MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dtgriscom | 2025-07-21 19:30:02+00:00
I wrote that software, called SeisMac. Someone figured out the Apple-private API for the Sudden Motion Sensor that parks your laptop's hard drive if it detects free-fall. Working from that, I wrote a free app that used the API to show three-axis acceleration graphs. I was proudest of the calibration utility, which had you tip your laptop on its side (with properly rotated dialogs!), and then on its screen.

People would send me recordings from all over the world (e.g. on a ship in the Drake Passage showing enormous surges). It was a lot of fun, and I even got an educational grant to improve it.

Big bummer when Apple switched to solid-state drives (well, a bummer for my one small reason...)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor
by arp242 | 2025-07-21 19:30:12+00:00
> if they were abolished the world would be a better place

I'm not so sure about that; some actions of the CIA are questionable at best, but the Soviet Union or KGB were not the good guys by any means, nor is Al Qaeda or Putin's Russia.

The failures are far more publicised than the successes. How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero. How does that balance against the mistakes and crimes? Unclear.

And look, obviously the world would be far better off without the CIA, or KGB/FSB, or Al Qaeda, or any of these assholes. But I can't control what Russia or Al Qaeda does and neither can anyone else, and obviously we need to do something to counter these people. It seems to me what we need is a way to have a secret service that doesn't go to the dark side.
by rwiggins | 2025-07-21 19:30:32+00:00
Hmm. I stick to jq for basically any JSON -> JSON transformation or summarization (field extraction, renaming, etc.). Perhaps I should switch to scripts more. uv is... such a game changer for Python, I don't think I've internalized it yet!

But as an example of about where I'd stop using jq/shell scripting and switch to an actual program... we have a service that has task queues. The number of queues for an endpoint is variable, but enumerable via `GET /queues` (I'm simplifying here of course), which returns e.g. `[0, 1, 2]`. There was a bug where certain tasks would get stuck in a non-terminal state, blocking one of those queues. So, I wanted a simple little snippet to find, for each queue, (1) which task is currently executing and (2) how many tasks are enqueued. It ended up vaguely looking like:

for q in $(curl -s "$endpoint/queues" | jq -r '.[]'); do curl -s "$endpoint/queues/$q" \ | jq --arg q "$q" ' { "queue": $q, "executing": .currently_executing_tasks, "num_enqueued": (.enqueued_tasks | length) }' done | jq -s

which ends up producing output like (assuming queue 0 was blocked)

[ { "queue": 0, "executing": [], "num_enqueued": 100 }, ... ]

I think this is roughly where I'd start to consider "hmm, maybe a proper script would do this better". I bet the equivalent Python is much easier to read and probably not much longer.

Although, I think this example demonstrates how I typically use jq, which is like a little multitool. I don't usually write really complicated jq.
by lostlogin | 2025-07-21 19:30:41+00:00
> I've seen them refuse to let a nervous patients family member stand in the room during the scan even though it could completely calm the patient... that's what seems odd to me. This is based on UK hospital experiences; I'm not sure if it's universal.

We do let family members in, we just try to avoid it. Having extra people there is extra problems, extra safety issues and makes everything slow. ‘It completely calms’, is rarely true. We are good at getting patients through scans - we do it 50x a day.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-21 19:30:47+00:00
> The fact is that if you’re worried about privacy, you should be far, far more concerned about all the data that various companies are hoovering up about you based on your online activity.

This tired canard makes me mad. It's not either/or. Be concerned about anyone who is collecting data on you and selling it without your consent.

And in my mind, the reason to delete your data from 23AndMe isn't to protect PII, it's to take an a salable asset away from a company that promised they wouldn't sell it in the first place, then changed their mind.
by ta1243 | 2025-07-21 19:31:09+00:00
There clearly is a shortage. When 98% of available homes are used that is a shortage.

I just did a rightmove search for rental in London and checked the first 8 adverts, every single one was added today except for one which isn't available until september.

Your definition of shortage seems very different to mine so there's no point in continuing.
by tejohnso | 2025-07-21 19:31:35+00:00
> I don't trust the state with the due dilegence

Me neither. That's why I'm glad that in any jurisdiction I've seen it available, it always comes down to the patient's choice.

> I want you to think of the million ways things go wrong

Nothing is perfect but if someone is suffering months or potentially years of pain I'm glad that they have the option to choose to end it legally.

> The fact that someone could look at the healthcare system and say "give them the option to kill people" is wild.

Nobody says that, maybe that's why it seems so wild. It's the patient that has the option, not the system. "Give patients the choice of end of life treatment that they prefer" is more like it.

