MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by probably_wrong | 2025-06-16 20:21:12+00:00
> So much work is being done on that front.

Yes, it is, but not nearly enough and it had to be done by dragging corporations kicking, lying and screaming every step of the way. Corporations, mind you, powerful enough to drive several of the wars of the last 50 years.

> We're still making lots of progress on healthspan

Yes, as long as your health insurance covers the treatment. UnitedHealth investors are suing the company for not willing to follow the "aggressive, anti-consumer tactics" that got their CEO murdered [1].

I've also personally heard a mildly drunk executive of a Fortune 500 company brag about how, on a cancer-related lawsuit, the US government would never let them go bankrupt because that would dry up the taxes they would collect otherwise. Time proved him right.

> Boeing and execs should face punishment, but...

They should, but they won't. And they are not the exception.

> Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved (...) look at what Moderna did during Covid.

Uber made ignoring the laws at a worldwide scale their whole business model. And how has the market rewarded Moderna for their to humanity? Their stock is at its lowest since 2020.

People have been making the comparison to the robber barons recently, but I think they miss the point where the robber barons didn't have a worldwide surveillance apparatus and the kind of propaganda power that Orwell could only dream of.

I agree that technology has advanced for good in a lot of areas, but I also think it's worth noticing that many of these advances are behind gatekeepers who will burn a forest to the ground before upgrading infrastructure that's one hundred years old to keep shareholders happy.

[1] https://futurism.com/neoscope/unitedhealthcare-investors-wil...
by wat10000 | 2025-06-16 20:21:16+00:00
Funny, I think Linus is a great example for the opposite reason. He shows that if you stop tolerating bad behavior, people will often change how they behave.

The idea that removing vulgarity will increase ambiguity in this context is very strange. In terms of communication, the only use for vulgarity is to convey emotion. That's not relevant here. If we ban it, maybe people will explain why something is shit, instead of just saying it's shit. Forcing other words to take up the slack is a feature, not a bug.

I know about the fast inverse square root code. I could probably give a decent if somewhat vague overview of how it works from memory. I don't recall the WTF comment, and that certainly isn't why I heard about it.

This is a great example of what I'm saying. Commenting 0x5f3759df "what the fuck?" isn't useful. It tells me the author was confused or amazed or something. Imagine if instead they had commented, "Compute an initial guess by negating and halving the exponent. 0x5f3759df was found by experimenting and seems to give a good guess in the mantissa bits."
by badc0ffee | 2025-06-16 20:22:27+00:00
> trying to make a definitive case on his...goodness? morality?

Speaking for myself, I'm actually just discussing the idea that a non-violent crime like drug dealing necessarily deserves a light sentence in general.

> Sounds like a you thing

It is a me thing. That's why I said "brings to mind".

I'm a product of my time. I remember when weed and psychedelics meant demonization and heavy sentences, and it was absurd because those substances aren't that dangerous.

This is the context in which I'm accustomed to calling drug dealing a "non-violent crime". So, I feel like I need to point out that things are not quite the same with deadly drugs like carfentanil.
by acc_297 | 2025-06-16 20:24:11+00:00
This has been on my mind for awhile and is why I only briefly used copilot on a daily basis.

I'm at the beginning of my career and learning every day - I could do my job faster with an LLM assistant but I would lose out on an opportunity to acquire skills. I don't buy the argument that low-level critical thinking skills are obsolete and high level conceptual planning is all that anyone will need 10 years from now.

On a more sentimental level I personally feel that there is meaning in knowing things and knowing how to do things and I'm proud of what I know and what I know how to do.

Using LLM's doesn't look particularly hard and if I need to use one in the future I'll just pick whichever one is supposedly the newest and best but for now I'm content to toil away on my own.
by aidenn0 | 2025-06-16 20:24:28+00:00
> XMPP/Jabber – battle-tested instant messaging standard with lots of client apps for major platforms. Despite me running an xmpp server I don't personally recommend it due to clients taking a while to catch up with features, i.e how Conversations currently lacks replies and most clients lack the ability to delete/retract messages.

