you got robbed of 15 euros?
by _alternator_ | 2025-06-30 13:55:33+00:00
I heard a talk from Mahadevan when I was in grad school, probably around 2010. It was one of the most inspiring talks I heard in my time at Caltech (he was visiting from Harvard). Much of the talk was dedicated to understanding how variable cellular growth creates the visible macroscale structure in plants, from leaves that ripple to flowers as complex as irises. He also had a notable demonstration with an rubber tube glued to an elastic band where he showed how these two structures with different tensions reliably cause the tube to fold into a “knot”, which is the basis for how our hearts form from a folding vein in utero.
by runamuck | 2025-06-30 13:55:38+00:00
I hold remote interviews and I can tell when candidates use AI to answer questions, real time with camera on. They repeat my technical question, pause for a few seconds, their voice drops to a monotone and they quickly recite a bulleted list of low level technical details that sounds like a wikipedia page. I worry that candidates will learn to act more subtle, maybe configure their LLM to return with an anecdote around the tech in question, and practice "selling" their vocal communication.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-30 13:55:50+00:00
Sometimes forcing yourself "not to edit" allows you to bring out things which are hard to catch and hide in the nooks and crannies of your mind.

Brain dumping also works the same way. You write whatever you have in your mind, without even correcting spelling errors. It really brings out things you don't know they are there and bothering you or taking space.

You should at least try once. Takes an hour or so.

I also use a similar method for drafting my blog posts if I have the idea, but can't bring out the rest of the text.
by user070223 | 2025-06-30 13:55:52+00:00
I've skimmed the result couple of weeks ago, and if I remember it states that there from all machines which takes t time to accomplish something there is one such that sqrt(t) memory is used. so it's at most but not on avg nor amorotized[not sure if et even make sense it the space where the problem lies] (you take the least memory hungry machine)
by pxc | 2025-06-30 13:56:33+00:00
It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway.

If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you should probably think of your gaming PC as a much more powerful and much jankier console, and avoid running or storing anything on it other than your games.
by alganet | 2025-06-30 13:56:41+00:00
You don't need catholics, or appeals to the beauty of sunsets, to question the "Turing Test" (there is no such thing, actually).

https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

Here's a quote from Turing:

> I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

Let's think about this "70 per cent chance of making the right identification" thing and what Turing means by that.

What if I make a fake Turing test? A human interrogator and two humans as subjects. That 70% should remain unchanged. Meaning that in his hypothetical year 2000, about 30% of the time, the interrogator should say that the real human is a machine.

So, what was Turing smoking? Why is he predicting that in the 2000s, a human would fail to identify other humans?

He's not. If we believe he's a smart guy (I do), he is also saying that about the 50s. At the time, simply there weren't any machines to make humans think of this problem. It's a hard problem to even grasp.

I would argue that this is the 1950 version of philosophical zombies, and it is the exact same problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie. He explicitly acknowledges this issue.

Turing, therefore, _was_ thinking of the hard problem of consciousness, before it was even defined.

In the same paragraph, he makes this remark:

> The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any improved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

What Turing was trying to do, is to isolate this "hard problem of consciousness" and separate it from easier problems we can actually answer. He never said the problem doesn't exist (quite the contrary, as I demonstrated above).

He is also saying, quite explicitly as well, that this Imitation Game (or what we now call "The Turing Test") is a thought experiment, not a rule written in stone.

What is happening right now in the AI world, is that people are taking these ideas from the 50s, pretending they're rules written in stone, and applying a 50s imagined of the test to machines made in 2025. In other words, they're using an obsolete version.

So, this "next Turing Test", where is it? How can I get the latest version?

You can't, mostly because AI companies have absolutely no interest in disproving themselves. Their benchmarks are tweaked to show their qualities and hide their shortcomings.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know more than Turing. We know this particular class of current machines is prone to hallucinations, and we know they work with a short context. A skilled interrogator in 2025, therefore, knows that.

We should update the thought experiment, then devise "a new hypothetical test" based on this new thought experiment.
by seanwilson | 2025-06-30 13:56:42+00:00
It's just people following trends I think, designers not knowing about WCAG, and designers with decent eyesight not knowing to consider people with poor eyesight. Someone sees some elegant looking site that has grey text and/or thin text, they copy it, someone else copies that etc. without really thinking about what it's going to be like to read a long article with that design.

- From my experience working with designers, many have minimal understanding of WCAG and will only adjust the contrast near the end of the design phase (as in, after the client has signed-off on it) to get it within passing limits if they're told to, and only if it's easy to do without spoiling their design.

- The rules for body text are pretty simple and I'm not excusing it, but WCAG is intimidating and confusing for most I think (ask designers why they don't follow it or understand it). There's loads of rules, the documentation is verbose, and it tells you what needs to pass, but lacks guidelines on how to do this in a way that doesn't change the look of your branded designs.

- I've been in this situation as a developer a few times where I'll tell the designer what specific WCAG rules aren't being followed, and they'll not change anything because they don't know what to do without compromising their design e.g. I'll mention "your main brand color can be used for large heading text, but it doesn't contrast enough for buttons", where the options might include picking a darker brand color (a big ask), a darker color just for buttons (might look weird), or maybe black for buttons (will change the look a lot).

- It's really common for designers to pick bright/vibrant colors for the main brand color too that won't be accessible for body/button/link text, so being told they have to pick a darker color can feel like a big unfair restriction, especially when they see large brands or the designers they follow breaking the WCAG contrast rules all the time. Also, when most brand guidelines don't include contrast metrics for recommended color pairings, you can tell this hasn't been thought about much.

To help with the above, I started working on a tool to create branded color palettes, with the idea that you pick the colors for your headings, buttons, body text etc. that have accessible contrast upfront, rather than tweaking the contrast of these as an afterthought later:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
by account42 | 2025-06-30 13:57:38+00:00
Your information is either outdated or very specific to your locale.

Not only do ISPs here support IPv6 by default these days but they have even started only giving IPv4 connectivity via carrier grade NAT for new customers - you can still ask for a real IPv4 address for now but it's not there by default and the ISP reserves the right to take it away.
by LanceH | 2025-06-30 13:58:00+00:00
I've printed a ton of little compartments for all manner of things for crafts. I'll print the grid to lay flat in a drawer, and then print various size boxes which socket into that grid. I'll also print a grid to lay on the table, so there is never a need to pull parts from the drawers, just pull the whole box and it sockets onto the table with it's own dedicated space and no slippage.

There is also a plugin for Fusion 360 which allows customizing a lot of items that can go into the grid.

I do work on my shop, but only so far as it furthers my hobbies.

As far as gridfinity goes, it's really nice to have the right size and amount of storage for everything. Imagine those inserts people buy for cutlery for a drawer in the kitchen. There is always a gap on the side for something to fall into. There is only a slot for all knives. No place at all for corn on the cob holders.

Now imagine this same problem for building models where a person may have 200+ different items in different amounts. Previously people used things like tackle boxes from fishing, or one of those plastic cases for holding screws. But they never quite line up.

Also, 3d printing is very much an asynchronous kind of thing. You work on your shop by pushing a button and get results an hour later. It's not woodworking where you spend 80 hours building your bench, then the next 500 hours building all the parts for it.