MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kkysen | 2025-07-20 04:15:42+00:00
They already do this on lines with upgraded CBTC signaling. The train runs in ATO (Automatic Train Operation) in which the driver just pushes the start button at each station. So they tried to combine the driver and conductor into one position, but the union fought back and stopped it.

Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
by Ccecil | 2025-07-20 04:17:24+00:00
My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?"

They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
by arrowsmith | 2025-07-20 04:19:38+00:00
Tangential but I just went to Kagi.com to check their pricing and I was astonished to see that:

- The "Monthly" option is selected by default.

- If you click "Yearly", it tells you the actual full yearly price without dividing it by 12.

That's so rare and refreshing that I'm tempted to sign up just out of respect.
by hackyhacky | 2025-07-20 04:21:26+00:00
In Haskell, we call this problem "overlapping instances," and can be allowed with an optional compiler flag. Nevertheless, I try to avoid using it, because of the potential for unforeseen consequences and reduced clarity in which code is actually being run.

In this use case, my instinct tells me that trait specialization is the wrong tool for the job. The author is trying to dispatch different functions based on a flag set in the caller. I can think of two more elegant ways to do this:

* Make the file system itself a trait, with implementations for read-only and read/write. Pass the concrete implementation as a parameter to the function using it.

* Store the capabilities as a variable in the file system object and query it at runtime. This can be done with an if.

Sometimes the simpler approach is better.
by legitster | 2025-07-20 04:21:56+00:00
Host here. Almost nobody sets prices manually. You either use Airbnb's pricing algorithm, or one from a third party. Either way it's set automatically based on local occupancy rates/hotel prices/etc.

Which is an argument that this is not truly gouging - there's just a demand surge and a supply crunch and the market responds the same way as if it was a business conference in town.

Another thing worth pointing out is that the market of available Airbnbs clears out from the cheaper units first. So it may look like prices are shooting up, but really it's just that all the normal priced ones are gone.
by ndiddy | 2025-07-20 04:22:09+00:00
> Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age.

I dislike the mentality that if someone criticizes one party, it means they must automatically support the other. Those are two different things! Personally I think this administration is the worst for America since the Reagan administration.

> I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.

The point I was trying to make is that US-style capitalism, where the government exists to serve large corporations and the people who run them, inherently results in social and political instability. Ignoring the average person in favor of stock market gains creates a large number of people who are hopeless, see things getting worse, and feel like they have nothing to lose, which is when you start seeing right-wing populists winning elections.

> It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.

The Democrats have shown time and time again that they don't care about earning people's votes. Even the gains the Biden administration had made for things like antitrust law and consumer protection were set to get rolled back under the Harris administration. "At least we're not Trump" is not an inspiring message. I think it's been telling that when the Democrats had a narrow majority in Congress during the Biden administration, over and over they threw up their hands saying "we don't have the votes" and let the Republicans stop Biden from implementing his agenda, but now that the Republicans have a narrow majority suddenly Trump has all the power in the world to dismantle the government piece by piece. After what happened with David Hogg getting forced out of the party for saying that maybe we should have some younger people representing us (note that 3 Democrat representatives have died in office this year), I genuinely believe that party leadership would rather keep losing elections than give an inch to even the most milquetoast reforms. We're left with a party of septuagenarians whose skills are in clinging to power, not delivering positive results for their constituents.
by walterbell | 2025-07-20 04:23:12+00:00
> never heard of anybody using it

5 million downloads of the Docker image, https://hub.docker.com/_/clearlinux/

It was a reference distro for performance optimizations, which will hopefully find their way into upstream projects and mainstream distros, https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Ends-Clear-Linux

Clear Linux has delivered many great out-of-the-box performance optimizations for Linux systems and shown what can be done for packaging with profile guided optimizations / link-time optimizations, various kernel tweaks, and other innovations over the years. At least the likes of CachyOS have picked up some of these optimizations. Intel engineers are also working with other major Linux distributions on enhancing their Linux distribution performance too.
by pansa2 | 2025-07-20 04:24:33+00:00
> Your first example has to do with the fact that tuples are copied by value, whereas lists are "copied" by reference.

My mental model for Python is that everything is '"copied" by reference', but that some things are immutable and others are mutable.

