MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-12 11:38:50+00:00
Maybe not zero conspiracies in total, but academic social science does take it as axiomatic that public sector organizations never engage in conspiracies. That's why their papers always assume any belief that they might do so is automatically false and must be explained via other factors. Occasionally you see recognition that private sector actors might genuinely conspire, but never public sector.

Invariably, such papers use an ad-hoc set of beliefs that are labelled as false with no explanation or investigation. The authors just assume that because everyone they know believes something, it must be true. Ironically that's the same sort of faulty belief system they claim to be investigating.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-12 11:39:25+00:00
How large of an idea can you implement by yourself as opposed to leading a team?

I can and have lead discovery sessions either virtually or hop on plane and do it in person, design the architecture, be a halfway decent project manager, tech lead, hands on development, take an empty AWS account and set up best practices from a security, networking, deployment pipelines, etc.

But I can’t do it all at once and there is still only so much I can do at once and no business would be happy with the length of time it would take me or any one person to do a complex implementation at scale. At some point, if you have big ideas, you have to lead projects.

However LLMs make a damn good and fast junior developer that can do it all especially on a green field project with clear requirements and the amount of work I can get done now by myself on each of those levels - post requirement gathering is at least 2x - 3x.

And I am not bragging - I’m old. I should be able to do all of things I mentioned.

Code is an implementation detail. My job has always been to get computers to do stuff to either make the computer money or to save the computer money either via my own hands or via leading a team.
by gavinray | 2025-07-12 11:40:47+00:00
I had a Ketamine infusion done at a clinic in Miami.

It was $600 (discounted) for the first infusion.

You go through a pre-evaluation with the doctor, where they determine a dosage for you based on prior experience and bodyweight.

My clinic also offered to co-administer IV benzos to prevent panic attacks or negative experiences, which was a HUGE plus for me.

During the experience you're given a button, which you can press to call them and have the drip turned off or turned down.

If it wasn't so expensive or covered by my insurance, I would've certainly repeated it.

Highly recommend.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-12 11:41:32+00:00
One watt is one joule per second. Most things designed to consume power, especially related to wall devices and consumer electronics you'd charge, are capable of ingesting multiple watts. Most things that aren't, aren't. The difference that I'm not sure I'm seeing from the other comments is that a phone takes that energy and stores it as a chemical reaction, with some losses as heat. For everything else, it's all heat. Also, it's uncontrolled. The phone charger circuit can be upwards of 95% efficient, so very little power is getting turned into heat. The ADC input to your scope, on the other hand, would turn 100% of that into heat, which is why it'd blow up.

Practical example is the 50 ohm term. Most scopes I've seen max that at 5 Vrms. P = V^2/R, so 0.5W being dissipated. Now assume you hooked your scope to mains and accidentally turned on 50 ohm term. A low mains voltage is 100Vrms. That's 200W. 400x the maximum. Could a device take 200W? Sure. Could that device? No
by DFHippie | 2025-07-12 11:41:37+00:00
The US hasn't switched to calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Partisans on the right do this to show their allegiance to Trump. Partisans on the left still call it the Gulf of Mexico to show their opposition to Trump. Big companies that can be targeted by Trump call it the Gulf of America to protect themselves. And most non-partisans still call it the Gulf of Mexico because they're not paying attention and have always called it that (if they have ever spoken of it or know that it exists). I suspect a lot of people call it the Gulf, already an established custom before this idiocy about renaming it, precisely to avoid entangling themselves in the partisan fight.

The US, like other countries, doesn't get redefined with every change of government, and Trump has not yet cowed the public into knuckling under to his every dictat.
by adastra22 | 2025-07-12 11:41:38+00:00
I should qualify by stating that I'm only slightly above amateur status here. I've had a life-long interest in study of the ancient Earth, and spent my early career supporting the closely related field of astrobiology (which studies evolution of life and mass extinctions to draw inferences about possible life elsewhere). But I am not a paleontologist myself.

To your question, my understanding is that if you ignore the K-T asteroid impact and look at the fossil record up to but not including the iridium layer, it looks very similar to the P-T die off. Same early indicators, same die-off patterns (e.g. starting with single celled marine organisms, changeup of specialized niche species, acidification, ecosystem collapse, more fungi etc.) Then of course the impact happened and reshaped everything. BUT, the argument goes, the impact had such drastic effects on Earth life because basically all the existing ecosystem slack had been taken up by the downstream effects of the Deccan Trap eruptions.

