MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-03 22:15:32+00:00
I'm not in academia, but I happen to find this type of question helpful, when done well.

When questions make no sense and it takes a lot of effort to find out, I would agree that this is stupid and not testing for any real skill. But when questions are designed in a way to meet the knowledge level that is expected, I think this type of questions is good.

For example:

For what x does the value of function 1 / sin(x) become zero

This question leads you astray, but it is a genuine sign of understanding when the answer is "none". OK, this is not a real trap question, but it borders on one.

A more callous example, not a MINT question (not sure what kind of test would ask this question though):

A hotel room costs 400$ a night, breakfast not included. It is situated in NYC and the cost of a hotel room in NYC averages at 250$ per night. The average cost for breakfast is 50$. Hotel rooms in Manhattan average 500$ per night, while hotel rooms in Queens average 120$/night. In what part of NYC is the hotel located?

The answer one gives to this question could be quite revealing. If so says "it might be in Manhattan, hotel rooms are particularly expensive there, but it is not possible to give a definite answer", fine.

If someone starts bullshitting, not so good.

Another one at high-school level maths:

A room has one wall that is 16ft long, another one that is 24ft long. What is the area of the floor of the room?

It might be reasonable to assume a rectangular room, but it's not given. So it should be expected to give a nuanced answer.

Even more callous would be to say the room is rectangular and then point out that the floor might be tilted :D

But yeah, I would be pretty annoyed by that, too. I mean, nobody would say that it's a good answer to start fretting about curved space-time or something given this question.

But in every domain, I think it's possible to design good "trick questions".

The more I think about it, this type of question is basically the same type of question one would use to "benchmark" an LLM.

And again, I'm not saying that I'd answer these correctly...
by codekansas | 2025-07-03 22:15:33+00:00
I have a pretty bad mental model of how most VCs think, but I think good VCs will fund smart people who demonstrate extreme conviction, regardless of how they initially size the market. The opportunity cost for me doing K-Scale is making quite a bit of money at Tesla or Meta, so assuming I am not acting irrationally, either I have extreme conviction or I am a masochist. In my experience, VCs are pretty bad at telling the difference.
by volkl48 | 2025-07-03 22:15:55+00:00
The piece of the puzzle that you're missing is the dams at the far end of the road divert the Caniapiscau River into the La Grande River, which provides close to half the water that eventually feeds all of the generating stations downstream.

Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.

So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.

--------

No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.

I'll also note:

- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.

- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.

- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-07-03 22:16:07+00:00
>I can speak my mind, but that path is generally more filtered and shallower than sitting and writing what I have in my mind.

Are you suggesting that this experience of yours applies to everyone or that it applies to every context (alone vs not alone)?

Nothing stops you from voice record 10-20 items and stopping or pausing the recording. The idea that talking plus transcribing does not let you do what you do when typing seems odd and likely not based on actual facts. Stephen Hawkings did not seem to struggle to do highly intellectual work without typing
by db48x | 2025-07-03 22:18:17+00:00
Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.
by randomNumber7 | 2025-07-03 22:18:33+00:00
What ML algorithms do you intend for full autonomy? Multi Modal LLMs for planning that control the robot by generating s.th. like code? Or s.th. that requires more learning from the environment?

When I click "get in touch" on your github I just land on the website where I can buy the robot. Building the hardware for an autonomous robot is orders of magnitudes easier than the control. Do you think anyone with the capability do develop an autonomus robot will buy this and then just give you the code because its open source?
by ryandrake | 2025-07-03 22:20:26+00:00
Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot.

Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
by leoc | 2025-07-03 22:20:37+00:00
> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.

Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.

(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
by hayst4ck | 2025-07-03 22:21:57+00:00
When faced with horrifying information which demands response most people will choose a strategy of denial and hoping other people will act. When people are under threat by people who don't seem accountable to the law or who are even able to punish them, most people will choose a strategy of neutrality and rationalizing that it's not them under threat.

These are mental health preserving and physical health preserving until they are not.

Nobody wants to hear that if you don't do something bad things are going to happen and nobody in power, such as mods, wants to have their power challenged or use it to threaten others in power because it is going to make them uncomfortable or their lives harder.

