MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapetitejort | 2025-07-22 20:25:31+00:00
I have been an Ansel Adams fan for decades, and yet never knew he took extensive photographs of the University of California system in the 1960s.

University of California, Riverside has thousands of photos and negatives in their archive. Some are viewable online: https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/?f=relatedW... Most of the unscanned images are probably just similar shots.

Some of my favorite I've found scrolling through:

Dr Margaret Burbidge, UCSD, https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/114620...

UCSD "Breezeway" which connects to the Physics building where I took classes: https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/97028/

Bikes locked up on the UCR campus: https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/19176/

Dr. Nello Pace and Monkey https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/19964/

Scripps Carbon 14 Lab, Dr. George Biem: https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/97023/

Conference room, I.G.P.P.: https://ucrartscollections.ucr.edu/en/collection/item/19221/
by teraflop | 2025-07-22 20:25:35+00:00
> "The retrograde orbital plane... of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth... The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%." Not sure where he comes up with 0.2%.

This part of the calculation, at least, is basically correct. The orientation of a plane in space is defined by its normal vector, so the right way to look at probabilities is in terms of solid angle. The normal of 3I/ATLAS's orbit falls within a cone around Earth's normal vector, having a half-angle of 5 degrees, and that cone's solid angle occupies about 0.2% of the full sphere.

Of course, this is only the chance of a retrograde alignment. Presumably, if the comet's orbit was prograde aligned with the Earth's to within 5 degrees, Loeb would be making exactly the same claim. So really, the relevant probability is 0.4%.

Nevertheless, I agree that the article is basically just a bunch of cherry-picked probabilities and insinuations that don't add up to much.

Also:

> "the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is ~20 kilometers in diameter (for a typical albedo of ~5%), too large for an interstellar asteroid."

But to justify this, Loeb cites his own work showing that the object is either a large asteroid, or a comet with a small nucleus. And then he seems to have looked at some earlier spectra and jumped to the conclusion that 3I/ATLAS couldn't be a comet, so it must be a large asteroid. But of course, follow-up observations have debunked this point and clearly shown it to be a comet.
by yongjik | 2025-07-22 20:25:50+00:00
God, Jeff Bezos's jet is such an inane distraction that I can't believe people are still falling for this. If you're upset about Bezos's CO2 footprint, the very easy way to fix it is to tax the rich more.

And then we can use the money for EV credits, more wind farms, and other initiatives. Hell, if you're really against climate policies, we could simply burn the money and at least that could help fighting inflation.

There is one party in the US that constantly shoots down climate policies. Guess what they also do to Jeff Bezos's tax. Somehow that doesn't bother all those "climate policy skeptics" that are deeply upset about his private jet.
Ask HN: How have you optimized your company/ work?
by Xx_crazy420_xX | 2025-07-22 20:25:52+00:00
Looking for routines, methodologies, bash scripts, or anything that works for you.

I will start with mine:

- Short cardio before meetings brings huge energy, especially if rest of team is involved - Define all tasks with short, crystal-clear acceptance criteria - Complete software rewrite is inevitable, don't overengineer - Code review should include aspects like user experience
by Pxtl | 2025-07-22 20:26:28+00:00
A fun trick is that if you're sure the batteries are in series you can sometimes swap out a pair of AA batteries for a 3.7V 14500 Lithium rechargeable and a fake AA battery (just a wire in an AA-sized plastic shell). Drill a hole in the battery-cover of the device where the 14500's USB port is and now your device is plug-in rechargeable, assuming it can handle 3.7V instead of the normal ~3.1V that comes from a pair of AAs (which isn't a huge stretch). Worked for my old Logitech game controllers.

Downside is that you've got parts in your bin that are dangerous because they look like AA batteries but could cause damage or even fires if somebody put them into the wrong AA thing. Make sure to mark the batteries loudly. I've electrical-taped the pairs together to prevent this problem.
by inetknght | 2025-07-22 20:26:36+00:00
> Put it in your git commit message.

Yes, that's fine. Developers can also put TODOs in their git commit message.

> Most commits people make are rather bad. Instead of taking us back to the stone age with TODOs, why not encourage better tool usage?

I have a tool which fails if it finds a TODO in a comment without a Jira link on the same line. Since it fails if it finds such things, it's great for CI/CD piplines to block PRs until all of the oddball ends have been tied up and made visible to the product team.

Alas, if we could get the product team to prioritize those TODOs then they can start to be removed from the codebase...
by hecturchi | 2025-07-22 20:26:52+00:00
Localhost benchmarks are pretty meaningless on code that is expected to deal with network latencies orders of magnitude larger.