IMHO the researchers like Gerta Keller who push the Deccan Trap only theory are mainly butthurt about Alvarez. But if I were to steelman their position, it is that a P-T like extinction event was already clearly underway, and if the asteroid impact hadn't happened we would have seen basically the same die off over a slightly longer period (or if the impact had happened without the Deccan Trap eruptions, there'd have been enough resilience that maybe the impact wouldn't have caused extinctions?), and so we should assign causality to the volcanos. Hard to prove a hypothetical though, which is why I think the one-two punch explanation is better science.
by thrance | 2025-07-12 11:44:27+00:00
Are those useful computations in the room with us right now? No, but seriously, I feel like factorization is the one application that could justify those massive investments QC is receiving (even though it would probably make the world strictly worse...).

All those other applications, no matter how neat, I feel are quite niche. Like, "simulate pairs of electrons in the Ising model". Cool. Is that a multi-billion dollars industry though?
by sylware | 2025-07-12 11:46:38+00:00
I am an elf/linux gamer: many games on steam are "scams", and you will have no chance against 'advanced scams'. Like, game = hardly more than a beautifull demo. You cannot trust online reviews nowdays.

I will know the movie was 'not for me' once I fully paid for it and watch a good chunk of it... and you would be a fool to trust those beautiful trailers.

Steam has curators... but they are not to be fully trusted even though it helps detecting real scams.

While I am thinking about it: it is REALLY complicated.
by gavinray | 2025-07-12 11:48:11+00:00
Tell me you never studied basic med chem or pharmacology without telling me...

You can't use animal models for dose, you have to convert to hED (Human-Equivalent Dosage). You can estimate this generally with allometric scaling:

https://drughunter.com/practical-pk-calculators

Also, animal physiology varies.

Beta-adrenergic agonists like clenbuterol make mice wildly muscular, which unfortunately is not the case in humans, for example.
by flyinglizard | 2025-07-12 11:49:08+00:00
We're on a Google and OpenAI collision timeline. Google has to win to stay relevant, while OpenAI has to win to survive.

Looking at my own usage patterns, Google's ad business should have be long gone now, but then again I've been running adblockers since forever so maybe I just don't understand the dynamics here. Google has to recapture the perceived (or actual) lead in the AI market before its made obsolete and OpenAI has to keep Google on the defense otherwise it will just be commoditized away (I think this is more about good old market share here and no one waits around for AGI to unlock a spectacular economic value, they want each other's money now).

This is the second step in just a month or so where OpenAI directly encroaches on Google territory (first was with the recruitment of Johnny Ive to sidestep established mobile platforms and now going straight for Google's jugular).

It would be really interesting once OpenAI gets into the ad business, because right now Google has its share of ad revenue on hard allocation, and once in-stream AI advertising opens up it would surely divert some of that money.
by raverbashing | 2025-07-12 11:50:23+00:00
I'm not disagreeing with you I think this was manually done

But here's the thing a "near zero chance" when we are talking about an actual event changes the math

Maybe there's a combination of vibration and manufacturing defect or assembly fault or "hammer this until it works" that can cause the switches to flip. Very unlikely? Yes. Still close to 0% but much more likely in the scenario of an accident

Of course AAIB/NTSB etc didn't have any time to investigate the mechanical aspects of this failure

So yeah it was probably done intentionally but the "switches turning off by themselves" should not be excluded
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-12 11:50:25+00:00
Their definition of conspiracy theory is found in Appendix A, where they just present an ad-hoc list of things they personally believe are false beliefs. Some of the things they present are very widely believed, and at least a few of them have actually been proven true (more or less).

It's always like this with such papers. 100% of them are pseudo-science.
by OKRainbowKid | 2025-07-12 11:51:01+00:00
Perhaps that's a result of being born into a world with (unprecedented?) amounts of uncertainty.

Climate change, automation threatening the value of human labor, rise of authoritarianism, "the West" losing it's hegemonic status, wars, genocides.

Hard to make long term plans for your life when the world is changing rapidly and we don't even know how it will look like in 10 years.
by chantepierre | 2025-07-12 11:51:16+00:00
I'm not using this to update the app itself - which is a docker container that gets updated when I push a new version. I'm simply using the BEAM's code loading capabilities to add client-specific parts to the app while it is running. They are part of the monorepo (and thus part of the app at dev time), but get stripped at build-time so they can be selectively loaded later.
by shash | 2025-07-12 11:51:26+00:00
My understanding from what we've been reading is that these are physical switches that cannot be moved using remote triggers. Wildly speculating, there _may_ be a possibility that the _effect_ of the switch may be triggered remotely, if it's a signal being read by a control unit or computer of some sort that then actuates the specific electromechanical components. But it would seem impossible to move a physical switch to do it.

As an analogy, if you have a smart lock, you can remotely trigger the _effect_ of turning the key using (let's say a bluetooth control), but if a key is inserted into the keyhole, unless there is two-way mechanical linkage, that key _will not turn_.
by lowwave | 2025-07-12 11:51:53+00:00
Good luck with that. Even when Standard Oil has being broken up, it just resulted in a bunch of smaller but more profitable companies. Following the breakup of Standard Oil, the government created the Oil Division of the US Fuel Administration and the Federal Oil Conservation Board, effectively making the oil industry a government-protected monopoly.