Isn't the same thing the true with Matrix? It's just side-stepped by 95% of the people using one of two clients?
by bitpush | 2025-06-16 20:24:57+00:00
The steps are as follows

1. Turn on travel router

2. Connect to its network

3. Go to travel router's admin page (192.168.8.1 or similar)

4. Click buttons and join the Hotel/Cruise/Flight WiFi

5. Go to neverssl.com (or google.com or whatever)

6. See the captive portal of Hotel/Cruise/Flight and follow instructions.

In other words, for the portal, it is no different than using your phone. The extra step is logging into the admin portal and having the router join the public wifi first.
by 7thpower | 2025-06-16 20:25:31+00:00
Story Time:

After I graduated, I went to work for a large PE firm that most of you probably hate, working for one of their subsidiaries focused on energy who happened to have a couple refineries. As someone passionate about renewables, I was actually excited to go see the underbelly of one of the most evil companies. I also wanted to learn more about the energy industry and the maze of pipes that looked like steel spaghetti to me.. it was also always in the back of my mind that those student loans wouldn't pay for themselves.

I started off in IT but eventually was fortunate enough to land a job focusing on their developing new products with other portfolio companies that focused on addressing challenges in O&G. One of the things I prided myself on was spending time, boots on the ground, with the people who were doing the day to day work and learning about what there problems were. This included a lot of escorted trips through the plant learning about the chemical processes as well as work processes, etc.

One of the things I had picked up on was how nasty benzene was, this was widely acknowledged at the time by the company, and not in the typical window dressing sort of way that these things are often glossed over.

Well long story short, one day I'm standing on top of grating resting above a concrete pit coming off a refining unit while they are using a truck sized vacuum to extract the liquid (guess what the truck is called), which is told is an every day occurance. Standing a few feet above the liquid, it looks like dirty water. As an afterthought, I ask "what is this liquid?".

"Oh, it's just benzine"

... taps 4 gas meter that's supposed to keep me safe from anything "well isn't this thing supposed to go off?"

"Not all the time"

Never did that again.

I was surprised it was treated so nonchalantly, but when your job is to deal with dangerous stuff day in and day out, I guess certain things don't raise alarms. I, of course, didn't ask what concentration it was, etc., I just filed a few lessons away. But it's always stuck with me how routine some of this incredibly dangerous work can seem, and how difficult it must be to differentiate types of danger when they're not things that are obviously dangerous, such as having your finger chopped off, or worse, ruining a nice set of steel toes.

Anyway, that's my benzine story.
by metalman | 2025-06-16 20:26:19+00:00
The ancients have us covered, much of the surviving texts deal with strife, trouble , the mixed joys of life, and the inevitable contradictions that are still our lot in life and the ancients would very much recognise the horrible possibilities in taking your thoughts and reason to a souless mechanical thing that has been conjured up by powerfull forces acting in there own interests but the pit, has it's own allure and one more lesser demon is only that, one more. no shortage of the corporeal type either.
by emorning3 | 2025-06-16 20:26:39+00:00
My mental model of the 'new normal' is end users using AI to get their work done.

So if I re-worded the OP's description and replaced 'internal tools' with 'internal AIs' then this would at least seem like a more reasonable process to me...

> At our startup, engineers don't build features anymore. > They build APIs that internal AIs can connect to. > Most "features" like running an SQL query, sending a push notification when product X is ordered gets built by ops or product folks using those tools.

To me this describes a team of engineers that use AI-capable tools and that are building 'features' for themselves. In the way that us dinosaurs used to write build scripts.

I'm not saying that my mental model is right or wrong, just that working this way seems reasonable if you buy into my model.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-16 20:27:03+00:00
> These days, I am more inclined to prefer boring content over interesting content, if it’s not AI generated.