It's ok that it runs faster, but much better if it's easier, safer, or more painless than the alternatives. The amount of code for a hello-world doesn't seem to indicate so, but maybe it pays off on more complex usecases.
by Sharlin | 2025-07-22 20:27:00+00:00
This was how physicists hypothesized the sun and other stars work in the late 19th and early 20th century, before the discovery of nuclear fusion. It presented a conundrum because calculations showed that the sun could only sustain the observed rate of energy release for a few million years – whereas the contemporary geological evidence was indicating that the Earth must be billions of years old.
by legitster | 2025-07-22 20:27:53+00:00
I just recently watched a lecture about this and was fascinated.

Specifically, the (incorrect) model of the universe that was used in Europe at the time had been refined to the point that it was absurdly accurate. Even had they adopted a heliocentric model, there would have been no direct benefit for for a long, long time. If anything, Galileo's work was rife with errors and mathematical problems that would have taken a lot of work to figure out.

So the argument was to take on a bunch of technical debt and switching costs for almost no benefits.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-22 20:28:30+00:00
Unfortunately for Tesla their look, their brand, and the associations of being "very into Tesla" are quite tainted by Elon Musk. What his association with Trump couldn't do, his double Hitlergruß managed effortlessly, and the precipitous drop in sales after that showed. The hellscape that X/Twitter has become sure doesn't help either.

I think this is a good idea that would have worked before the brand was this tainted, but now it feels like it's naturally going to attract the specific sort who don't mind being visibly associated with that taint.
by pull_my_finger | 2025-07-22 20:28:31+00:00
We do a lot of keto cooking here. Erythritol is the bottom of the barrel. They have monkfruit/allulose blends that are very comparable to sugar in taste and how they interact with heat - caramelization or melting in granular or powdered. I've read erythritol is more "immediately" sweet on your tongue, but for it's "potential" health detriment, as well as the overpowering "cooling" effect it's really not worth it. I guess if you're doing low cal as well you need to make additional concessions but most of those that don't get processed, really turn your GI upside down as well.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-22 20:29:12+00:00
Decision makers are wrong all the time. Have you ever worked at a startup? Startup founders get decisions wrong constantly. We can extrapolate and catastrophize anything. The reason CEOs are constantly jumping onto the bandwagon of new is because if a new legitimately disruptive technology comes around that you don't get behind, you're toast. A good example of that was the last tech boom which created companies like Meta and felled companies like Blackberry.

In my experience the "catastrophe hype", the feeling that the hype will disrupt and ruin the industry, is just as misplaced as the hype around the new. At the end of the day large corporations have a hard time changing due to huge layers of bureaucracies that arose to mitigate risk. Smaller companies and startups move quickly but are used to frequently changing direction to stay ahead of the market due to things often out of their control (like changing tariff rates.) If you write code just use the tools from time-to-time and incorporate them in your workflow as you see fit.
by DamonHD | 2025-07-22 20:29:23+00:00
And won't annoy people who get over-stimulated.

I don't normally have that issue, but one site had (has?) a bright green thing that jumped periodically that was so vastly distracting that I could not read the text on the page without covering the 'thing' somehow, eg with my hand! Absolutely pointless. I had to give up using the site entirely, even though it was otherwise useful.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-22 20:29:40+00:00
It's not so much about the encapsulation. Since ES6 you can achieve encapsulation more directly through an arbitrary block, such use of curly braces not associated with a loop, condition, or object. This is what older languages like C and SQL call a procedure.

The primary value of IIFE is that it is encapsulation that outputs to a value and data type. For example if an IIFE returns a string then it looks like a function, behaves like a function, but it is a primitive string type.
by pharrington | 2025-07-22 20:29:42+00:00
Individuals trying to avoid the garbage products is one side of the social relation. Another side of the social relation is the multibillion dollar company actively warring for you attention—flooding all of your information sources and abusing every psychological tool in its kit to get you to buy into their garbage products. Informed individuals have a small amount of fault, but the overwhelming fault is with Google, Claude, etc.
by yorwba | 2025-07-22 20:30:04+00:00
I agree that this is an unsurprising consequence of the output reflecting model internals that should be orthogonal to the output, but aren't. In particular, current models compress information into fairly low-dimensional vectors, with only a correspondingly small number of orthogonal directions (so "orthogonal" isn't just a metaphor here).

Usually, the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma is invoked to argue that there can be a much larger number of almost-orthogonal vectors, but if you actually do the math, the break-even point (where Johnson-Lindenstrauss starts having any benefit at all) is fairly large (IIRC > 1500 if you can tolerate 1% error) so with dimensions in the low thousands, but hundreds of thousands of concepts to represent, there'll be many large but entirely spurious correlations.

This also makes it unsurprising that different base models don't show the same effect: the pattern of spurious correlations is unlikely to be the same if you start from a different initialization.
by prometheus76 | 2025-07-22 20:30:32+00:00
The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.

There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.
by Aloisius | 2025-07-22 20:30:48+00:00
Source?