With the JEDI contracts ect that is basically what is happening to Google, MS and AWS.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-12 11:53:20+00:00
Courts do not seek to establish the truth. They aim for a reasonable balance between false positives (innocents convicted of crimes they didn't commit) and false negatives (criminals allowed to go free). In practice, the false positive rate is probably around 5%, and innocents go to prison all the time.

Air accident investigations mostly deal with one-in-a-billion freak occurrences. Commercial aviation so safe and reliable that major accidents rarely happen without a truly extraordinary cause.
by user568439 | 2025-07-12 11:53:36+00:00
I'm kind of forced to use X because to help my sick wife I follow on Long Covid research, people self-reporting improvement and so on.

Is there a way to get what I want without using X directly unless I interact? Notice that I need to be able to easily "follow" new people if someone I already follow retweets/likes someone new and interesting to me. Or also navigate through chain of retweets and references
by morngn | 2025-07-12 11:53:38+00:00
The bubble won’t pop on anything that’s correlated with scammers. Exhibit A: bitcoin. The problem is not one of public knowledge or will of the people, it’s congress being irresponsible because it’s captured by the 2 parties. You can’t politicize scamming in a way that benefits either party so nothing happens. And the scammers themselves may be big donors (eg SBF’s ties to the dem party, certain ai players purchase of Trump’s favor with respect to their business interests, etc). Scammers all the way down.
Show HN: I built this AI tool to replace my thumbnail guy and save hours of work
by NikoNaskida | 2025-07-12 11:54:44+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Niko.

I’ve built ThumbnailPilot - a platform for creating, editing and previewing viral thumbnails and titles.

The idea is simple: You import reference images or upload your face, and we create thumbnails for you.

After that you can go edit it with out AI powered image editor, or create titles for it.

What's more you can preview it in real-time youtube feed to make sure it stands out and outperforms competitor thumbnails!

Check out the examples landing page!
by mkl | 2025-07-12 11:55:27+00:00
Are there open source libraries that provide a better hash map? I have an application which I've optimized by implementing a key data structure a bunch of ways, and found boost::unordered_map to be slightly faster than std::unordered_map (which is faster than std::map and some other things), but I'd love something faster. All I need to store are ~1e6 things like std::array<int8_t, 20>.
by contrast | 2025-07-12 11:56:30+00:00
From my perspective, your argument is:

- AI gives me huge, mediocre prints of my own shitty pictures to fill up my house with - AI means I don’t have to talk to other people - AI means I can learn things online that previously I could have learned online (not sure what has changed here!) - People who cross-check multiple websites for information have a limited perspective compared to relying on a couple of AI channels

Overall, doesn’t your evidence support the point that AI is reducing the quality of your information diet?

You paint a picture that looks exactly like the 21st century version of an elderly couple with just a few TV channels available: a few familiar channels of information, but better now because we can make sure they only show what we want them to show, little contact with other people.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-12 11:56:35+00:00
This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

The quality of your team is more-or-less a pre-existing background variable. The question is whether a team of comparable quality takes longer to produce quality software than hacked-together software, and the answer appears to be "yes". The only way out of this is if optimizing more for code quality *actually helps you recruit better engineers*.

I can put a little data to that question, at least. I run a recruiting company that does interviews, so we have data both on preferences and on apparent skill level.

I went and split our data set by whether an engineer indicated that emphasis on code quality was important to them. Our data suggests that you can probably make slightly better hires (in a raw technical-ability sense) by appealing to that candidate pool:

- Candidates who emphasized quality were slightly (non-significantly) more likely to pass our interview and,

- Candidates who emphasized quality were slightly (non-significantly) less likely to have gotten a job already

The effect is pretty small, though, and I doubt it outweighs the additional cost.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-12 11:56:56+00:00
>Has anyone tried spaced repetition for this?

Yes.

>Does it help with deep understanding,

Also yes. Undoubtedly.

>or is it better for rote memorization?

A third "yes". Some explanation is in order here.

You are going to get a lot of answers here of the kind "lol I just do the thing, idk why you're trying all this weird garbage." These comments are wrong for your situation, because they are coming from already experienced practitioners of whatever you're talking about. They have, in the ideal case, already hammered in the type of rote memorization of the basics, through exposing themselves to many subtly different problem and variations on those problems that require them to understand the deeper underlying principles in order to succeed at solving them. They may even be currently working full-time on these kinds of problems, and spending 40 hours a week on one very specific challenge tends to make you the world's foremost expert on that challenge, and pretty good at a whole bunch of surrounding challenges. (In the modal case, which isn't common here in HN, they simply aren't as good as they imagine themselves to be at - in this case - distributed system design.)