I'll take boring over AI generated as well but, if I'm honest, I'm more likely to just not bother with either boring stuff or AI generated stuff.

It is getting harder to avoid AI generated stuff, and it does tend to be bottom-of-the-barrel.
by robocat | 2025-06-16 20:28:13+00:00
Relevant sections from the 2005 report:

3.1 Benzene. On the east side of the Park, south of the Play Barn the groundwater is contaminated with benzene. An interim action removed a benzene containing LNAPL that had been discovered during site investigation. The remedy chosen for benzene was an air-sparging/soil vapor extraction (AS/SVE). The AS/SVE system covers approximately 1.5 acres of the Park. It is unnoticeable to Park users except for a small equipment box near the Towers. . An action level was calculated based on MTCA Method B surface water criteria and a dilution attenuation factor (DAF). The calculation used to set the DAF and the action level for benzene is given in appendix 1. 4.1 Benzene. Benzene concentration in the compliance well OBS-1 remains below the action level but above the method B groundwater cleanup level. The remedy, therefore, remains effective. See figure 3 below.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-06-16 20:28:42+00:00
Most of my adult life I've suffered from DPDR. In recent years I've been able to get somewhat of a handle on it.

While I never pinned down the cause exactly, my talk therapist and I came to the realization that some meals would trigger it. Usually those meals were obviously bad for my health, so I started avoiding them.

> This might sound weird but I can "physically feel" in my head a certain anxiety

Why I commented. DPDR is in the same box as anxiety and, yeah, I could literally feel this weird pressure in my head. An actual physical sensation. Seems like we had different cause and side effects but it's so good to read there's someone else out there.

Glad you found something that worked for you. There's so much we don't know about our bodies.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization-derealizatio...
by Ma8ee | 2025-06-16 20:28:45+00:00
Entropy is certainly a physical “thing”, in the sense that it affects the development of the system. You can equally well apply your argument that it isn’t a physical thing because it doesn’t exist on a microscopic scale to temperature. Temperature doesn’t exist when you zoom in on single particles either.

There’s no reason to involve our knowledge of the system. Entropy is a measure of the number of possible micro states for a given system, and that number exists independently of us.
by kragen | 2025-06-16 20:29:16+00:00
I haven't written a blog post about this; do you mean my HN comment or CF Bolz's blog post?

Bolz's blog post is not written to persuade anyone but to provide objective, verifiable information from which people can form their own conclusions.

I agree that a holistic analysis of memory operation cost across all threads would be not only more persuasive but more informative. But it is also much more difficult.
by cyberpunk | 2025-06-16 20:30:07+00:00
nah, it’s great! we all get to sit at the same desk with noise cancelling headphones on in the same meeting, and for added bonus - if someone forgets to turn voice isolation mode on you get to hear yourself with a one second delay which makes it really hard to talk..

and a nice commute either side of the workday because who really wants to spend time with their kids during the week anyway?

right? right?
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-16 20:30:48+00:00
The literal meaning is indeed potassium apparatus / device / contraption. The Kali part is indeed shortened from Kaliumhydroxid.

Strangely enough, the modern German name is Fünf-Kugel-Apparat, "five balls apparatus". I found that one simply by going through "Other languages" on Wikipedia.

And benzene is called Benzol in German. And gasoline is called Benzin - that word has false friend potential because it seems more similar to benzene. It is also not derived from the name of Carl Benz of Mercedes-Benz fame who used it in the first practical automobile that he invented.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-06-16 20:31:14+00:00
Very niche? That's suprising to hear. I'm not in the space, and I know it's not in the big 2/3 (is SystemVerilog distinct from Verilog), but it's been around for 13 years and even DARPA has it on their radar:

> Chisel is mentioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a technology to improve the efficiency of electronic design, where smaller design teams do larger designs. Google has used Chisel to develop a Tensor Processing Unit for edge computing

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)#...
by superkuh | 2025-06-16 20:31:29+00:00
You're not the only one getting blocked. I emailed dreamwidth about this in the past and they say it's something their upstream network host does and they cannot even fix it if their site users wanted to fix it. They're a somewhat limited and broken host partially repackaging some other company's services.