I believe that's equivalent to immutable objects being 'copied by value' and mutable ones being '"copied" by reference', but "everything is by reference" more accurately reflects the language's implementation.
by Ukv | 2025-07-20 04:27:07+00:00
> > Would this guilty-until-proven-innocent rule apply also to non-ML code and manual decisions?

> I would say yes [...]

So if you're a doctor making manual decisions about how to treat a patient, and some harm/loss occurs, you'd be criminally guilty-until-proven-innocent? I feel it should require evidence of negligence (or malice), and be done under standard innocent-until-proven-guilty rules.

> The mere presence of AI (anything based on underlying work of perceptrons) [...]

Why single out based on underlying technology? If for instance we're choosing a tumor detector, I'd claim what's relevant is "Method A has been tested to achieve 95% AUROC, method B has been tested to achieve 90% AUROC" - there shouldn't be an extra burden in the way of choosing method A.

And it may well be that the perceptron-based method is the one with lower AUROC - just that it should then be discouraged because it's worse than the other methods, not because a special case puts it at a unique legal disadvantage even when safer.

> The problem of fines is that they don't provide the needed incentives to large entities as a result of money-printing through debt-issuance, or indirectly through government contracts.

Large enough fines/rewards should provide large enough incentive (and there would still be liability for criminal negligence where there is sufficient evidence of criminal negligence). Those government contracts can also be conditioned on meeting certain safety standards.

> Merit of subjective rates isn't something that can be enforced

We can/do measure things like incident rates, and have government agencies that perform/require safety testing and can block products from market. Not always perfect, but seems better to me than the company just picking a scape-goat.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-20 04:27:07+00:00
I will give you an example of where you are dead wrong, and one where the article is spot on (without diving into historic artifacts).

I run HomeAssistant, I don't get to play/use it every day. Here, LLM's excel at filling in the (legion) of blanks in both the manual and end user devices. There is a large body of work for it to summarize and work against.

I also play with SBC's. Many of these are "fringe" at best. LLM's are as you say "not fit for purpose".

What kind of development you are using LLM's for will determine your experience with them. The tool may or may not live up to the hype depending how "common", well documented and "frequent" your issue is. Once you start hitting these "walls" you realize that no, real reason, leaps of inference and intelligence are still far away.
by harrisi | 2025-07-20 04:27:51+00:00
I think I know what you mean, but there's a line somewhere. Just because everyone doesn't understand the intricacies of the micro ops their cpu is using or every type of cache involved in various situations doesn't mean their computer is full of bugs.

Similarly, as long as the mental model of a Python programmer is in line with the results of executing some computation with Python, all is well.
by esjeon | 2025-07-20 04:27:54+00:00
> avoiding "abuse" just reads as imposing your taste onto all users of your language.

I believe languages are all about bias. A language must represent the preference of the community using it.

We should all learn from the case of Lisp, which is the simplest language and likely the most expressible language. The community suffered from the serious fragmentation driven by the sheer simplicity of the language and tons of NIH syndrome. It took them 30 years to get a standard CL, and another 20 years to get a de facto standard package repository (QuickLisp).
by jmyeet | 2025-07-20 04:27:58+00:00
The military industrial complex, endowment funds from large colleges and academic research created Silicon Valley.

American corporations are fading into irrelevance through "financial management". Manufacturing powerhouses like Boeing and Intel are a shadow of their former selve and are really just coasting on inertia.

Pretty much everywhere you see "innovation", you will see government money. Look at the pharma industry. I doubt there's a drug out there that wasn't created by researchers using federal grants.

I'm often reminded of the story of Tetris. A handful of Soviets created the game. What was capitalism's contribution? Licensing agreements, sub-licensing agreements and so on. Put another way: building enclosures. That and rent-seeking is really all American corporations do anymore.
by ilaksh | 2025-07-20 04:28:19+00:00
That's obviously broken but part of this is an inherent difficulty with names. One thing they could do would be to have a default question that is always present like "what other people named [_____] are there?"

That wouldn't solve the problem of mixing up multiple people. But the first problem most people have is probably actually that it pulls up a person that is more famous than who they were actually looking for.

I think Google does have some type of knowledge graph. I wonder how much AI model uses it.