What you probably want to do is this: Create a small "rote memorization" deck with the small list of general principles of system design. Then create or source a larger - much larger, at least an order of magnitude and preferably two - deck of actual problems and solutions in that space. The more concrete, the better. That second deck is by far the more important one. The human mind, and probably good thinking in general, proceeds from concrete to abstract; once you've seen a problem ten different times it's very easy to see it the eleventh time.

At first you will find yourself "simply" memorizing the answers to these problems. But as the days wean on, and as the problems become too numerous for your brain to hold carbon copies of, it will do the lazy thing and start to actually think through the deep logic of the problem, trying to abstract it out. This is no different in kind to what happens in a carpenter's hands after they've built a couple log cabins. Do not fight this urge when it comes up. Let yourself sit back and think hard and long on that particular problem. It may take a few tries before you finally breach the core, but you'll know once you do, because even entirely fresh cards will start to feel easy to you. Just like doing a math worksheet in grade school.

Good luck. Even this is no substitute for good old fashioned experience, but it's about as close as you can get if you don't have a reliable source of said experience at hand. It lets you cover a lot more ground faster in my experience.
by yde_java | 2025-07-12 11:59:11+00:00
I use the Python package 'sorcery' [0] in all my production services.

It gives dict unpacking but also a shorthand dict creation like this:

from sorcery import dict_of, unpack_keys a, b = unpack_keys({'a': 1, 'b': 42}) assert a == 1 assert b == 42 assert dict_of(a, b) == {'a': 1, 'b': 42}

[0] https://github.com/alexmojaki/sorcery
by dxdm | 2025-07-12 11:59:38+00:00
> Again, it’s probably pointless but it’s an interesting thought exercise.

Coming up with ad-hoc solutions is easy, especially the less you know about a complex system and its constraints. I'd say it's not an interesting exercise unless you consider why a solution might not exist already, and what its trade-offs and failure modes are. Otherwise, all you're doing is throwing pudding against a wall, which can of course be fun.
by 7952 | 2025-07-12 12:00:27+00:00
At some point I think we need to accept more control from automation. The model where ultimate authority reverts to a single input is a cop out. That could be pilot input, sensor input or even direction from ATC. They will all provide false data on occasions. When that data contradicts 99% of the other data then the safest option is to ignore it. And that doesn't just mean with compromised humans but with normal human weakness. Fully understanding the aircraft, its state, its systems and the minds of its crew is impossible.

In this case I wonder if the fuel cut off switches could be replaced by buttons for particular situations. Have an engine fire button or a shut down whilst on the ground button. Let the pilot provide input on state and let the automation decide what to do with that. Obviously this is not a solution to suicidal or murderous behaviour. But it could be a solution to all the low probability edge cases.
by adidoit | 2025-07-12 12:01:26+00:00
Not sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at caching

Input │ Output │ Cache Create │ Cache Read 916,134 │ 11,106,507 │ 199,684,538 │ 2,767,614,506

as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the past two months.
Ask HN: Could dual pilot input help prevent Air India-like crashes?
by amichail | 2025-07-12 12:02:02+00:00
Maybe jetliners should require simultaneous physical input from both pilots for all sensitive switches, as a way to protect passengers from intentional actions by a single pilot.

In other words, both pilots would need to toggle their copy of a dual switch at approximately the same time.

Do you think this would be a reasonable safety measure?
by greenavocado | 2025-07-12 12:02:49+00:00
> The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (like news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
by briandear | 2025-07-12 12:04:30+00:00
You don’t inadvertently turn off both switches. The linked SAIB was in 2018 and addresses faulty installations, not a failure after use. And preflight over thousands of flights would have detected if the switches had a failed locking mechanism. And for both to fail at once? Practically impossible. Also the recommended inspection — that was almost 7 years ago. If a major airline didn’t comply with the SAIB, that’s on them, not Boeing. There hasn’t been a single reported instance of fuel switches being accidentally switched off on any Boeing airliner — in 320 million flight hours over the past 10 years.
by theturtle | 2025-07-12 12:04:42+00:00
They at least mentioned Mastodon (once). I have a BlooSky account, mostly to claim my usual username, but I don't feel much of a pull. The Mastodon instance I'm on tends to pull a lot of alt people, people who wrestle interesting tech, and a lot of catpictures. I have yet to find the same niche on BS. I still have my account on birdsite, where I post maybe once every six months, "y'know, there are other, better places..."
by kevincox | 2025-07-12 12:05:48+00:00
IIRC it was basically undefined, some data formats were defined. Eventually it was specified that it must correctly parse RFC 3339 and everything was browser defined. I think in the name of web compatibility they have started to carefully define the legacy behaviours of common browsers.

But the morale of this story should be if you need a date from a user user a date input and if you need to parse a computer-readable date always use UNIX timestamps or RFC 3339 (which are correctly and consistently supported).