MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A lightweight ML model to predict music emotion - energy, valence, etc.
by jaeheonshim | 2025-08-24 20:46:33+00:00
Spotify has 7 features for each of their music tracks (acousticness, danceability, energy, instrumentalness, liveness, speechiness, valence) which describe the perceptual/emotional content of the song. I wanted to tag my own offline music library with these features so that I could sort my songs into playlists for different occasions (working out, driving, etc.), but unfortunately Spotify doesn't share how they calculate these features. So, I trained my own lightweight neural network to predict these features!
by qcnguy | 2025-08-24 20:46:54+00:00
You missed his point. People have measured this. Basically all plastic waste in the oceans come from Asia. This was true before these EU regulations and is also true of America where such bans don't exist.

It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.

The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.
by altairprime | 2025-08-24 20:47:24+00:00
Ironically, America finally automated one of our oldest workplace specialties: grifting! People overconfidently declaring made-up nonsense in board meetings is a classic executive behavior. I suppose it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that everyone has one in their pocket. Will their patter improve from exposure alone, or will they more easily detected because their skills weaken from disuse?
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-24 20:47:39+00:00
It's a cheap and effective drug that has minimal side effects as long as you follow the instructions on the packaging. Pretty much all of the alternatives are worse.

Ibuprofen is usually rated to be on the same level (damaging your kidneys rather than your liver during long term use) but from what I've read I believe the potential side effects are more extreme (i.e. the elevated stroke/heart attack risk).

Using any pain medication for prolonged periods of time without consulting a doctor is dangerous. Many people do it, and most are absolutely fine, but when things go wrong, things go terribly wrong.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-08-24 20:47:45+00:00
I feel it.

If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.

What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.

I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
by joshka | 2025-08-24 20:47:45+00:00
At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors).

Based on this, I strongly believe that if you're providing hardware for software engineers, it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available, and to upgrade every 2-3 years. I can't comment on non desktop / non-mac scenarios or other job families. YMMV.
by wenc | 2025-08-24 20:47:52+00:00
A lot of relationships are (locally) linear so this isn’t as restrictive as it might seem. Many real-life productionized applications are based on it. Like linear regression, it has its place.

T-SNE is good for visualization and for seeing class separation, but in my experience, I haven’t found it to work for me for dimensionality reduction per se (maybe I’m missing something). For me, it’s more of a visualization tool.

On that note, there’s a new algorithm that improves on T-SNE called PaCMAP which preserves local and global structures better. https://github.com/YingfanWang/PaCMAP
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-24 20:48:11+00:00
Sounds very similar to my situation. I switched to Linux around the same time and for basically the same reasons. I had looked at Linux at various times in the past, and attempted to switch around 10 years ago, but wound up going back to Windows. The horrors of Windows 10/11 made me more determined this time, and also the Linux desktop experience has improved slowly but steadily.

I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
by mac-mc | 2025-08-24 20:48:17+00:00
Like a full sprite sheet, one sprite at a time or a sprite animation loop?

Each one would require a different kind of model and model technique to make, so I wouldn't be surprised that ChatGPT has issues with it. A sprite animation loop would be better done by a potentially specialized video-oriented model, for example, and the current image and video models are barely trained on that kind of video data.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-24 20:48:59+00:00
Same happened to me with a hackberry I didn't know was wild. Some genius added landscaping to make it look like a choice. You got off easy, I think after all was said and done I paid about the same out of pocket, but also was displaced for a long time due to the damages, and it cost insurance another $80+ grand that I'm sure I'll pay back over time in raised premiums.

Fun!
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 20:49:35+00:00
> It did a fantastic job, taking into account meals, diet, sleep, and several pills with different constraints and contraindications.

How do you know though? I mean, it tells me all kinds of stuff that sound good about things I'm an expert in that I know are wrong. How do you know it hasn't done the same with your wife's medications? Seems like not a good thing to put your trust in if it can't reliably get things correct you know to be true.

You say it explained your wife's symptoms, but that's what it's designed to do. I'm assuming she listed her symptoms into the system and asked for help, so it's not surprising it started to talk about them and gave suggestions for how to alleviate them.

But I give it parameters for code to implement all the time and it can't reliably give me code that parses let alone works.