Maybe it hits the graph, but also some kind of Google search, and then the LLM is like Gemini Flash Lite and is not smart enough to realize which search result goes with the famous person from the graph versus just random info from search results.

I imagine for a lot of names, there are different levels of fame and especially in different categories.

It makes me realize that my knowledge graph application may eventually have an issue with using first and last name as entity IDs. Although it is supposed to be for just an individual's personal info so I can probably mostly get away with it. But I already see a different issue when analyzing emails where my different screen names are not easily recognized as being the same person.
by redrove | 2025-07-20 04:28:58+00:00
It was years ago but I recall high CPU usage being an issue in particular.

In general it's just not as battle tested as ceph and I needed something more bulletproof.

However I will say this: I'm sure that issue with the CPU usage was fixed (I was watching the GitHub issue) and you might not need your distributed FS to be CERN ready for your lab; AND the UI and built-in backups Longhorn offers are great for beginners so I'd suggest giving it a try if you don't already know you want ceph or OpenEBS Mayastor for the performance and so on.
by ghewgill | 2025-07-20 04:29:27+00:00
The walrus operator allows you to use `elif` there to avoid cascading indentation.

if m := re.match(pattern1, line): do_stuff(m.group(1)) elif m := re.match(pattern2, line): do_other_stuff(m.group(2)) elif m := re.match(pattern3, line): do_things(m.groups()) else: ...
by Spivak | 2025-07-20 04:29:39+00:00
> You should never trust an "rsync copy" or even crash consistent backups.

This leads you to the secret forbidden knowledge that you only need to back up your database(s) and file/object storage. Everything else can be, or has to be depending on how strong that 'never' is, recreated from your provisioning tools. All those Veeam VM backups some IT folks hoard like dragons are worthless.
by rapind | 2025-07-20 04:30:19+00:00
This is interesting. Maybe slow it down a bit? What I've found is I really need to be extremely involved. I approve every change (claude-code). I'm basically micromanaging an AI developer. I'm constantly reading and correcting. Sometimes I tell it to wait while I help it make some change it's hung up on.

There's no way I could hire someone who'd want me hovering over their shoulder like this.

This sounds tedious I guess, but it's actually quite zen, and faster than solo coding most of the time. It gives me a ton of confidence to try new things and new libraries, because I can ask it to explain why it's suggesting the changes or for an overview of an approach. At no point am I not aware of what it's doing. This isn't even close to what people think of as vibe coding. It's very involved.

I'm really looking forward to increasing context sizes. Sometimes it can spin it's wheels during a refactor and want to start undoing changes it made earlier in the process, and I have to hard correct it. Even twice the context size will be a game changer for me.
by opo | 2025-07-20 04:30:38+00:00
>The thing we’d be giving up is 2% of our economic output…

That 2% was for a payout of just $1,000 a month and the participants knew it was temporary. A more generous payout that was permanent might lead to a higher percentage.

>...and the thing we’d be getting is, I think, a massive improvement to people’s quality of life.

The general principle of most welfare systems is to provide for those who are unable to work. There isn't nearly as much support in the general public to provide for those who simply choose not to work. Hence the comment in the blog that "...if it’s confirmed that basic income discourages work and provides little long-term career benefits, I think interest in the idea will wane rapidly."
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-20 04:30:55+00:00
As others already pointed out, Lua is used in tons of video games as the scripting language.

The most famous example being World of Warcraft, but it's far from the only one. If you play, or have played, games, you almost certainly have run software built with Lua without realizing it.

It's not because a language isn't relevant in your personal coding niche that it's not industrially relevant.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-20 04:31:39+00:00
It depends on your collapse threat model. In any case, my assumption is that serious preppers already have EMP-shielded laptops and solar panels for a SHTF scenario. And serious preppers are probably doing some datahoard as well. The point is that there are economies of scale in the datahoard. Most of the work of datahoard is identifying data worth hoarding, setting up your scripts, monitoring your webcrawler, etc. Once you've got a drive full of data, replicating that drive is comparatively easy. That's why it could make sense to start a business selling replicated drives.

Maybe there is room for an "all-in-one" product offering with an energy-efficient laptop, solar panel, and TBs of useful data, all protected in an EMP storage case for the event of solar flare.
by pansa2 | 2025-07-20 04:31:59+00:00
> I'd argue the first one is not a smaller WTF than the latter.