> due dilegence to have direct power over life and death

How do you feel about police carrying firearms with authority to kill base on high pressure, low time, individual decision making?
by flkiwi | 2025-07-21 19:31:40+00:00
> He was promoted every year in his first 8 years at Microsoft.

Microsoft has too many layers and they value performative work over any kind of actual leadership experience OR Microsoft's promotions are a sham and leadership select--i.e., filling roles that make the real money--have absolutely nothing to do with these sops to the masses. That's the conclusion I draw from such a bizarre stat. Either way, this guy was played by a system that will happily chew him up before he can realize he wasted his life (unless, of course, this is genuinely what he wanted, in which chase, man, you do you).
by kevinventullo | 2025-07-21 19:32:16+00:00
Oh so to be clear, I view formal methods as less of a useful tool, and more as enforcing a higher standard of proof. E.g. it’s not clear to me that having access to Lean would actually help a human in the IMO; certainly most professional mathematicians are not yet getting a positive ROI from formalization. But I’m sort of an armchair expert here; I could be wrong!
by GeekyBear | 2025-07-21 19:32:18+00:00
Apple and Google had no choice but to comply with the National Security Letters demanding access to user's push notification data.

They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.

That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.

It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.

Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
by bjourne | 2025-07-21 19:32:18+00:00
> And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term.

Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.
by lapcat | 2025-07-21 19:32:48+00:00
I'm in the middle of reading the book "Apple In China" by Patrick McGee. A few excerpts from one chapter:

> The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers' mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves "Apple widows" because their husbands were around so infrequently. So many marriages were broken up during the first year of Jobs's comeback that informal preventative measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to to when an engineer couldn't come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line.

> One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, "Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple." The doctor explained that that the stress would basically kill him.

> Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks "shattering," and it's what led to his own departure later on. "A lot of people got sick at Apple," he once said. "The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill... and I was worried that if I stayed, I'd end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important."
by markx2 | 2025-07-21 19:33:04+00:00
Data about me and what I click is one issue.

Data that can be used against my children is another.

My late wife had MS. It took her. Insurance companies would love that data to load against anything my kids do.

There are other issues but the fact is that companies will use DNA and every other data point they can to maximise what they take and minimise with loaded terms what they might, just might, maybe, pay out.

It's not about the now.

It's about the later.
by themanmaran | 2025-07-21 19:33:12+00:00
Hey we've done a lot of research on this side [1] (OCR vs direct image + general LLM benchmarking).

The biggest problem with direct image extraction is multipage documents. We found that single page extraction (OCR=>LLM vs Image=LLM) slightly favored the direct image extraction. But anything beyond 5 images had a sharp fall off in accuracy compared to OCR first.

Which makes sense, long context recall over text is already a hard problem, but that's what LLMs are optimized for. Long context recall over images is still pretty bad.

[1] https://getomni.ai/blog/ocr-benchmark
by lostlogin | 2025-07-21 19:33:22+00:00
You’d be surprised what people won’t do.

Unlike many facilities, we insist everyone strips down to underpants (no bra) and wears a gown. We push quite hard to remove all jewellery (including piercings), but many places do not. It removes a whole category of problems, but is also slow, has an extra cost (laundry) and still patients leave things on, covered up by the gown.

But the percentage of people with something in them is very very high.

We are dealing with a population that by definition has health issues, and I’d estimate that 75%+ have something metal in them.

Sternal wires, fillings, clips, biopsy markers, screws, plates, braces, joint replacements (x6), ports, mesh, vascular stent, urinary stents, breast implants. These are conditionally safe implants from yesterday. If we expanded it to a week we could add heart valves, hearing implants, vsd closure devices and about 20 other implants I’m sure.

We have either memorised or looked up the conditions for each. We pay techs well because we want good staff. Minimum staffing levels include using healthcare assistants and suchlike. There are potential downsides to this approach, particularly around safety.
by tetris11 | 2025-07-21 19:33:37+00:00
> That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.

What kind of reasoning is that? Fine, they're not doing whole genome sequencing on you (yet), but having a detailed chip profile of several million informative SNPs absolutely can and will be used to profile you.

Very quickly and easily I might add.

Classical linkage analysis has been used quite effectively to profile people since the 80s using only a handful of (polymorphic) markers, because the power of the analysis is driven more by the number of related members than by the number of markers of an individual.