What you are seeing is how Nazi Germany happened. Not this specific thing, but this behavior scaled over an entire population. People with empathy and others subjected to stress enter a state of grief, and the first stages of grief are shock (disbelief) and denial (not asking questions you know the answer to because the answer is too awful to bear), people tell them they are overreacting or that they are "too political." "Protest somewhere else" is a common sentiment for anyone inconvenienced by those who feel unjustly treated, and only once they personally experience harm do they start to change their mind.

It is flagged because most people want to be comfortable, and hearing uncomfortable things in comfortable spaces is something they don't want to tolerate, even if it threatens the existence of their comfortable spaces in the long term because curiosity is not compatible with authority and authoritarianism.
by littlekey | 2025-07-03 22:22:26+00:00
Yes and no, I don't think it's true that it's "built to sense our vulnerability". But there is what I'd call engagement hacking, in the sense that they fine-tune/prompt the models to prolong conversations as long as possible. For example, every time I ask Claude something, it ends its response by saying e.g. "is there any aspect of this you'd like me to explain further?" so I'm sure that question-asking behavior is part of the system prompt.
by munksbeer | 2025-07-03 22:23:07+00:00
>It’s you and the ghost of Marie Antoinette against the world huh.

That is silly. The populist zeitgeist is very much anti "the thing they call neoliberalism".

But the argument is ridiculously shallow. It cherry picks a few decades in human history, in a few western countries, where we observed very high increases of standard of living. It then sets that as the standard by which we should compare to.

It does not lower itself to examine, what caused that period in all of human history? How did it compare to 50 years prior to that period? Does it make sense to set that period as the benchmark? In other words, was it an anomaly, what caused the anomaly, was it sustainable?

None of this is addressed in any social media post (reddit, hn, wherever). It is far easier to just repeat the manta.
by jules | 2025-07-03 22:23:46+00:00
Money is not "hidden" or "hoarded" in tax havens, nor does hoarding money affect the economy negatively. Taxation is necessary for infrastructure (though that is actually a small fraction: about 3% of US federal taxes goes to infrastructure), and I did not say or imply that taxation is unnecessary. The question of what the best level of taxation is, and what the best place to levy those taxes is, cannot be decided based on high level slogans. One thing is clear though: standardizing tax rates is bad because it removes the competitive aspect between countries. It is good if people and companies are able to move to the places that give them the best public services for the least cost, for the same reason that it is good that salaries are not standardized between companies, and the same reason why it is good that airline ticket prices are no longer standardized by the IATA and CAB.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-07-03 22:24:25+00:00
Agree that the default appearance of the web site is... less than optimal. You can change it with the light/dark and high contrast controls at the bottom, though.

Commit is a good, high-quality typeface. I think it lives up to its aspiration to be "neutral" and that its creator is to be commended for genuinely excellent work.
by throwaway150 | 2025-07-03 22:24:53+00:00
> Think about all those times your program isn't building and `make clean` fixes it.

I don't think that's a good example. I've worked with more than 20 different build tools by now, and I cannot recall a single instance where the problem actually came down to cache invalidation. Every time I dug into it, the real cause was something else: a mistake in the build script, an incorrectly declared dependency, or something similar.

So when you say "think about all those times", not a single such time comes to my mind!
by hatthew | 2025-07-03 22:25:18+00:00
If you have a system with "slow storage", caching is a way to optimize that to "storage that is sometimes fast".

If you have a system with "slow storage" and "fast storage", caching is a way to abstract that away to just "storage".

The author is arguing that the latter is the default way we should think about the concept of caching, which is a valid opinion to have.
by Grosvenor | 2025-07-03 22:25:31+00:00
This is so cool. The future is cool!

I wonder how it will work on languages that have different grammatical structure than french/english? Like Finno-Ugric languages which have sort of a Yoda speech to them. Edit: In Finno-Ugric languages words later on in a sentence can completely change the meaning. Will be interesting to look at.

It's considerate of them to name it after my favourite whisky.
by thorio | 2025-07-03 22:26:00+00:00
Reading all the comments here about small phones and after recently receiving Google's info about my pixel 6As battery downgrade I took a look at Unihertz again and they apparently made a pretty good looking new 5G model "jelly max".

What do you guys think? Should we give it as go? Apparently it's funded via s Kickstarter...
by josephg | 2025-07-03 22:26:18+00:00
I’d go further and say that zig already respects / trusts developers enough to manage their own memory. Philosophically it’s already not a language for sloppy teams who would ignore 4000 compiler warnings if given half a chance.

