MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gethly | 2025-08-02 14:10:32+00:00
it does not matter that much. only thing of importance here is that the leather will be still usable whereas the synthetics are "one crash only" type of thing. leather does not breathe either. i am not arguing for one or the other, that is an endless debate, i am merely saying there is no "best". each has its positives and negatives. if i would be riding a sport bike on a track or doing high speed freeway riding, leather is a no-brainer. anything else, synthetics will be more user friendly. also, understand the difference between nylon and polyester. one is tough and rough(ie. cordura), the other is soft and weak. most cheap product use polyester that provides very little protection so they layer it whereas nylon(like cordura) will be much safer choice.

PS: if you crash, for the love of anything holy, do not slide but roll(ie. be active during the event, not passive). it is better to get bruises rather than getting your skin peeled off.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-02 14:10:39+00:00
It’s my perception that’s there’s been a negative reaction to pressure on younger people to have kids for a while now.

As a mid 30s millennial, it sure did feel weird back in my early 20s when older people from my rural hometown asked why I hadn’t found someone to marry and started a family yet. I had yet to even figure out who I was and how to be responsible, upstanding adult but somehow I’m supposed to take on a partner and N children too?! How does that make any sense? The chances of it ending in disaster of one sort or another are just too high, and that was obvious to me even in the midst of the naivety of a freshly minted adult.

Flash forward to today, and yes I’d like to do those things but I’m now in so much better of a position to do so that it’s difficult to even express. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the pressure.
by stdvit | 2025-08-02 14:11:16+00:00
> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life.

They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many don't have capacity to do it. And it isn't even something new at this point.
by alchemyzach | 2025-08-02 14:12:22+00:00
> I've also seen good use of automation tools that monitor the codebase for TODOs and if they last for more than a couple weeks escalate them into a "real" ticketing system

Im sorry but that’s exactly the kind of automation that sounds helpful in theory but ends up creating bloat and inefficiency in practice. Like the article says, the second a TODO gets a timer/deadline attached, it stops being a quick, lightweight note and turns into process overhead (note the distinction between something that is urgent and needs fixing now, and something that really is just a TODO).

Maybe a weird way to put it, but it’s like a TODO that used to be lean and trail-ready - able to carry itself for miles over tough terrain with just some snacks and water - suddenly steps on a scale and gets labeled “overweight" and "bloated" and flagged as a problem, and sent into the healthcare system. It loses its agility and becomes a burden.

"But the TODO is a serious problem that does need to get addressed now" Ok then it was never actually a TODO, and thats something to take up with the dev who wrote it. But most TODOs are actually just TODOs - not broken code, but helpful crumbs left by diligent, benevolent devs. And if you start to attack/accuse every TODO as "undone work that needed to be done yesterday" then youll just create a culture where devs are afraid to write them, which is really stupid and will just create even more inefficiency/pitfalls down the road - way more than if you had just accepted TODOs as natural occurrences in codebases
by kaivi | 2025-08-02 14:12:38+00:00
It's funny that you mention this because I had a similar experience.

ChatGPT in its sycophancy era made me buy a $35 domain and waste a Saturday on a product which had no future. It hyped me up beyond reason for the idea of an online, worldwide, liability-only insurance for cruising sailboats, similar to SafetyWing. "Great, now you're thinking like a true entrepreneur!"

In retrospect, I fell for it because the onset of its sycophancy was immediate and without any additional signals like maybe a patch note from OpenAI.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-08-02 14:12:42+00:00
100%. There's always the layer of hormones, chemicals, touch, electric fields, and whatnot that also entails human contact. Mirror neurons. Stuff like that. It's like replacing a partner with a sex doll. I'm a bit sad that the author didn't have a take on the cheap reproduction of human contact and how it's connected to our broader culture and instead thinks about a non-solution to one of the issues that causes a lot of other bigger problems we're facing.
by notarobot123 | 2025-08-02 14:12:42+00:00
Isn't that more of a comment about the quality of weak-tie networks that exist on internet scale web platforms?

The rise of private group chats as the new lifeblood of social networking gives me hope that the state of the Web today isn't the end of the story. Authentic human connection across digital networks is still possible even if it isn't particularly common right now.

We need new protocols.
by bityard | 2025-08-02 14:13:51+00:00
I don't know if anything has changed but 10 years ago I was part of an effort to make the base OS of our product FIPS-compliant. FIPS was both prescriptive and outdated. And it turned out that the changes required to make everything FIPS-compliant actually made our product demonstrably less secure.

