MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exiguus | 2025-06-23 23:07:58+00:00
We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce. Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast. The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.
by LelouBil | 2025-06-23 23:08:28+00:00
Here's a related software that I like : https://archipelago.gg/

This is a multi-game randomizer, where items will be scattered accross all games in the multiworld, and so players will have to find items in their own games, but for eachother.

It's really fun, and I am just amazed by the fact that it works so well for a ton of games.
by andy99 | 2025-06-23 23:08:40+00:00
I'm a big fan of pigz, I discovered it 6 years ago when I had some massive files I needed to zip and and 48 core server I was underutilizing. It was very satisfying to open htop and watch all the cores max out.

Edit: found the screenshot https://imgur.com/a/w5fnXKS
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-06-23 23:08:47+00:00
Donna, Zuck's sister*..

https://archive.ph/EyV7r

Japan was "just" another example that the contest between republicanism and monarchism (/imperialism) cannot be resolved internally?

What would be a historical counterexample? (I don't think the British commonwealth counts either, Suez was the final nail, but the hammer wasn't British)

Looking forward, if the Vatican becomes even more democratic even as it becomes less relevant...

Which is not to declare a win for historical pessimism. My personal ideology is that it's a simpler problem to scale Switzerland (monarchism never took hold there, albeit with an assist from the V but scaling S would also involve removing the necessity of natural borders-- a straightforward task for Catholicism-infused Daoists*?)

One might also already argue that that's the rde of EU

(*Pareidoliacally, the role of the feminine [yin] counter is nascent not just in siblings Zuckerberg & Altman, but also AMD ;)
by TheAlchemist | 2025-06-23 23:08:56+00:00
Tesla is going bankrupt or bought by a competitor at some point and Elon is going to prison at some point. I would be shocked if that's not the case. It's all smokes and mirrors, manipulation, deception and it will eventually come back to earth.

However, there is a little saying - 'Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" that you seem to want to learn the hard way !

PS. I'm short the stock - but it's a hugely risky bet that I would not recommend to anyone.
by astrange | 2025-06-23 23:09:22+00:00
"Kissa" just means café, but when you'd use the word is complex.

Basically in Japan Japanese words feel retro or else appropriate for personal and family life, while English words feel clean and modern/corporate/business-y.

So a Japanese word like kissaten gives the impression of somewhere from the 60s that's full of old people and you can't breathe because of all the cigarette smoke. But it also specifically means a coffee shop and not a bar I think, so there wouldn't be alcohol.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-23 23:09:28+00:00
I've seen managers managed out because a team that was formerly low turnover started hemorrhaging senior talent a bunch of whom said the new boss was a dick on their way out.

Now, if you've ground out enough leet code to land an almost no-show job at some bigco that runs on monopoly bucks and everyone is silo'd and everyone is divorced from actual results you'll probably never see that. But it happens.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-06-23 23:11:11+00:00
I somehow hadn't seen this before! A fun watch.

- Google buying TiVo is very funny, but ended up being accurate

- Google GRID is an interesting concept, but we did functionally get this with Google Drive

- MSN Newsbotster did end up happening, except it was Facebook circa ~2013+

- GoogleZon is very funny, given they both built this functionality separately

- Predicting summarized news is at least 13 years too early, but it's still correct

- NYT vs GoogleZon also remarkably prescient, though about 13 years too early as well

- EPIC pretty accurately predicts the TikTok and Twitter revenue share, though, again, about 12 years too early

- NYT still hasn't gone offline, and was bolstered by viewership during the first Trump term, and print subscriptions are the lowest they've ever been

Really great video - it does seem like they predicted 2024 more than 2014, where people unironically thought haitians were eating dogs and that food prices had gone up 200% because of what they saw on TikTok and elected a wannabe tyrant as a result
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-23 23:12:27+00:00
There are touchscreen laptops you can touch. It was a priority for Microsoft in the Windows 8 era but Apple always kept away from it because they’ve always wanted to maximize the psychological difference between laptops, tablets, and phones because they have every expectation of selling you all three.

One thing I find a little annoying about my steam deck is that it has a touchscreen and it works right some of the time but there are plenty of games where you have an object in the screen with a skeuomorphic interface that you ought to be able to touch but you have to work it with the game controller buttons. Back in the day with the PS Vita almost all games could be played with game controller buttons only but any touch target that should have obviously been a touch target was a touch target.
by nicbou | 2025-06-23 23:12:36+00:00
Most of the time, the requirements are not spelled out. Nobody even knows what the business logic is supposed to be. A lot of it has to be decided by the software engineer based on available information. It sometimes involve walking around the office asking people things.

It also requires a fair bit of wisdom to know where the software is expected to grow, and how to architect for that eventuality.

