MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-07-11 20:42:51+00:00
I normally use an M3 MacBook Air, but I still have my T430 from college and I love how upgradable and hackable it is.

What I've done so far:

* Maxed out the RAM to 16GB (using lower voltage DIMMs to increase battery life)

* Swapped to a larger 9 cell battery

* Upgraded the CPU (and thermal paste) from a 2 core/4 thread i5 to a 4 core/8 thread i7

* Flashed a custom BIOS to remove the WiFi card whitelist and installed an Intel 7260 WiFi AC + Bluetooth card

* Replaced the stock 1600x900 TN panel with a 1920x1080 IPS display

* Replaced the barrel charging port with a USB-C connector (requires a 20v USB PD power supply, but those aren't super rare or expensive)

* Replaced the HDD with an SSD

* Replaced the optical drive and a 2.5" drive enclosure and installed a second SSD

Future projects:

* Flash Coreboot

* Upgrade to a faster i7

* Upgrade to a 1440p IPS panel

* Swap to a T420 keyboard
by jfengel | 2025-07-11 20:43:53+00:00
By "we", they mean them specifically, the Newsguard web site. They're just going to go ahead and call things "false".

They claim that that's a higher standard, though I don't quite accept that. Dubbing something "disinformation" means more than just "false". It means "false, and it was a deliberately introduced falsehood, starting at a source with a history of falsehoods".

It's used to push back: "Check your sources, and do not trust anything from this source". Merely dubbing a single fact false does nothing to stem the flow of falsehoods, and that flow is a torrent.

They don't have to make that their mission, if they don't want to. But it does diminish their utility.
by ddahlen | 2025-07-11 20:44:10+00:00
Oort cloud comets are so distant that they are only weakly gravitationally bound to the solar system. When they come in and we see them, they have enough energy to go back out to the extreme distances. Minor nudges from the big planets are enough to cause them to become ejected from the solar system (ecc>1). This can lead to the whole "one and done" thing.
by jlhawn | 2025-07-11 20:44:18+00:00
> ... These assessments would require intricate and subjective valuations that are very difficult to quantify accurately.

I continue to believe that "full cash value" assessments which try to ascertain the market purchase price of real estate are very foolish. And there are so many inputs and methods of formulating an assessment. What all of them have in common though, is that they consider the rental value of the property. It would be so much simpler if the tax was only assessed on the rental value. It eliminates things that effect the sale price estimates like interest rates, subjective risk tolerances, speculative premiums, and even the tax itself. The tax rate on the rental value would of course be much higher than the tax rate on the purchase price (25% compared to 1% for example) but it's a much more stable assessment with a lot more reliable data backing it up.

disclosure: I am a Georgist and former president of Common Ground California.
by disambiguation | 2025-07-11 20:44:20+00:00
The paper linked in the article is paywalled, but after a bit of sleuthing I found a full access pre-print (I assume hosted legitimately)

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d5fz2_v3

The section on measuring over-confidence is interesting, specifically how they address the shortcoming of self-reporting confidence (if you're bad at the task in the first place, you're also going to be bad at estimating your performance, where the act of estimating resembles the task itself).

Another fun activity is to visit the appendix (p. 47) which lists all of the True and False Conspiracies used in their assessment.
by vintagedave | 2025-07-11 20:44:50+00:00
I didn't post with the intention of being rage-bait; I thought it was a genuinely interesting article beyond its headline.

That said, you're right. We don't know, and maybe we're giving too much credit to someone who seems unreliable. I'd love to know more in general about how LLMs get from the training stage to the release stage -- there seems to be a lot of tuning.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-07-11 20:45:04+00:00
Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.

My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
by closeparen | 2025-07-11 20:46:24+00:00
>We programmers, we 1%ers, are in the top percentile of capitalism high scores in the entire world - that’s the literal definition - but we keep fighting with each other to get closer to top place. Why?

>Because we forgot there’s anything else. Because someone convinced us that the score even matters.

Because we want homes near the offices we're required to work from in order to maintain those capitalism high scores, and those homes are a fundamentally zero sum resource.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-11 20:46:58+00:00
No, it was exactly blocked because of a procedural issue. Despite the fears of many, Trump is not yet a dictator, and the Republican Party is not in total control. Judges rule in ways that they don't like all the time.

This keeps coming up because Trump tries to act like a dictator and just order things to be the way he wants, and it doesn't work that way. There are procedures that the Federal government has to follow; it can't just ignore them and get things done right now. And in fact, the government being forced to follow procedure is a very good thing, even if it's something we want the government to do. It's one of the things standing between where we are and a dictatorship.
by SideQuark | 2025-07-11 20:47:16+00:00
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.

It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.

Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
by taraindara | 2025-07-11 20:48:03+00:00
I wonder if under-regulated pesticide and herbicide use is slowly contaminating these areas, as the water that occasionally makes its way to these areas becomes more contaminated by man made chemicals. I know it’s only more recently being discovered that these things are causing diseases in humans. Not a far stretch to say it also affects plants and other animals in ways we can’t predict.
by ryao | 2025-07-11 20:48:06+00:00
My recollection is different. The batteries were not defective. They simply got old in terms of cycle life and once they were old enough, they could not support the peak current needed by the phones causing crashes. Apple shipped an iOS update that throttled the CPU frequencies of phones with old batteries and called it a stability update without explaining anything. Phones stopped crashing, but started to become slower. Then 12-18 months later, people realized how the update worked and there was outrage because of how Apple handled it. Then Apple shipped an update to give customers visibility into this, published documentation and offered to replace batteries that were below 80% capacity for $29 for a year.
by strbean | 2025-07-11 20:48:32+00:00
> Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.

It seems like you are equating self-labeling of this sort with claiming to be a paragon of that ideology.

Do you think someone who labels themselves as "Christian" inherently believes they are pure of soul and perfect, and sins less than non-Christians? Certainly there are plenty of self-righteous people out there, but "Christian" does not imply "Christ-like".

The same goes for rationalists - "rationalist" does not imply "rational". I don't know the proportion of self-described rationalists that would consider themselves truly rational, but I think a good portion of them would consider anyone who made that claim to be full of crap. The whole movement is predicated on studying and maintaining awareness of the mountains of cognitive bias humans carry. If you can study that and still think you are ultra-rational, you've got a special kind of hubris.
by projectazorian | 2025-07-11 20:48:58+00:00
> I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now.

I don't think they're gone though? I just got back from a trip to Japan and I was very pleased to find these experiences were still the norm outside the most heavily touristed areas. Even in big cities. Have been to Colombia twice in the past two years and it was the same way.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-07-11 20:49:27+00:00
I wouldn’t trade a modern Macbook for an old one by any stretch, but man, you could really have some fun with those older models.

I gave my modded 17" 2009 "cafeteria tray" Macbook Pro to my father, and after using it for many more years, he brought it in for… something. I had replaced the internal optical drive with an SSD and reformatted it as a “Fusion Drive” (a kind of smart multi-drive partition that would put commonly-accessed things on an SSD and large rarely-used storage on an HD, identified as a single drive), apparently every Genius Bar employee crammed around the table because they had never seen any Apple computer like it :D
by ChocolateGod | 2025-07-11 20:50:21+00:00
I've used it as my desktops main filesystem for many years and not had any problems. I have regular snapshots with snapper. I run the latest kernel, so ZFS is not an option.

That said, I avoid it like the plague on servers, to get acceptable performance (or avoid fragmentation) with VMs or databases you need to disable COW which disables many of it's features, so it's better just to roll with XFS (and get pseudo-snapshots anyway).
by pornel | 2025-07-11 20:51:07+00:00
Why would they be less likely to be bombed? Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant got bombed in 2022.

There's no strong deterrent there. These plants don't blow up like nukes, or even Chernobyl. Nuclear disasters require very precise conditions to sustain the chain reaction. Blowing up a reactor with conventional weapons will spread the fuel around, which is a nasty pollution, but localized enough that it's the victim's problem not the aggressor’s problem.

Why do you even mention transformers and cables as an implied alternative to nuclear power plants? Power plants absolutely require power distribution infrastructure, which is vulnerable to attacks.

From the perspective of resiliency against military attacks, solar + batteries seem the best - you can have them distributed without any central point of failure, you can move them, and the deployments can be as large or small as you want.

(BTW, this isn't argument against nuclear energy in general. It's safe, and we should build more of it, and build as much solar as we can, too).
by lazharichir | 2025-07-11 20:51:29+00:00
From my (limited) understanding you cannot really switch these off inadvertently as they require a couple of actions in order to be switched off. So it would mean one of the pilots switched these off (and they were a few seconds later switched on again but it was too late).

But there was audio, too, and one pilot asked the other "why did you switch these off" and the second one said "I didn't".

Was there are third one in the jump seat?
by calmbonsai | 2025-07-11 20:51:31+00:00
In order:

- No. There are many companies that have board mandates such that one single entity can never have a prima facie super-majority of voting power.

- Yes it does. Under this structure, the CEO has no voting power on the board or right to initiate matters before it. Usually, a CEO has at least 1 vote and that right.