I think the first one probably arises more frequently, but at least there's a fairly straightforward explanation: "`x += y` acts in-place if-and-only-if `x` is mutable".

The second example is more niche but it's much harder to explain what's going on - it can only be understood by first understanding the first example, and what it implies about the implementation of `+=`.
by godelski | 2025-07-20 04:32:08+00:00
They can definitely solve some problems. There's a number of items that are well known to have common forgeries. Weirdly common is things like Lamy pens[0]. I've gotten legit ones from amazon but seem fake ones.

One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.

There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.

But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/q14p5w/are_la...
by johnfn | 2025-07-20 04:34:10+00:00
> To win in Unix land, C# needs to be editable in a plain text editor. It requires succinctness. But with the current community, I'm afraid they'll never figure this out.

I couldn't disagree more strongly. This has nothing to do with Windows/Unix and everything to do with language philosophy. I also think that languages that understand that understand they are targeting (text, IDE) rather than just (text) accomplish things that those that only target text never will.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-20 04:36:03+00:00
Seeing as this is an in vitro study, they fall back on a specific human study (Witkowski et al., 2023) for many of the human effect claims. However the referenced study has a few issues:

- All study subjects had a "high prevalence of CVD [cardiovascular disease] and risk factor burden"

- Erythritol occurs naturally in the body and and this was not accounted for

- The study subjects were already suffering from cardiovascular disease and were likely to be consuming more artificial sweeteners than a general population, but this was not recognized or accounted for

- Erythritol's presence after a cardiovascular incident could be from consumption or from natural production but only baseline was measured despite data showing dramatic fluctuations after consumption

Another one of the studies cited for evidence of human claims (Khafagy et al., 2024) directly contradicts them. It stated said "we did not find supportive evidence from MR that erythritol increases cardiometabolic disease".

There are two more human studies referenced but I didn't read them.
by mynameisash | 2025-07-20 04:36:59+00:00
> when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in.

I worked in building 6 for a while. That was frustrating because the two halves of the building were mirror images. If I had to go to the other side of the building for a meeting, I got disoriented and thought I knew the way back to my office, but I kept getting it wrong. It's like the Upside Down.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-20 04:37:41+00:00
Stop trying to disguise your insincere trolling as the Socratic method.

If you label something as a "strawman", that means you are already aware of distinct and relevant differences between it and the "real" thing.

But instead of presenting those things that you claim to already have, you're running away, unable to explain your own words! Much like someone that hurled "strawman" as a reflexive insult after they felt uncomfortable reading the text.
by mango7283 | 2025-07-20 04:37:43+00:00
Replying here since we hit the nesting limit.

Thanks for understanding.

I'm still looking at the thread and see people bringing up other titles that haven't been banned as if that's a gotcha and it just baffles me. Like what do they think the activists would respond if they were called out on it?

"Oh we don't care about that we only had a grudge on this game in particular"

Or more likely

"Thank you for bringing this title to our attention, we will certainly try to have it taken down as well as it too is against the values we are fighting for"
by cloudbonsai | 2025-07-20 04:38:56+00:00
This seems to be one of the researches from Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell Univ.

https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-co...

I believe that "learn" is a bit too strong word here. The fungi is essentially a UV light sensor. The researchers made a robot that moves in a certain way based on the biological signal.

So the mushroom is more like a passive sensor then an active pilot.
by avidiax | 2025-07-20 04:38:56+00:00
Not much I miss about working at Microsoft, except that everyone had an office, and if you had even a couple of years of seniority, you had that office to yourself. The window offices required 5 years' seniority when I joined, and when I had 5 years' seniority, window offices required 10 years' seniority...

Even Microsoft has gone open office now, though.
by mbesto | 2025-07-20 04:39:13+00:00
Search wasn't just "search". It was "put a prompt in a form and then spend minutes/hours going through various websites until I get my answer". LLMs change that. I don't have to go through 20 different people's blog posts on "Which 12v 100Ah LifePO4 battery tests for the highest watt hours", the LLM simply just gives me answer that is most relevant across those 20 blog posts. It just distilled what I would have taken an hour to do down to seconds or 2 minutes.