I can't picture an LLM doing a fraction of that work.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-06-23 23:13:01+00:00
There is perceived (likely valid in most cases) risk with criticizing employers. It is entirely possible that if you go directly at leadership, you may be shown the door, regardless of whether you are ready to go or not.

The counterpoint to this guy's story is many of us who have told an employer the issues that we were concerned with in an exit interview, or even in a feedback period during employment, and seen it come right back around to bite us.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-23 23:13:08+00:00
> One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.

This doesn't seem to be "wokeness" (whatever that means) so much as "shallow writing pandering to an editor somewhere who is obsessed with race but has no education to grapple with it".
by foxyv | 2025-06-23 23:13:26+00:00
Solar radiation is roughly 1 kilowatt per square meter. Human beings generate about 0.1 kilowatts. A good suit will try to reject as much of that kilowatt as possible. Also your dark side will radiate heat but the temperature differential is much lower.

Suits are insulating for a reason. You want to prevent heating on the sun side and prevent too much cooling on the space side. Your body is essentially encapsulated in a giant thermos.

Cooling is achieved using a recirculating cold water system that is good for a few hours of body heat. Water is initially cooled by the primary life support system of the spacecraft before an EVA. Pretty much it starts off pretty cold and slowly over time comes up to your body heat. Recent designs use evaporative cooling to re-cool the water.

Life support systems are so cool.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-06-23 23:13:32+00:00
It's possible but it's not really up to you. I had an experience I could describe almost exactly the same as yours. I later found out from a friend who stayed that my feedback was used in some sort of failed management coup between VPs I had never met or interacted with. But it associated me with that conflict, and one particular side of it.

I've thought about this a lot over the years but I don't think I had any information I could have used to predict this outcome. All the people and relationships I could observe were healthy and professional. But it continues to affect me professionally; the company was large and well known in my area and industry, people who worked there then are all over now. I don't give sincere feedback anymore.
by astrange | 2025-06-23 23:14:15+00:00
> I think the disconnect between bland American commercial spaces and more intimate Japanese ones is the relationship of the owner-proprietor to commercialism.

Much of this is building codes. There are simply many things you can't do in an American business even if you want to, and not for bad reasons either, but eg electric, fire safety, ADA, employee safety rules are totally different than Japan and force you to have much larger and plainer spaces.

The big one that kills everything is parking minimums.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-23 23:15:03+00:00
You very much are underestimating it. Spinning mass helps even out very short term fluctuations in supply vs demand. Like on the timescale of tens of seconds, even when the whole grid is spinning mass. Even 10x the inertia in the grid would have maybe bought a few extra minutes, because the problem by the point the grid was collapsing was there were not enough plants online to provide the demand.

(Spinning mass on its own doesn't do much to deal with the voltage fluctuations. It's entirely something that's reactive to grid frequency, which is the most 'global' indicator of supply vs demand in a grid, since it can't fluctuate locally. But voltage and current can vary wildly in different parts of the grid, and required separate management)
by siebenmann | 2025-06-23 23:15:52+00:00
In 1989, the costs appear to have been significantly different, although on a casual search I don't see list prices for eg then-older Sun models like the 3/60. A brand new Sparcstation 1 (also 1989) was far more expensive than an NCD 16 or NCD 19, and a diskless Unix workstation would need more server support and disk space than an X terminal. Today is a different thing, but that's because PC prices have dropped so dramatically.
by o11c | 2025-06-23 23:16:05+00:00
You really don't want PEG, even if you think you do. Maybe especially if you think you do. PEG gives up on both performance and correctness in case of ambiguity; LL and LR are the main families that can be trusted (though not LL(*) unless it's actually LL(1) after converting token trees). If you're just parsing expressions however, you don't need anything near that complicated though.

Operator-precedence parsers can handle partial orderings just fine if you think about it - just toposort them, then explicitly list the set of acceptable children on each side (which must be less than the current precedent, or possibly equal on the left side, or right if you can reassociate which requires remembering parens) rather than just subtracting 1 like most implementations do. In many cases it suffices to just specify a single number (plus a single bit to allow more of the same level) instead of a set, e.g. if you're just fixing the ambiguous level of the bitwise or comparison operators between languages.

Note also that Bison has an XML output mode which is really useful since LR machine runtimes are trivial to write yourself; the conversion from a grammar to tables is the hard part. Unfortunately there is no similar story for lexers.
by sensanaty | 2025-06-23 23:16:30+00:00
Everyone discussing some AGI superbeing a la Skynet is falling for the hype pushed hard by AI companies hook, line and sinker.