23&Me has a customer base of more than 10 million people(!!)
by ta1243 | 2025-07-21 19:33:42+00:00
No I'm not

This pressure group says there is too much airbnb

https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/facts-and-figures

They say that over 97.5% of homes in London are in primary residential use, i.e not airbnb, not second home, not empty all year except for some wealthy oligarch coming for a couple of weeks.

The numbers might be slightly off as people are not reporting their use of airbnb, but

https://www.selfcatering.co.uk/reports/uk-airbnb-stats/

Claims just 50,000 airbnb homes in London, which is just 1.3% of the housing stock in London (and that 50k number includes those which are primary residential use but the current occupant moves out for a week if they get someone)
by jasonlotito | 2025-07-21 19:34:04+00:00
> I'd say 'God bless you sir', but that's hate speech as well now.

The only people I see suggesting that it's hate speech are conservatives who pretend you can't say anything anymore. I'd love to see something beyond some random Twitter post from some random user that classifies "god bless you" is literal hate speech.

Regardless, may Satan see you in the end.
by int_19h | 2025-07-21 19:34:17+00:00
.NET didn't transition to XSLT 2.0 for the simple reason that demand wasn't really there. The way they saw it, LINQ was a better all-around option, with XLINQ specifically being an adequate replacement for XPath, and VB even got a bunch of special syntax to work with XML that made it more concise than XSLT in many cases: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/progra...

That said, it is emphatically not true that XSLT 2+ was somehow license-restricted. I worked at a company that used XSLT 2.0 and XQuery for code generation back in 2006, and we used the free edition with Saxon with no issues - paid versions had some optimizations and features like static type checking which we simply didn't need.

For the most part, XSLT 1.0 was "good enough" for most cases when XML was still the primary interchange format, and later JSON took over so there was less incentive for framework providers to spend resources on keeping up-to-date with the standard. Especially since XSLT 2.0 was such a massive leap in many ways, including a different data model that made many existing XSLT 1.0 processors incompatible in ways that required a massive redesign.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-21 19:35:05+00:00
Ironically, I worked really hard for a number of years precisely to ensure that my family would be financially safe if something happened to me -- something like what happened to my own father. The difference was that I quit my well-paying job as soon as we had enough to sustain a modest lifestyle.

I will admit that at times I was seduced by the illusion of status, so I get why some people get trapped in that work-first mindset, but it was a very shallow mirage. Just look at your spouse and children and ask whether they would rather have more money, or a more present husband & father.

If my wife asked me to work harder to make more money, I would question my choice to marry her. But she didn't, she was supportive both while I was working and when I decided to quit. She could see the price I was paying for that salary.
by hvs | 2025-07-21 19:35:08+00:00
I don't actually disagree with anything in this article, I would just argue that at some point you might want to consider why you are so interested in "fast career growth". Is it more money? More recognition? More power? To what end?

The standard cliches are true as far as I can tell (as I approach 50). "You can't take it with you", "no one wishes on their death bed that they had worked harder", etc. In 10 years, no one at your office is going to care how much time you put in at the office, but your partner and kids will. Do you want them to resent you for it?
by Terr_ | 2025-07-21 19:35:21+00:00
My point is that most such comparisons are already flawed because the "machine" people are referring-to is an illusion.

It's like people are debating the cellulose-quality of playing cards, comparing cards in a TV broadcast of a (real) poker tournament versus the cards that show up through a magical spy window caused by solitaire.exe. The comparison is already nonsense because the latter set of cards has no cellulose, or any mass at all.

Similarly, the recipient of your "now do X" command in an LLM chat doesn't really exist, so can't have source-code or variables or goals. The illusion may sometimes be useful (esp. for marketing and getting investor money), but software engineers can't afford to fall for it when trying to diagnose problems.

The real "constraints" are that each remotely-generated append to a hidden document statistically fits what came before with a certain amount of wiggle-room. Maybe that means you see text about "HAL-9000" opening the pod bay doors, and maybe you don't, but the document-generator is the thing in charge.
by deanCommie | 2025-07-21 19:35:52+00:00
The president is not the state. That's been established multiple times in cases like Nixon, and unfortunately recently regressed with the Trump SCOTUS decision.

But in theory all these organizations swear an oath to the constitution, not to any branch of government, and especially not their leadership.

If any of the leadership issues illegal orders or does work to undermine the constitution or the country, according to the oath sworn by CIA agents, they should be doing everything they can to work against this leadership.

Even the military expects soldiers to reject illegal orders to commit gencode.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-07-21 19:35:54+00:00
Even on windows, it isn't usually the NT kernel that's the issue, it's the user space api's. For example, why hasn't ripgrep (and similar tools) replaced grep as a default? they're much better for performance right? (i mean on stable/mainstream distros). i get supporting old stuff, that's why there are LTS releases. But I think it is the fear of not being able to shed enough old things in new releases to displace the maintenance burden of LTS type releases that's the big issue.