But we had to ship it anyway, otherwise a non-negligible portion of our customers could not legally buy our product.
by SilasX | 2025-08-02 14:14:11+00:00
>Let's say our overall goal is to get to work showered, wearing clean clothes, and having brushed our teeth. After we showered and put on clean clothes, wouldn't you say that the remaining goal is to brush our teeth and get to work?

Yes, I agree! My issue is not with the reality of having reduced the problem to a different one, but with the "goal" metaphor, which is counterintuitive to how that term is normally used, especially since it connotes that each step is some brand new thing, rather than progress.

And sure, like any technical jargon, you can learn to accept some specialized term-of-art usage, but I'd prefer it be conducive to developing a correct ontology of what is going on in an assisted Lean proof.

While "subgoal" is better, I think the issue even goes back to calling the original theorem a "goal". Really, the goal is to prove the theorem. So a better term, more conducive to intuiting the Lean ontology, would be something like "[remaining] unresolved proof state", even though it's more verbose. (Perhaps you could get the best of both worlds with some kind of footnote for new users that clarifies that this is what "goal" means here.)

With that said, I appreciate the pushback, as your comment forced me to more carefully think about what I was objecting to.
by jiehong | 2025-08-02 14:14:25+00:00
I think BMW used to use a paid product named Control-M to handle this (from BMC, still exists).

It contained what people quickly need to reach for:

- schedule a job in UTC or local time zone for a particular place;

- schedule a job but only if another job ran beforehand;

- semaphore-like resource limits on jobs.

It did this with job generating resource tokens and other jobs stating a token as a condition for being scheduled.

It ended up being a not so nice system to debug to be honest, but worked fine.

For simple job, I’d reach for systemd timers on a single machine, a kubernetes cronjob on a given platform, or something external altogether otherwise (for geo-distributed scheduled jobs).
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-02 14:14:50+00:00
Something The Anxious Generation specifically calls out as problematic about online relationships is how disposable they can be; if someone online offends or upsets you you can just block them and move on without giving it a second thought.

Real life relationships aren’t like this; you have to invest in repair and maintenance to keep them up. You have a limited number of times that you can “go no contact” with people before you find yourself alone. And people like this in the real world are usually pretty easy to identify and avoid — the embittered self-righteousness and victimhood is obvious, so others quickly learn to keep them at arm’s length.

This is the same principle why you can have fiery fling on vacation but struggle to talk to the cutie next door — the next door person you only get one shot with.

AI risks amplifying all this. Not only is the AI already far too agreeable and unbound by morals or conscience, you can reset it whenever you want, if you do happen to tell it something that takes it in a direction you don’t like.

That this could become the next generation’s training wheels for how friendships and partnerships function is terrifying.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-02 14:16:16+00:00
> "They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?"

This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP).

I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the truth.

In reality a LLM presented with a vast array of tools has extremely poor reliability, so if you want a thing that can order delivery and remember your shopping list and remind you of your flight and play music you're radically exceeding the capabilities of current models. There's a reason successful (anything that isn't demoware/vaporware) uses of agentic LLMs tend to narrow-domain use cases.

There's a reason Google hasn't done it either, and indeed nor has anyone else: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have a general purpose assistant (defined as being able to execute an indefinite number of arbitrary tools to do things for you, as opposed to merely converse with you).
by honeybadger1 | 2025-08-02 14:18:44+00:00
He has certainly angered a lot of the Miami folk I work around in the office. Latins here were very much pro-trump and now it seems they are just bitter about his presidency because of the the iran move, now supporting the ukraine war, these are viewed as an extension of the "swamp". i've even heard more than once that he is now "king of the swamp" from people who were generally favorable of him over anyone else(not nutjob magas, just didn't like kamala).
by gitremote | 2025-08-02 14:19:05+00:00
> Sex is decoupled from birth rates, due to access to 100% effective birth control (IUD/morning after pill/abortion).

In 2022, the US overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Abortion is now outlawed in 17 US states, restricted in 8.

Politicians in some of these states are also trying to ban IUDs and the morning after pill.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-02 14:19:10+00:00
Substack philosophy is not at all clear here. In the end, maybe I think Substack should refuse to censor their notifications. Maybe it should be illegal to censor notifications without user consent. Their approach is the worse of both worlds. The most dangerous thing is probably letting people speak and then pretending like your not.

If sunshine is the best disinfectant, than by censoring their notifications, Substack is protecting Nazis.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-02 14:19:22+00:00
OpenAI reportedly made a loss of $5B in 2024. By 2024's end they had ~300M WAUs, most of them free and not monetized in any way whatsoever.

To be profitable, they'd need to monetize those free users for an average of $17/year or $1.5/month.