Obama didn't actually talk about Russian election interference until after the 2016 election due to a fear it would appear partisan. In interviews afterward, he avoided suggesting Trump or his campaign coordinated with Russia at all.

I can't find anything about Obama accusing Trump of asking Russia to interfere. It would be so out of character that it is hard to believe.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-07-22 20:31:09+00:00
> LLMs do not output computed or measured values.

LLMs output a vector of softmax probabilities for each step in the output sequence (the probability distribution). Each element in the vector maps to a specific word for that sequence step. What you see as a "word" in LLM output is "vector position with 'best' probability in softmax probability distribution".

And that is most definitely a computed value. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

https://medium.com/@22.gautam/softmax-function-the-unsung-he...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349823091/figure/fi...
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-22 20:31:52+00:00
>I don't feel like their capabilities are substantially oversold. I think we are shown what they can do, what they can't do, and what they can't do reliably.

> Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026

> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would not have studied computer science today if he were a student today. He urges mastering the real world for the next AI wave.

> Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff just announced that due to a 30% productivity boost brought by AI tools, the company will stop hiring software engineers in 2025.

I don't know what narratives you have been following - but these are the people that decide where money goes in our industry.
by jcynix | 2025-07-22 20:32:01+00:00
Why would I want to have this? No idea, but if I did I probably would use a modern dashcam (these can easily do 4K HDR with 60 fps nowadays) and later analyze the recording with OpenVC.

Some viofo dashcams even allow the connection of two secondary cams (those only FullHD) so you could scan to the left and right simultaneously to the front.
by neuralRiot | 2025-07-22 20:32:04+00:00
As a vegan (for ethical reasons) for over 15 years, and with the egg price craze I find hard to understand people’s obsession for eggs and milk, there are so many other foods that seems bizarre to me that people are debating if they’re healthy or not, if they raise cholesterol or not. It’s actually simple, not eating them won’t harm anybody.
by atoav | 2025-07-22 20:32:07+00:00
I work 5 days a week and I like my work. But my feeling is that it is too much. My job is demanding enough thst I can't really do a lot on workdays that isn't work related. On saturday I have to do my private shit (cleaning, other chores) which leaves sunday for my real interest stuff. On Monday I am rarely truly rested.

I am pretty sure that is neither in my, nor my employers interest. Since my work quality goes down if I am fatigued. If things continue like this I am going into a burn out and then good luck to them. A 4-day week would be interesting because then I'd have at least a chance to get rest over the weekend.
by exmadscientist | 2025-07-22 20:32:17+00:00
> TI’s TXB0108 for this purpose as well, which has an automatic direction sensing feature that obviates the need for all of the direction logic that I mentioned above.

Yeah, don't use these guys. They have a tendency to swap translation direction in the presence of electrical noise, which means your input is now an output, cross-driving something. Sometimes everything survives just fine and switches back on the next edge. Sometimes the magic smoke comes out. And sometimes, if the stars align just wrong, you get an industrial accident.

This is one of those classes of parts that has hidden dangers and really should not be as prominently advertised as it is. They look simple, but they're for experts only. Don't use them unless you really know their failure modes and don't have another reasonable option.
by irvymike | 2025-07-22 20:32:51+00:00
Recently they had a significant country wide false alarm in Israel at 3AM... There was a emergency alert cell broadcast (similar to amber alert), which caused everyone to move their phone at the same time, which was falsely detected as an earthquake, which caused an Android earthquake alert to be sent to all phones in Israel 30 seconds later. I guess they didn't plan for this scenario

Edit: Arstechina article seems to mention this: "only three were false positives. One of those was triggered by a different system sending an alert that vibrated a lot of phones"
by Pxtl | 2025-07-22 20:32:55+00:00
If it runs on two batteries in series and you're willing to take a risk, you can get a 3.7V 14500 battery and then a dumb fake straight wire battery in there. Gives you 1.85V per-slot instead of the normal 1.5, which might be too much for the device, but beats the pants out of the 1.2V you get from NiMH AAs.

I got 14500s for my Logitech F710 game controllers, and then drilled a hole in the battery compartment of the controller to make them plug-in chargeable. I've only just played with them a few times - no guarantee this is a long-term solution, but it seems to work well for now.

Note that this does mean you'll have a bin of things that look like AAs but might cause a fire or melt if you put them into the wrong thing that accepts AA batteries (like the just-a-wire-fake-batteries have allcaps warnings about never ever putting them into a charger).
by colechristensen | 2025-07-22 20:33:26+00:00
> Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.

> will crumble the current religion we call Science

Facts: people who talk like this are pontificating nonsense and are never worth talking to because speech like this indicates a person has zero interest in an actual discussion. I want to insult instead of debate because I truly believe people who talk like this need to be publicly shamed for discourse like this. It is a root cause of the destabilization of our society and needs to be stopped. You're talking like an AM radio conspiracy call-in nutjob. If you want to be taken seriously, don't channel the ghost of Rush Limbaugh in your rhetoric.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-22 20:33:27+00:00
> It was a bad noose prop, they were just threatening to murder elected officials if they didn't install the unelected dictator who directed them to do this.