>Dreamwidth Studios Support: I'm sorry about the frustrations you're having. The "semi-randomly selected to solve a CAPTCHA" interstitial with a visual CAPTCHA is coming from our hosting provider, not from us: ... and we don't have any control over whether or not someone from a particular network is shown a CAPTCHA or not because we aren't the ones who control the restriction.

This also applies to the 403's.
Show HN: Nexus.js - Fabric.js for 3D
by ges | 2025-06-16 20:33:45+00:00
I was looking for a tiny library to easily transform both 2D & 3D objects with simple mouse / touch controls and a fixed camera, in the browser.

Like a simple 3D editor but without requiring the user to be a Blender expert.

Couldn't find anything lightweight, so I’m building one. Think Fabric.js but for 3D. Built entirely with Three.js / R3F.

Borrowed some inspiration from VR/AR interaction systems for controls.

Feel free to play with it and let me know what you think!
by kgwgk | 2025-06-16 20:34:19+00:00
> Entropy is a measure of the number of possible micro states for a given system, and that number exists independently of us.

That number also exists independently of the system! I can imagine any system and calculate the corresponding number.

(And for an even more philosophical question, does the “system” really exist independently of us? What separates the “system” from anything else? Is every subset of the universe a “system”?)
Show HN: Zero-config AWS CUR → interactive cost dashboard (DuckDB and Rill)
by adamkabak | 2025-06-16 20:34:34+00:00
I got tired of wrestling with AWS Cost & Usage Reports, so I wrote an open-source script: point it at a folder of Parquet CUR files, run one command, and get fully interactive Rill dashboards that adapt to your tags and cost drivers.

Highlights

Clone to custom dashboards in < 5 min

Ingests many CUR exports at once—even with schema drift.

Unifies schemas. Flattens MAP-type cols like resource tags automatically.

Chooses chart types programmatically based on spend coverage, cardinality, and distibution.

Generates Rill YAML (source, metrics (including measures), canvases) so you can tweak further.

Repo + demo video: https://github.com/Twing-Data/aws-cur-wizard

Credit to Dan Goldin (CEO @ Twing Data) for the idea. Would love feedback or edge-cases I missed!
by meehow | 2025-06-16 20:35:21+00:00
- Compiled firmware is available on GitHub, packed together with a script for flashing it.

- You can use Meshtastic CLI.

- Docs are in git repository in .mdx format: https://github.com/meshtastic/meshtastic

All "sins" you mentioned are results of trying to be more convenient for users used to web browsers. Current state of web is pretty far from being decentralized, including web3.
by tzs | 2025-06-16 20:36:02+00:00
How much of Tesla's FSD is learned from watching a lot of recordings of human drivers and how much of it is explicitly coded rules?

I'd expect school bus stop signs to be challenging to learn because of how context dependent they are compared to regular stop signs. Some examples, drawn from the rules in my state (Washington) are below. These may be different in other states.

With a regular stop sign you stop, then you go when it is safe to do so.

When you stop for a school bus sign you are supposed to stay stopped as long as the sign is there. You don't go until the school bus retracts the sign. It is essentially like a red light rather than a stop sign.

Whether or not a school bus stop sign applies to you depends on the direction you are traveling and on the structure of the roadway.

It applies if either of the following are true: (1) you are traveling in the same direction as the bus, (2) it is a two lane roadway and the lanes are not separated by a physical barrier or median. Three or more lanes or a barrier or median and cars traveling opposite the bus don't have to stop.
by ellisv | 2025-06-16 20:36:53+00:00
I disagree that cruises are expensive. Cruises can be expensive but many cost roughly the same per night in a hotel but includes your food and entertainment. No, they're not as cheap as camping at your local campground or a staycation. Yes, they're more expensive if you have to fly to/from the port.