These things are dangerous not because of some sci-fi event that might or might not happen X years from now, they're dangerous now for perfectly predictable reasons stemming primarily from executive and VC greed. They won't have to be hyperintelligent systems that are actually good or better at everything a human is, you just need to sell enough CEOs on the idea that they're good enough now to reach a problematic state of the world. Hell, the current "agents" they're shoving out are terrible, but the danger here stems from idiots hooking these things up to actual real world production systems.

We already have AI systems deciding who does or doesn't get a job, or who gets fines and tickets from blurry imagery where they fill in the gaps, or who gets banned off monopolistic digital platforms. Hell, all the grifters and scammers are already using these systems because what they care about is quantity and not quality. Yet instead of discussing the actual real dangers happening right now and what we can do about it, we're instead focusing on some amusing but ultimately irrelevant sci-fi scenarios that exist purely as a form of viral marketing from AI CEOs that have gigantic vested interests in making it seem as if the black boxes they're pushing out into the world are anything like the impressive hyperintelligences you see in sci-fi media.

I'm as big of a fan as Philip K. Dick as anyone else, and maybe there is some validity to worrying a bit about this hypothetical Skynet/Bladerunner/Butlerian Jihad future, but how about we shift more of our focus on the here and now, where real dangers already exist?
by beej71 | 2025-06-23 23:16:56+00:00
For me, too. On the poorly-documented stuff that I get into, where I really need help, it flails.

I wanted some jq script and it made an incomprehensible thing that usually worked. And every fix it made broke something else. It just kept digging a deeper hole.

After a while of that, I bit the bullet and learned jq script. I wrote a solution that was more capable, easier to read, and, importantly, always worked.

The thing is, jq is completely documented. Everything I needed was online. But there just aren't many examples to for LLMs, so they choke.

Start asking it questions about complexity classes and you can get it to contradict itself in no time.

Most of the code in the world right now is very formulaic, and it's great at that. Sorry, WordPress devs.

It's a powerful tool, but it's not that powerful.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-23 23:17:01+00:00
Isn't it just math? How many PhD students are "minted" by a professor over their career? A very crude estimate is between 10 and 50. For each PhD to get a professorship, each generation the number of jobs would have to multiply by that number. Does anyone believe that can be possible? If not, you will end up with a "crisis" like this, regardless of the best of intentions or evil influences or whatever. I mean of course if you kept 10x-ing the available jobs, at some point the supply of students would thin out but probably only at a huge number.
by gentile | 2025-06-23 23:17:11+00:00
Some more context for Japan's land use (it does not differ prefecturally; some local regulations like kyoto and building colors)

The basics of Japan's Land use rules in english (only 8 pages; mostly tables/pictures and very straightforward): https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001050453.pdf

- In the "Control of Building Use by Land Use Zones" you can see how even the most exclusive of zoning enables "Houses with other small scale function", Clinics, Schools or stores with very small footprints.

- Structures are restricted by the shape, shadow, and floor area.

- No mention of "single-family" housing.

A map (of Tokyo) overlaying the gradient of zoning from least to most permissive. You can see how the up-zoning follows the major roads: https://tokyochizu.github.io/zoning.html
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-23 23:17:27+00:00
An Uber driver is in their car while the car is "working". They have the ability to react to any situation because they're physically present. They can protect the asset they have leased.

A Tesla performing overnight robotaxi service while the owner sleeps is a liability to the owner. The car may be damaged, abused, or vandalized. This may be done by people other than the person who requested the ride. The car can notify the owner, but now the owner has to get there (without their car, because their car is there) to react to whatever is happening, long after it has happened.

The proceeds would have to be absolutely massive for me to put up with that. I don't want to run a one car cab company. Offloading the ride hailing and driving aspects is nice, but what's left for me is not a job I want to do. I don't want to wake up at 3 AM to a biohazard notification from my car.

It's just not a good deal for the owner. They're eating all the negatives you called out and taking on substantial risks.

It might be possible to have a robotaxi fleet that makes enough money to pay for the staff and absorb the risks. Losing one vehicle is not a big deal to a fleet. Losing my vehicle is a huge deal to me.

"Your car is also a robotaxi!" is a gimmick for those who have trouble connecting events over time. There will be those who gleefully shout about every robotaxi revenue deposit they get while ignoring what they spent to get it, like a lottery scratch-off player with a $100 win after weeks of losing tickets.
by dekhn | 2025-06-23 23:18:10+00:00
This happened when I was in grad school back in the late 90s. Clinton increased the budget of the NIH significantly (thanks Bill) which led to a huge increase in training grants allowing PhD programs to expand. However, faculty positions did not expand, so many PhDs had to find alternate careers (most people go into PhD program to get a faculty/researcher position). This actually worked out really well for bigtech, which hoovered these folks up. I worked with tons of ex-physicists who were great programmers especially at machine learning. It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-06-23 23:19:05+00:00
"product launches" - keep in mind this is Tesla's product launch.