So what's to say it's not also giving a medication schedule that "doesn't parse" under expert scrutiny?
by atiedebee | 2025-08-24 20:49:48+00:00
> But the obvious possibilities almost certainly won't be performant: integer modulo is a single CPU instruction [...]

Yes it is a single instruction, but that is not indicative of the actual performance. Modulo on x86 is done through the div instruction which takes tens of cycles. When you compile the code you'll likely see a multiply + shift instead because you modulo by a constant.
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-24 20:50:55+00:00
There are another two issues that aren’t technical, which are starting to come up again now that Internet access is rapidly becoming available and good onboard aircraft:

- People not paying attention to/ignoring the instructions of the FAs during safety briefings and emergencies due to being engaged in a phone call.

- People being assholes and talking on the phone, bothering the person stuck in the seat next to them.

On all of the flights I’ve been on recently the preflight brief has been crystal clear that you can do whatever you want on the internet connection except have voice calls.
by loeg | 2025-08-24 20:51:24+00:00
Seems possible, though we only incorporated FDP changes to the non-rocks writes and saw large WAF reduction. (We're approximately an object store as a service with rocksdb for metadata and direct disk writes for data; typical object size is hundreds of kB to single-digit MBs, and rocks updates are batched. Many of our users can accurately predict how long their objects will live, so we can segregate FDP streams by lifetime.)
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-24 20:51:39+00:00
I'm not sure, but I used them as recently as 2019. (Well, not a blue book per se, but a printed exam where students handwrote their answers on the provided sheets.) I'm pretty sure some faculty never stopped using them except when forced to by online classes. (Incidentally, increased pressure to offer more online classes is a worrisome combination with increased AI-aided cheating.)
by bawolff | 2025-08-24 20:51:41+00:00
> This is one example. How many other attempts did the person try that failed to be useful, accurate, coherent? The author is an OpenAI employee IIUC, so it begs this question. Sora's demos were amazing until you tried it, and realized it took 50 attempts to get a usable clip.

If you could combine this with automated theorem proving, it wouldn't matter if it was right only 1 out of a 1000 times.
by Vetch | 2025-08-24 20:52:53+00:00
Unless you're also writing your own graphics and game engine from scratch, if you're making a truly novel and balanced game, then it should not be possible to crank out code with AI. When working in engines, the bulk of the work is usually in gameplay programming so the fact that its code is so predictable should be concerning (unless the programming is effectively in natural language). Not spending most of your time testing introduced mechanics, re-balancing and iterating should be triggering alarm bells. If you're working on an RPG, narrative design, reactivity and writing will eat up most of your time.

In the case you're working as part of team large enough to have dedicated programmers, the majority of the roles will usually be in content creation, design and QA.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-24 20:53:17+00:00
There's a difference between AI being bad at prose and storycraft. Good prose is totally achievable and it's just that it hasn't really been a priority for the tech shops, and I think they also often don't understand what makes really good prose so they're not good at optimizing for it anyhow. I expect given people's aversion to slop that the big laps will start to push hard on it soon and get their act together though.
by zdw | 2025-08-24 20:53:58+00:00
Trapping user's data in their roach motel formats (the data goes in, but can never leave with full fidelity) is the longest running objection I have to using any Microsoft software.

This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
by jppittma | 2025-08-24 20:54:04+00:00
Still a ways to go. I found out part of the reason for my linux bluetooth woes is that a settings in bluetooth called “JustWorks” and “FastConnect” default to off. Like. Why?

As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.

Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-24 20:55:02+00:00
I will admit that I am a little confused. I barely accepted regular online banking into my life ( and I refuse to install app for every corp I happen to deal with ). Who would accept a non-deterministic entity onto your computer to do said banking? It feels like the same business model like llms buying stuff for you ( apparently it is a thing ) and while I can logic through it at an abstract level, the idea is on the verge crazy not even because you should not be trusting a randomized prompt response system to do your banking for you, but because, as a customer, you cede a tremendous amount of free will and gain... what?

And I like llms.. even llm browser could have real use cases. Maybe, just maybe, it is not for general population though.

Maybe force people to compile it to make sure you know what you are getting into.
by WorkerBee28474 | 2025-08-24 20:55:34+00:00
There is mounting talk of a link between Paracetamol/Acetaminophen/Tylenol and autism.