Do you realize how low that is ? Yes, ads even implemented in an uninspiring fashion would more than cover that. With some thought into it ? Well, You don't need to be a genius to see the potential of directly weaving paid recommendations naturally into conversations when appropriate.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-02 14:19:22+00:00
> Trump believes there is a winner and loser in everything.

This, precisely. It's Fred Trump's mantra, inherited.

It's also bound up with his malignant narcissism; no deal is ever closed, it can always be renegotiated and he can always decide it was bad for him even when it was his deal.

People did refuse to work with him, though I am sure the rest came to realise you overbilled so you got paid at all.

And he made some hilariously bad deals when he was desperate (the ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal got comically good terms because Trump was so desperate to have a book).

Famously his lawyers would only meet with him in pairs. He is that untrustworthy.

All of this factors into how the tariff deals are going; any diplomatic department anywhere in the world understands all of this.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-02 14:19:37+00:00
> But what if we take two random choices (2-random) and just use LRU between those two choices?

> Also, we can see that pseudo 3-random is substantially better than pseudo 2-random, which indicates that k-random is probably an improvement over 2-random for the k. Some k-random policy might be an improvement over DIP.

This sounds very similar to tournament selection schemes in evolutionary algorithms. You can control the amount of selective pressure by adjusting the tournament size.

I think the biggest advantage here is performance. A 1v1 tournament is extremely cheap to run. You don't need to maintain a total global ordering of anything.
by karolinepauls | 2025-08-02 14:19:57+00:00
The parent comment I'm responding to is literally:

> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.

To which I'm stating that forests and wetlands are not carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.

Then you miss the parent comment's context and start in an inflammatory way:

> Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.

And take it somewhere else (move the goalpost) - from whether forests are carbon neutral or not to how effective charcoal creation is at carbon capture, in our human timescale.

Meanwhile the only practical point wrt. charcoal creation from forests was:

> Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.

Which doesn't propose an effective carbon capture solution. At most it's something like emission reduction - the key phrase is old trees. And soil enrichment.

Recommendation: don't argue against points people didn't make.
by cube00 | 2025-08-02 14:20:05+00:00
> Some people are also more susceptible to various too-good-to-be-true scams

Unlike a regular scam, there's an element of "boiling frog" with LLMs.

It can start out reasonably, but very slowly over time it shifts. Unlike scammers looking for their payday, this is unlimited and it has all the time in the world to drag you in.

I've noticed it reworking in content of previous conversations from months ago. The scary thing is that's only when I've noticed it, I can only imagine how much it's tailoring everything for me in ways I don't notice.

Everyone needs to be regularly clearing their past conversations and disable saving/training.
by al_borland | 2025-08-02 14:20:23+00:00
This is already happening. I keep seeing articles and videos about Gen Z opting for dumb phones and getting into 90s or early 00s era tech.

It just needs to reach enough of a tipping point for companies to get behind it, and hopefully not be a fad that just burns out. This part is all very unlikely. The mainstream will have to get really bad.

To buy new "90s" stuff, it's not as good as what we had in the actual 90s. I watched something on new cassette players (walkman style) that companies are building. They are a lot bigger and bulkier than peak walkman, which was hardly larger than the tape. The tools and tech to make those small walkmans just doesn't exist anymore, and the market isn't large enough to invest in it.

When Apple's click wheel patent expires, I'm sure people would love to see some high quality 3rd party iPods that are easily repairable and have more modern features out of the box. There is still a community of people keeping the old ones going.

The way things are driving right now, it's going to be very hard to get a flip phone soon. My HSA plan just announced that if we don't download their app before fall they're going to lock us out of our accounts. That seems wrong in so many ways. In their FAQ there is a question about a user's phone not supporting their app, and the answer provided is to get a new phone that does. The HSA is through my employer, I can't just change, even though I'd like to. Earlier this year, before my grandma died, some company was telling my mom that my grandma needed an email address to use their service. She was 104 and months away from death, and they wanted her to get her first email account. After loudly refusing, they found away around it, but that's where we're at as a society. Can we even go back?
by dskhatri | 2025-08-02 14:21:10+00:00
So with any conventional transistor including the GaN HEMT, the input/gate capacitance must be charged in order for the transistor to turn on. The turn on and off (discharging the input and the output capacitance) is predictable, and is the job of a gate driver integrated circuit.

It appears to me that while the effective input capacitance is reduced with HZO, the gate driver would need to be special to deal with the changing capacitance.