Our most recent cruise was less than $1,200 for 6 nights, $556 for airfare, and $127 for a hotel the night before. This was more expensive than usual because it was during a popular time of year to fly.

However I completely agree that vacation is meant to be focusing on the present. One of the main appeals of cruises to me is being disconnected from the Internet.
by conductr | 2025-06-16 20:38:26+00:00
I read it and I simply don't think intent to distribute should be synonymous with intent to kill. There are violent crimes with actual victims that serve less time than this. This is a mathematical calculation of damage that could have been done in worst possible scenario, no evidence of that scenario playing out at all.

This math of weights and maximum hypothetical carnage produces very unfair sentencing.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-16 20:38:44+00:00
As should surprise no one, "US-made" is a lie.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/06/16/trump-mobile-will...

> The T1 appears to be a reskinned version of the REVVL 7 Pro 5G, in a new enclosure and with slightly moved around cameras. This smartphone normally costs $250 at full retail, and even goes down to $169 on sale like it is on Amazon right now. For the Amazon price, you don't get the gold-colored trim, of course.
by jiveturkey | 2025-06-16 20:38:47+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1crxkx9/starlink_...

Apparently a mid-size ship will have 12 terminals. That same thread talks about other ship sizes but not if they have more terminals.

I still submit that the pricing is entirely a function of what the market will bear, and not the cost of the service.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-16 20:39:04+00:00
How do they make sure the prison isn't just employing people already experienced in the field to make the prison money? How do they ensure people are treated fairly (normally prisoners aren't really even allowed sick days, they can't chose not to work overtime if required, etc)? Do they audit to ensure number of sick hours are comparable to non-prison work? Do they ensure prison guards bonus' aren't based on inmate performance (UNICOR does all of the above bad practices resulting in sick people being forced to work overtime in order to get the guards their bonus)?

UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.
by officeplant | 2025-06-16 20:39:28+00:00
I have to know, what's the the rise of people like you chiming in with AI sourced tidbits? It's like the people with no knowledge on a subject that use google as a quick catch up tool so they can participate in a conversation, but somehow even worse. Are they the same people, but now lazier or just true believers in the non-sense engines?
by mullingitover | 2025-06-16 20:39:51+00:00
LA has a project where sterile male mosquitos are released[1]. Females only mate once, so this absolutely wrecks mosquito populations. It's the same strategy that keep screwworms contained at the Darrien Gap.

[1] https://www.glamosquito.org/2024-04-12-innovative-pilot-prog...
by kubectl_h | 2025-06-16 20:39:56+00:00
You have to do the tracing anyway if you are going to sample based on criteria that isn't available at the beginning of the trace (like an error that occurs later in the request) and tail sample. You can head sample of course, but that's going to be the most coarse sampling you can do and you can't sample based on anything but the initial conditions of the trace.

What we have started doing is still tracing every unit of work, but deciding at the root span the level of instrumentation fidelity we want for the trace based on the initial conditions. Spans are still generated in the lifecycle of the trace, but we discard them at the processor level (before they are batched and sent to the collector) unless they have errors on them or the trace has been marked as "full fidelity".
by djoldman | 2025-06-16 20:40:52+00:00
I fear that the distinctly American emphasis on personal independence and deprioritization of root causes has led to our persistent and failed war on drugs.

Unfortunately, many of the laws written and policies enacted presume an idealistic fantasy where humans are much more rationally acting, thoughtful, and informed than they really are.

The clearest example of this is raising statutory penalties from "many years" to "many many years" in prison. What is this supposed to achieve? Do people think that folks out there:

1. know the laws well enough to know how many years they'll get for the crime they're about to commit?

2. (and if knowledgable about penalty changes) think, "oh well I would have done X and risked many years in prison but now that it's many many years, I won't" ?

If huge prison sentences and massive resources spent on crime detection+ enforcement were the answer, America wouldn't have an illegal drug problem.