- Not true in corporations where there are distinct cohorts of stock classes such that the owners of (e.g. class "A") a particular stock have 10-100x more voting power than (e.g. class "B") and as a "price" to assume the role of CEO one must "purchase" a controlling majority of shares.
by SideQuark | 2025-07-11 20:51:36+00:00
Houses today are vastly larger. Cost/sq ft in all but the few most expensive places has been nearly constant under inflation adjusted price for an incredibly long time. A huge majority of the population lives in such places.

Here's a size list that is commonly shared https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

When you figure in # of people in such houses, the avg person has vastly more space https://www.reddit.com/r/REBubble/comments/14hayqq/average_h...
by udkl | 2025-07-11 20:51:48+00:00
This is a good writeup, but the VP learnings/mistakes (#3, 4 and 5) honestly felt pretty amateur mistakes for any leadership position ... even for just a junior managerial role. It's a good thing they were able to learn on the job, but the team could have used a more seasoned leader - or the author could have had more pre-training/coaching.
by oc1 | 2025-07-11 20:51:54+00:00
<< At launch, Comet will be available first to subscribers of Perplexity’s $200-per-month Max plan, as well as a small group of invitees that signed up to a waitlist.

Boy i already pay Anthropic that. Now i should pay another 200 bucks to use an ai browser? On top of all these ai saas that want another 20 bucks.
by hubraumhugo | 2025-07-11 20:51:54+00:00
Pretty proud to see this at the top of HN as a Swiss (and I know many are lurking here!). These two universities produce world-class founders, researchers, and engineers. Yet, we always stay in the shadow of the US. With our top-tier public infrastructure, education, and political stability (+ neutrality), we have a unqiue opportunity to build something exceptional in the open LLM space.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-11 20:51:54+00:00
Any electronic gear that you care about must be connected to a UPS. HDDs are very susceptible to power issues. Good UPS are also line conditioners so you get a clean sine wave rather than whatever comes straight from the mains. If you've never seen it, connect a meter to an outlet in your home and what how much fluctuations you get throughout the day. Most people think about spikes/surges, while forgetting that dips and under-volting is damaging as well. Most equipment have a range of acceptable voltage, but you'd be amazed at the number of times mains will dip below that range. Obviously location will have an affect on quality of service, but I hear my UPSes kick in multiple times a week to cover a dip if only for a couple of seconds.

The fun thing about storage pools is that they can lull you into thinking they are set it and forget it. You have to monitor SMART messages. Most drives will give you a heads up if you know where to look. Having the fortitude to have a hot spare instead of just adding it to the storage pool goes a long way from losing data.
by tonymet | 2025-07-11 20:52:45+00:00
sure but here's what happens in practice. The agency raises the revenue, and raises the spending to meet the new revenue.

I'll give an example. My local city proposed creating a separate taxing authority for the fire department . The new authority would get an additional share of the property tax. Meanwhile the city would keep the share they were getting beforehand, and spend it on other things.

My point is that abstract / theoretical approaches to taxing don't account for the human factor. The human factor is that people just want to make their job easy, and if they get more money, they will spend it.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-11 20:52:56+00:00
It's the one below the one ashwinsundar linked, "detection of artificial colour in turmeric powder".

The test is: when you add the powdered turmeric to water, natural turmeric will give the water a "light" yellow color, while adulterated turmeric will give it a "strong" yellow color.

This is not a test that I'd characterize as "easy" or "reliable".
by generalizations | 2025-07-11 20:53:35+00:00
> GDPR covering a significant fraction of the world

> privacy law that covers all business that do business in any Canadian province

A random group of people uploaded free software source code and said 'hey world, try this out'. I wish the GDPR and the PIPEDA the best of luck in keeping people from doing that. (Not to actually defend the telemetry, tbh that's kinda sleezy imo.)
by theozero | 2025-07-11 20:53:42+00:00
Personally I don't want to write custom code from scratch or glue together 5 tools to do this on every project. I've done it - many many many times... If your project is very simple with a few env vars, it may not be a big deal, but on large projects it quickly becomes a burden. Maybe not one you deal with every day, but regularly - when new teammates join, when new external services are added, when new deployment environments are being used.

Also a big goal here is to have a single tool that will work for all frameworks _and languages_. In monorepo projects, it's very common to have a different custom env var loading and validation setup in each child project, and sharing config across the project is very awkward.

Doing this stuff well is hard, which often means people take shortcuts. So many times dev teams gets stopped in their tracks because someone added a new env var and forgot to distribute it to everyone, or they only added the new key to staging and forgot production. We just want to make doing the right thing the easiest thing.

Imagine if this was just a standard, and when you look at a public docker container, there is a schema of the env vars it takes, rather than digging through the readme. When it boots up, if the env vars are invalid it will give you a clear error message. Imagine when you clone some template project, you get this all this validation and documentation for free, without having to trace through some custom code.