> Sure, they were at the event where people violently broke through police, into the capital, into offices and the chamber, looking for public officials with zip ties while chanting for death to specific members of Congress and the vice president... But the people with this specific noose prop probably only had good intentions.

It feels like every political discussion has just become an absolute clown show.
by sillywabbit | 2025-07-22 20:33:49+00:00
Those experts will generally ask clarifying questions if they don't understand what you're asking, rather than spin you in circles. The reason they're considered experts in the first place is they understand the topic they're sharing information on better than you do. It's not the end users fault that the LLM is spewing nonsense in a way that can be mistaken for human-like.
by airspresso | 2025-07-22 20:34:09+00:00
Yes, for inference the main bottleneck is GPU VRAM and the bandwidth between the GPU cores and VRAM. Ideally you want enough GPU VRAM to be able to load the entire model into VRAM + have room for caching the already-produced output in VRAM when you're generating output tokens. And fast enough VRAM bandwidth that you can copy the weights from VRAM to GPU compute cores as fast as possible to do the calculations for each token. This determines the tokens/sec speed you get for the output. So yes, more and faster VRAM is essential.
by utopman | 2025-07-22 20:35:14+00:00
This.

I did not find other comments like this in this thread.

6% M2 cpu (even single core) is a huge computing budget for such a small feature.

At this point I don't really understand why OP seems happy with this result (sorry).

I think even a naive canvas implementation can really and quite easily cut most of this computing budget.

Also, a pure css animated thing should use mostly gpu in a right DOM implementation. I think some issues remains in this result.

Maybe OP displays it's app on a 240hz external screen which makes browser compute DOM animation at 240 fps requiring slighly more compute in a passive way (4o-mini suggests this, I am not sure browser works like this)

I remember too much of my pentium 1 166Mhz let run entire age of empires 2 game in 1997
by crabbone | 2025-07-22 20:35:57+00:00
> without you having to think about them at all.

Hahahahaha.

Oh. I'm rolling on the floor. Hahahahaha.

How do you never learn? No, honestly, how do you never learn this simple thing: it will break! I will bet my pension on that it will break, and perhaps not you, but some hundreds of developers will have to try to debug and try to figure out where the dependencies went and why they weren't installed correctly, or why something was missing and so on.

There will never be a situation that you don't have to think about something as important as dependencies at all.
by neogodless | 2025-07-22 20:36:02+00:00
As a Polestar 2 (closely related to Volvo; they share a lot of components and infotainment software... bugs) owner, none of this surprises me.

I've had the "Complete Center Screen Malfunction" issue on my Polestar 2 (though an infotainment reboot "fixed" it.

But climate controls disappearing and climate shutting off during infotainment reboots is already pretty atrocious.

I have the "backup camera unavailable" issue, and despite multiple recalls and attempts to fix in software... the issue persists.

There are other issues, but none as bad as he's seen with his EX90!
by nosequel | 2025-07-22 20:36:20+00:00
I was so excited to get my S60 PHEV. Mechanically it is an amazing machine, great handling, great power, I rarely have to put gas in it. BUT. It is a nightmare with the technology.

Like most new cars, everything is tied into the center display/computer. It will crash while driving, which will remove all sound from your car, and I don't mean just the radio/spotify/whatever. You can be in mid-turn with your turn signal on and then just absolute quiet. It is so off-putting. Your blinker stops, you can't really tell your engine is on, and every screen just goes black. Thankfully I don't have a pure electric, so I my car still physically moves, but I really can't believe I haven't gotten in an accident when my screen crashes.

Thankfully I leased this vehicle, and I'm almost done with it, I honestly can't wait to turn it in.
by Norcim133 | 2025-07-22 20:36:28+00:00
AI is an accelerator if you know one language and you're trying to go full-stack, say. The learning you get is incredible. All other use-cases are dubious. If you're a senior dev, you're still faster (once you include the debugging). If you're a junior dev it's too buggy and gets out of control as complexity increases.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-22 20:36:29+00:00
> Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it

Not OP, but it's still an important consideration - one can be both glad Google is working on this, but also cautiously optimistic given Google's history. IMO it's right to be wary of private entities taking care of what should effectively be a public service.
by drdec | 2025-07-22 20:36:44+00:00
> helping our other Americans find work

In the same way that laws against pumping your own gas help other Americans find work. It makes everyone else poorer instead of naturally created jobs which provide goods and services people want.

> increasing the likelihood that foreign goods will be purchased from allied nations and not totalitarian dictatorships

Citation needed, this round of tariffs have also fallen on our allies