Features shouldn't be ridden of just because either, there needs to be a good reason, like a better alternative.
by sweezyjeezy | 2025-07-21 19:35:55+00:00
Gemini is clearer but MY GOD is it verbose. e.g. look at problem 1, section 2. Analysis of the Core Problem - there's nothing at all deep here, but it seems the model wants to spell out every single tiny logical step. I wonder if this is a stylistic choice or something that actually helps the model get to the end.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-21 19:36:07+00:00
> To what extent?

The earliest evidence for nuclear families is in Germany, going back 3,000+ BCE [1]. We next seem it gain prominence in 13th-century England [2]. Otherwise, the default for non-nomadic societies was kin (extended family) or community oriented childrearing. Similar to what we see in traditional family structures in South America, Southern Europe and Asia.

> could also see the argument that parental role is diminished in modern society with the outsourcing to public schools

It would be difficult to make this argument given the primacy of parents in public schooling compared with e.g. their diminished role in kin- or community-based childrearing systems.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117192915.h...

[1] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/97813151...
by tantalor | 2025-07-21 19:36:50+00:00
> Ledger balances are calculated by summing all transactions per account. The differences should be as close to zero as possible, with small differences allowed for pending transactions such as weekly Stripe payouts.

That's not quite right. I'm not an accountant, but pending transactions (posted, but not cleared) should be factored into the balance of account, or at least the "available balance" - which is more important the the "current balance".

The idea that you can "allow" accounting discrepancies as "those are probably pending" is wild.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-21 19:37:07+00:00
The bad news is that much like how "I'm just going to DSL this ..." inevitably morphs into a full-blown programming language[1], so too is the ubiquitous "gah, your language is too complex, I'm going to just use this other tool that implements my favorite 10% of the cases"

which is a long way of saying: or else what? There's 100% no way that I'm going to ever, ever use <<python3 -c "import json, sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin)[...ohgawd...]">> and if you are, then more power to ya and jq apparently doesn't solve a problem you have

1: https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
by perihelions | 2025-07-21 19:37:21+00:00
It's topical that India's nuclear weapons program was started up with a Canadian-supplied heavy water reactor (though not CANDU; a not-power-generating type).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor

> "Canada stipulated, and the U.S. supply contract for the heavy water explicitly specified, that it only be used for peaceful purposes. Nonetheless, CIRUS produced some of India's initial weapons-grade plutonium stockpile,[6] as well as the plutonium for India's 1974 Pokhran-I (Codename Smiling Buddha) nuclear test, the country's first nuclear test.[7]"
by rscho | 2025-07-21 19:38:02+00:00
> Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?

Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though you've planned it all according to guidelines. What he's saying is that when shit hits the fan, he's really grateful if someone's there to assist with basic moves while he's trying to control the more pressing matters. I can relate.
by simonebrunozzi | 2025-07-21 19:38:08+00:00
> this is an ouroboros

Wow, I've never heard the term in English, but I looked it up [0] and of course it makes perfect sense. In my native Italian language, we would call it "a snake that eats its own tail", which is what an Ouroboros symbol depicts. Fascinating.

On the general comment: thanks, I personally agree with most of your assertions. And yet, it seems that rational negatives on crypto or BTC fail to make it crash, or kill it. It keeps growing. Perhaps we're just a bit behind a real huge crash, but what if not?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
by mcv | 2025-07-21 19:38:39+00:00
Oh, come on, man. Read the sources he points to before you invent imaginary contradictions.

> The Phoenix housing market exploded briefly during the pandemic, when demand skyrocketed amid a housing supply shortage. Remote workers relocating to the relatively cheaper city brought up home prices and values. Between February 2020 and February 2025, home prices were up 53 percent in Phoenix and 56 percent statewide in Arizona, according to Zillow. During the same five years, prices grew by 45 percent nationally.

> But the city has been experiencing a price correction in recent years, as demand slowed significantly with return-to-office orders and buying properties in the city became unaffordable for many—especially locals. "There's a mass sell-off occurring, as pandemic investors and snowbirds sell out,"

Did you know that prices can vary over time? They can go up first, and down later. That's what the article is referring to.

> An increase in housing supply leads to a fall in prices, which leads to a fall in supply?

You mean basic free market reacting to a disruption and looking for a new balance? High prices make supply go up, high supply leads to more competition and lower prices. This is basic economics, man.