Yes - it is something new, but our hope is that it is intuitive enough to grasp even if it's new to you.
by rybosworld | 2025-07-11 20:53:52+00:00
Based on the comments, I think a lot of people are missing what the AI Agent actually got wrong here. Nowhere did the agent claim that 45 + 8 = 63.

You can see the Agent's step by step thought process here (also linked in the article):

https://ibm-cuga.19pc1vtv090u.us-east.codeengine.appdomain.c...

The Agent correctly entered the starting point (MIT) and the ending point (Harvard) and the mode of transport (on foot). OpenStreetMap returns this as taking 45 minutes long.

Then the agent reversed the directions, and changed the mode of transport to car. What it should have also done, is change the destination to Logan Airport. This is the part that the agent missed. OpenStreetMap then returns that the drive from Harvard to MIT takes 8 minutes.

The agent then returned the answer as being 45 minutes walking and 8 minutes driving. The first number is correct. The second is wrong because the agent chose the wrong destination, not because it did math incorrectly.

Seems like lots of readers are chomping at the bit to prove how stupid the models are rather than focus on the real problem the author is highlighting.
by 59nadir | 2025-07-11 20:54:23+00:00
I am personally somewhere in-between these two places. I've used ChatGPT to get unstuck a few times this past week because I was at the end of my rope with regards to some GPU crashes that I couldn't make heads or tails of. I then used it for less headache-inducing things and overall it's been an interesting experience.

For research I'm enjoying asking ChatGPT to annotate its responses with sources and reading those; in some cases I've found SIGGRAPH papers that I wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise, and it's nice to get them all in a response.

ChatGPT (4o, if it's of any interest) is very knowledgeable about DirectX12 (which we switched to just this week) and I've gained tons of peripheral knowledge with regards to the things I've been battling with, but only one out of four times has it been able to actually diagnose directly what the issue was; three separate times it's been something it didn't really bring up or note in any meaningful regard. What helped was really just me writing about it, thinking about everything around it and for that it's been very helpful.

Realistically, if someone let an agent running on this stuff loose on our code base it would likely end up wasting days of time and still not fix the issue. Even worse, the results would have to be tested on a specific GPU to even trigger the issue to begin with.

It seems to me that fancy auto-complete is likely the best this would be able to do still, and I actually like it for that. I don't use LLM-assisted auto-complete anymore, but I used to use GitHub Copilot back in 2022 and it was more productive than my brief tests of agents.

If I were to regularly use LLMs for actual programmit it would most likely be just for tab-completion of "rest of expressions" or 1 line at a time, but probably with local LLMs.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-11 20:54:58+00:00
> Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?

LOL, what?

Tesla has a bigger market cap than those companies COMBINED. And more. How is it a "medium" player? I don't agree with that market cap, to be clear.

It seems that Tesla is the Schrodinger's automotive manufacturer: snappy young upstart when that's convenient, world's biggest/strongest/brightest when that narrative is convenient.
by lazide | 2025-07-11 20:54:59+00:00
There is nothing in this entire thread that is useful or makes sense, eh?

Just like arguing that the only common form of mercury people would run across in daily life (elemental!) isn’t applicable, since it isn’t implicated in toxicity events (duh! Because it’s not particular toxic and requires massive exposures over time!) - when we’re talking about relative toxicity of elemental plutonium and mercury compounds, eh?

Or do you want to try to guess if we can make a plutonium equivalent of methyl mercury - which we haven’t really tried to make, because it’s insane.
by boroboro4 | 2025-07-11 20:55:18+00:00
Ok, bonus content #2.

I took Qwen3 1.7B model and did the same but rather then using embedding vector I used vector after 1st/etc layer, below accuracies for 1st positions:

- embeddings: 0.855

- 1st: 0.913

- 2nd: 0.870

- 3rd: 0.671

- 16th: 0.676

- 20th: 0.683

And now mega bonus content: the same but with prefix "count letters in ":

- 1st: 0.922

- 2nd: 0.924

- 3rd: 0.920

- 16th: 0.877

- 20th: 0.895

And for 2nd letter:

- embeddings: 0.686

- 1st: 0.679

- 2nd: 0.682

- 3rd: 0.674

- 16th: 0.572
by gpm | 2025-07-11 20:55:22+00:00
I mean, those are merely the two countries privacy laws I'm most familiar with. The general principal of "no you can't just steal peoples personal information" is not something unique to the ~550 million people the laws I cited cover.

And the laws don't prevent you from uploading "random" software and saying "try this". They prevent you from uploading spyware and saying "try this". Edit: Nor does the Canadian one cover any random group of people, it covers commercial entities, which Bloop AI appears to be.