Zig is a language that demands a lot of rigour of the programmer. It offers a lot of trust. Far more so than Go or even Rust. It’s in light of that philosophy that it seems so weird. The compiler trusts me to manually manage my memory, but it’ll scold me like a naughty child if I ignore an unused variable for 5 minutes? Pick a lane.

I’d love to hear some arguments in support of this choice. The closest I’ve heard is “it doesn’t bother me, personally” - which isn’t a very strong argument.

I’m a little tempted to fork the compiler just to fix this. Can’t be that hard, right?
by HK-NC | 2025-07-03 22:26:22+00:00
I don't think child porn and tired racist stereotypes are the same. Even content showing murder would be ignored by most and none of us, I assume, are pro murder. I dont assume everyone that uses a sexy female thumbnail is a gooner, just farming goons. I think the original poster has a fair point, having seen the videos, they lack the usual cherrypicked accuracy of content made by genuinely racist creators and instead go for.. Watermelon. My friends are about as bothered by watermelon as an irishman is about cartoon leprechauns, but I'm not in the USA so perhaps its a cultural thing.
by bobbiechen | 2025-07-03 22:27:26+00:00
Thank you!!

If I understand correctly:

* The prover commits to a starting value (public input)

* Instead of waiting for an interactive challenge, they hash it and use the resulting hash output as if it were a challenge

If we believe the hash is a random oracle (as we do for cryptographic hash functions), then it is hard for the prover to manipulate the challenges. Is that it?
by MosesTule | 2025-07-03 22:28:06+00:00
I’m a CS student who recently got kicked out of my apartment due to sudden rent increases and a shady landlord. What followed was a nightmare spending thousands on emergency Airbnb stays, endless scams on rental listings, and total uncertainty about where I’d be living next.

That experience became the catalyst for building Proofly, a platform designed to make the renting process easier, safer, and more transparent for both tenants and landlords.

What we're building:

1. Verified rentals Listings are independently evaluated before viewings, so what you see is what you get.

2. Third-party property checks Prospective renters pay a small viewing fee to receive trusted evaluations including real photos, condition notes, and red flags.

3. Better leads for landlords We help landlords connect with serious, pre-qualified renters while building trust through transparency.

We just launched the waitlist and are actively looking for:

• Renters who want a smarter, safer way to explore housing • Evaluators who can earn by doing quick local property visits • Landlords and property managers interested in better listings and faster leases

Join the waitlist: https://www.proofly.site/

Happy to answer any questions or hear your feedback. We’re building this in public, and all insights are welcome.
by krater23 | 2025-07-03 22:28:28+00:00
Looks like you think only in windows and linux. Ok, but how much of your rust runs on freeRTOS or bare metal and on how many processor families? C? Runs on all of them. 6502? No Problem? 8051? Clearly! CRC16C? Yes. Eco32? yup. i386? Is developed to run C. Arm64, Arm? They too. They run Minix in their internal controlling hardware. Written in C...

Rust is not portable at all compared with C code.
by starkparker | 2025-07-03 22:28:32+00:00
> And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.

It's very much about familiarity. I've played quite a lot of both (and D&D 3.5 and PF1 before them).

It's not wrong that PF2E has a harder and more demanding focus on mechanics and tactics, especially teamwork, which is for both better and worse. D&D5E doesn't just allow for the DM to define more outcomes through narrative-focused hand-waving, it _requires_ it by lacking rules or guidance and having imbalanced granularity in some rules or builds over others. PF2E is more demanding in both design and practice, but in exchange provides more tools out of the box that a GM doesn't need to invent on the fly when players invest time and effort into tactical cooperative play. 5E has the shallower difficulty curve, but experienced 5E players who get past 2E's steeper curve find it has a higher ceiling... _if_ combat is a heavy focus.

I had a rather contentious argument last year with a fellow freelance designer when I tried to suggest that PF2E is a roleplaying game. There's a significant cohort of PF2E players who play it almost exclusively for its combat. To me, that was telling in ways that I think the combat advocate didn't intend. Part of the allergy to D&D4E that players of D&D3E and earlier had when it came out was its narrowing of focus to combat. PF2E is likewise (and borderline ironically) a response to D&D5E's reduced focus on combat balance.

To put it more generally, adept improvisational DMs with players who don't care as much about combat balance or fidelity are better served by D&D5E (or a wide array of TTRPGs with even less focus on simulation in tactical combat over giving players difficult choices, like Powered by the Apocalypse games, Mork Borg and its OSR-adjacent or -derived family of short-lived character gantlets, or narrative playgrounds like Bastionland).