They launched Tesla Semi 8 YEARS ago, and the truck is nowhere to be seen. Not even official specs have been released.

This product launch was for influencers only, paying 4.2$ per ride.

I'm not gonna lie - I hate the world where it's possible to become the richest person in the world, while being a snake oil salesman.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-23 23:19:23+00:00
You're projecting that I am scolding OP, but I'm not. My language was neutral and precise. I presented no judgment, but gave OP the tools to better clarify their argument and express valid, actionable criticism instead of wholesale criticizing "AI" in a manner so imprecise as to reduce the relevance and effectiveness of their argument.

> But it ain't here yet buddy . . . we can all read date stamps on comments.

That has no bearing on the general trajectory that we are currently on in computer science and informatics. Additionally, your language is patronizing and dismissive, trading substance for insult. This is generally frowned upon in this community.

You failed to actually address my comment, both by failing to recognize that it was mainly about using the correct terminology instead of criticizing an entire branch of research that extends far beyond transformers or LLMs, and by failing to establish why a rapidly evolving landscape does not mean that certain generalizations cannot yet be made, unless they are presented with several constraints and caveats, which includes not making temporally-invariant claims about capabilities.

I would ask that you reconsider your approach to discourse here, so that we can avoid this thread degenerating into an emotional argument.
by Topfi | 2025-06-23 23:19:39+00:00
> What else are you plugging your headphones into?

My Macbook, my work laptop, my e-piano, my Note9, my BTR7, ...

Don't get me wrong, I understand far too well why no new flagship offers the jack anymore and wireless/USB-C is truly amazingly convenient for the vast majority of users, even audio quality wise, but sadly we are still very far from either being universal, either because the standard is still 1/8 or 1/4 inch or latency is key (in the case of instruments both). Also, USB-C ports are finite so using the small 3.5mm port is often preferable. So just keeping the dongle plugged in, sadly not an option. Apple Dongle DACs are easily lost too, ask me how I know.

Am very far removed from the mainstream customer and accept that in any case, my dream phone would likely bankrupt whoever was dumb enough to bankroll it, so I'll just deal with the compromise.
by exiguus | 2025-06-23 23:20:56+00:00
I think that's my problem with AI. Let's say I have all the requirements, down to the smallest detail. Then I make my decisions at a micro level. Formulate an architecture. Take all the non-functionals into account. I would write a book as a prompt that is not able to express my thoughts as accurately as if I were writing code right away. Apart from the fact that the prompt is generally a superfluous intermediate step in which I struggle to create an exact programming language with an imprecise natural language with a result that is not reproduce-able.
by harmmonica | 2025-06-23 23:21:00+00:00
I don't know the absolute answer to that, but there's a belief, based on commenters on HN, pundits online and even (one of) the Waymo CEO's stating that the current Jaguar is north of $100,000 per vehicle (that's equipped with the sensor suite for self-driving; note I've been in threads on HN where people are guessing that the current Waymo is minimum $150k up to $200k+). I think you can get a Model Y for $50-$60k. So I think the answer is yes to the cost of the hardware and manufacturing. That's of course not the full picture on the cost side as a sibling comment points out about in-person or remote drivers.

My info is only as good as what I've read and I'm trying to present that here as well as I understand it.
by robocat | 2025-06-23 23:21:33+00:00
You're going to design an MOS circuit, and it'll be fabricated at Intel. If it works, you pass. If it doesn't, you fail,

I wish I had even one engineering class like that. Everything I had was theory and we were tested for academic ability.

By the second session, two-thirds of the class had dropped out.

Interesting that students were obviously motivated to avoid a measurable outcome. I'm guessing the students figured that the class was too much work, and that they should choose other classes that would be easier to pass? Assumably they were all interested enough in the topic since they signed up for it and generally engineering students are interested in leading edge tech.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-23 23:21:36+00:00
To me the signaling-spiral inside-baseball hall-of-mirrors as well as the committee-style decision making seem most salient as reasons.

The whole thing reminds me of the exponential increase in published scientific papers but comparatively little to show for it in terms of big name discoveries. Both are immaterial prestige games and can fly off into a spiral.
by creakingstairs | 2025-06-23 23:21:52+00:00
I guess it depends. In one job I gave my feedback in a nice way that didn’t put blame on people but procedures and it helped the remaining coworkers.

In the another job I didn’t think providing any kind of feedback would help me or anyone there due to multiple reasons, so I didn’t even try.

My experience has been that people (including me) kinda suck at accepting critical feedback. You could try to mitigate this with some techniques but you never really know how the receivers will take it (or how the message is relayed!!) So the rational thing to do is to play it safe and not do an exit interview unless you are sure that it won’t backfire on you.