The article implies that the Berkeley team has been researching the use of feroelectrics in Si devices for 20 years. Are there Si mosfets in production with this material on the gate?
by yomismoaqui | 2025-08-02 14:21:54+00:00
Who says an LLM has to be a sycophantic yes-man?

Today there are LLM roleplay models than can behave like some character with a specific personality (e.g. a tsundere). So if you want a electronic partner that sometimes puts you in your place you can have it.

And this is with the current roleplay models, sincerely I'm a little scared with what would be available in 5 years.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-02 14:22:04+00:00
I don't think it's that the elderly are "dumb enough" to believe that their robot companion is human... it's that there may be some benefit of even that artificial simulation of companionship compared with having none at all.

I'm sure they know they're not talking to a human, but maybe, even on a tiny subconscious level, if they get even a fraction of that companionship in a simulated way, it is presumably better than the alternative.

Recounting memories from your youth with a robot is not as enjoyable as sharing them with real friends, but maybe it's slightly more engaging than being stuck in a nursing home bed all day by yourself watching TV.
by apelapan | 2025-08-02 14:23:24+00:00
It would be a weird kind of bad situation, if literally thousands of juniors with little to no experience/understanding of programming simultaneously start learn-as-you-go contributing C++ code for Ladybird.

In the perhaps more plausible situation that two or three people with a reasonable foundation in CS and/or a bit of professional programming experience decide to learn C++ in order to help Ladybird, I think it would work out quite fine.
by danans | 2025-08-02 14:23:38+00:00
> Yes, I really am always shocked by the Joe Rogans et. al. who spout off about random fad pharmaceuticals like this

Why shocked?

It seems quite normal since we live in an age where there is no accountability for spouting that stuff, and probably a major economic upside for the person spouting it.

Snake oil has never had a bigger market than it has today, aided by the Internet as a platform.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-02 14:24:39+00:00
But the current systems are about as good as they'll get: we can make them a bit better in fields where we can cheaply generate synthetic data, but human communication is not one of them. (And even where you can generate synthetic data, your efforts would usually be better spent assembling a purpose-built system.) Sure, I probably could make something more effective, using non-LLM technologies (given a large enough budget), but… why would I, or anyone else, do that when it'd be obviously harmful, with no benefit?
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-02 14:24:39+00:00
This paper seems misleading to me because ivermectin was dosed only once a month at about a standard dose. Based on the drug's pharmacology, there is no way in which it could maintain any effectiveness over a week.

If the paper is legitimate, then the effect could be better with weekly dosing and much better with twice-a-week dosing.
by ncr100 | 2025-08-02 14:25:22+00:00
Is Gen AI helping to put us humans in touch with the reality of being human? vs what we expect/imagine we are?

- sycophancy tendency & susceptibility

- need for memory support when planning a large project

- when re-writing a document/prose, gen ai gives me an appreciation for my ability to collect facts, as the Gen AI gizmo refines the Composition and Structure
by Swizec | 2025-08-02 14:26:17+00:00
> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along.

> lost all weight i wanted with Wegovy

It’s not a scam. The trick is that you probably weren’t dieting aggressively enough before Wegovy. All diets and GLP inhibitors work on the same principle: Caloric restriction.

It is simply impossible to stay fat without eating enough calories. But that’s really really hard to do without help. I have friends and family on GLP and they regularly eat less than 800 calories per day. You can’t do that on your own, the willpower it would take is hard to imagine.

Conversely when I’m marathon training it’s almost impossible to eat enough calories to avoid losing weight. Eating itself becomes a huge chore. Run 10mi/day and I promise you’ll lose weight the old fashioned way.
by colechristensen | 2025-08-02 14:26:36+00:00
It doesn't have to be a mental illness.

Something which is very sorely missing from modern education is critical thinking. It's a phrase that's easy to gloss over without understanding the meaning. Being skilled at always including the aspect of "what could be wrong with this idea" and actually doing it in daily life isn't something that just automatically happens with everyone. Education tends to be the instructor, book, and facts are just correct and you should memorize this and be able to repeat it later. Instead of here are 4 slightly or not so slightly different takes on the same subject followed by analyzing and evaluating each compared to the others.

If you're just some guy who maybe likes reading popular science books and you've come to suspect that you've made a physics breakthrough with the help of an LLM, there are a dozen questions that you should automatically have in your mind to temper your enthusiasm. It is, of course, not impossible that a physics breakthrough could start with some guy having an idea, but in no, actually literally 0, circumstances could an amateur be certain that this was true over a weekend chatting with an LLM. You should know that it takes a lot of work to be sure or even excited about that kind of thing. You should have a solid knowledge of what you don't know.