GMs who struggle to create fair mechanics for unusual circumstances mid-game and players who demand greater balance and fidelity in combat are better served by PF2E (or a smaller but still robust field of TTRPGs with more streamlined _or_ more extensive mechanics with similar goals, like 13th Age, the Warhammer family of games, or even D&D4E.)
by impure | 2025-07-03 22:28:45+00:00
> In a move that at first went unnoticed

Oh, I noticed. I've also complained how Gemini 2.0 Flash is 50% more expensive than Gemini 1.5 Flash for small requests.

Also I'm sure if Google wanted to price Gemini 2.5 Flash cheaper they could. The reason they won't is because there is almost zero competition at the <10 cents per million input token area. Google's answer to the 10 cents per million input token area is 2.5 Flash Lite which they say is equivalent to 2.0 Flash at the same cost. Might be a bit cheaper if you factor in automatic context caching.

Also the quadratic increase is valid but it's not as simple as the article states due to caching. And if it was a bit issue Google would impose tiered pricing like they do for Gemini 2.5 Pro.

And for what it's worth I've been playing around with Gemma E4B on together.ai. It takes 10x as long as Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and it sucks at multilingual. But other than that it seems to produce acceptable results and is way cheaper.
by m463 | 2025-07-03 22:28:55+00:00
Older teslas were better (not perfect). You had nav and status on dashboard in front of you, dedicated physical controls for turn signals, shifting, wipers, autopilot, etc. Central display was for big nav map and configuration. There was also a "rim" around the display to rest your hand on when touching something.

They still screwed it up with software updates. Touch targets got smaller and harder to hit in a moving car. Grey on white controls were harder to see, and frequently disappeared until until touched. Even dedicated controls like the passenger seat heater would disappear when the passenger got up. Controls rearranged themselves.

They need to hire some masters of human factors like modern airplane cockpit designers. In a plane, a mistake is a lost plane + faa investigation.

And listen to their customers, because most of the mistakes are blindingly obvious to everyone.
by frankus | 2025-07-03 22:29:18+00:00
Thanks for the link. One of the projects I'll probably never get around to is a thermoelectric-augmented fan coil unit for air-to-water heat pump retrofits. The existing emitters (and crucially the in-wall distribution piping that's expensive to insulate and vapor seal after the fact) would stay just above the dew point, and then the augmented fan coil would work to remove latent heat (humidity) by dropping a bit below the dew point via thermoelectric coolers that reject heat into the return piping.

It's a relatively small delta-T and in most climates a relatively small fraction of the overall cooling load, so it might just barely pencil out.
by rolph | 2025-07-03 22:30:23+00:00
its been some years in making since starwars.

Hello Tatooine! An unpowered device can harvest water vapor in a desert[2017]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/hello-tatooine-an-un...

Moisture farm https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Moisture_farm
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-03 22:30:51+00:00
There’s a really weird phenomenon too with drones. I’ve used Chinese (non-drone) software for work a bunch in the past and it’s been almost universally awful. On the drone side, especially DJI, they’ve flipped this script completely. Every non-DJI drone I’ve flown has had miserable UX in comparison to DJI. Mission Planner (open source, as seen in the Ukraine attack videos) is super powerful but also looks like ass and functions similarly. QGC is a bit better, especially the vendor-customized versions (BSD licensed) but the vendors almost always neuter great features that are otherwise available in the open source version and at the same time modify things so that you can’t talk to the aircraft using the OSS version. The commercial offerings I’ve used are no better.

Sure, we need to be working on being able to build the hardware components in North America, and I’ve seen a bunch of people jump on that in the last year. But wow is the software ever bad and I haven’t really seen anyone working to improve that.
by arghwhat | 2025-07-03 22:31:14+00:00
The noise does not contain a signal, does not dance over it, and is not detail. It is purely random fluctuations that are added to a signal.

If you have a few static frames and average them, you improve SNR by retaining the unchanged signal and having the purely random noise cancel itself out. Retaining noise itself is not useful.

I suspect the effect you might be seeing is either just an aesthetic preference for the original grain behavior, or that you are comparing low bandwidth content with heavy compression artifacts like smoothing/low pass filtering (not storing fine detail saves significant bandwidth) to high bandwidth versions that maintain full detail, entirely unrelated to the grain overlaid on top.