Some links:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pre...

https://jennifermargulis.substack.com/p/why-this-doctor-is-c...
by wonderwonder | 2025-08-24 20:55:36+00:00
Depends on the interruption.

Someone just messages “hi” and then waits for me to respond is going to take a while to recover from due to the massive level of frustration I get from it and the wasted pleasantries just to find out what they want.

“Hi, quick call?” The day is over, I’ll try again tomorrow

“hi, do you know what module x is populated in?” 3 minutes and im good to go
by pessimizer | 2025-08-24 20:55:53+00:00
> I think the author's leaning heavily on vibes to do the convincing here.

I have no idea what you're trying to express in your comment, so who's using vibes?*

Were you triggered by the word "caring?" A waiter usually cares that the people they're serving have an enjoyable meal. It doesn't mean that they love them, it means that they think the work of feeding people is purposeful and honest (and theirs.)

-----

[*] It's certainly not in the words; I don't know what made you angry about "joy," I don't know why you think the author does not teach writing skills in "communications," I don't know why the fact that you went through multiple drafts in writing school papers is relevant or different than anyone else's experience. Maybe that's over now. Maybe I actually don't care if you use AI for your second and further drafts, if I know you can write a first draft.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-08-24 20:56:55+00:00
Some random comments on the article:

Stateful packet filters usually perform sequence checking and verifying that there are no invalid connection states that affect the client, but the primary benefit is that it lets you put subsequent packets in a fast path. Imagine a firewall with many hundreds or thousands of rules. Usually, firewalls also have “object group” concepts where instead of listing only one each IP/subnet make tuple (be it a host or network) as the source and destination, you can create a lot of them and refer to the list. In the actual implementation that explodes to one rule per list item. Firewall rules are processed in order, either firing on first match or last match (hi, pf, we love you anyway). There’s certainly some really neat tricks to make that as efficient as it can be, but it’s still a lot of computation to determine whether a packet should pass. That doesn’t scale well. So instead, conceptually we only check the rules on the first packet of a connection and then slam the connections details into a data structure we can perform lookups against for subsequent package much more efficiently.

Packet filters aren’t all that useful anymore by themselves. They’re certainly one layer of defense, but won’t get you past any audits. Deep packet inspection (or L7 firewalls, or application firewalls, or whatever you want to call them) come with their own problems tho, and may require some interesting architectures to address. A huge amount of Internet traffic is encrypted (TLS), and rightly so. A network firewall that simply sits in the path like in the diagram in the article can’t inspect that traffic meaningfully. There’s some interesting techniques for finding certain markers even in encrypted packets, but obviously you can’t filter a specific HTTP verb (as a contrived example).

If you’re firewalling user traffic you have control over, you can install a wildcard certificate on the firewall and act as a proxy, transparently decrypting all traffic. Many enterprises do this. If you’re trying to protect your servers from Internet users you have no control over, you generally want to decrypt on a load balancer that can also do the security work, or pass the traffic from there unencrypted through a firewall, and then re-encrypt to the server if that’s warranted.

For logging, firewalls in front of busy networks can generate non-trivial amounts of log traffic, and unlike other network logging sampling usually won’t do. This can require using interesting protocols (not syslog, certainly not HTTP) that can be hardware accelerated.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-24 20:57:00+00:00
The weird thing is that to a significant extent that battle is really just about the words "Microsoft Office". LibreOffice has some awkwardness and annoyances, but it's quite adequate for probably 90% of mundane office tasks people need to do (and MS Office has its own pain points). A major barrier is just a specific insistence that Word be used, without any reference to functional requirements of the actual document.
by nine_k | 2025-08-24 20:57:24+00:00
> coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck

Doesn't look exactly that to me. The author built a server, studied React, built a frontend, made the card game work.

Then, with most bits needed for a card game already in place, he asked Claude to alter the existing code to implement a different card game. Understandably, it took much shorter. But it would also take much shorter if a human engineer did the same.
by yes_man | 2025-08-24 20:57:57+00:00
Ibuprofen also increases risk of strokes and NSAIDs have been linked to increased risk of intracerebral hemorrhage. It’s a question of whether benefits outweigh cons on population level and I am not an expert, but recommending ibuprofen over acetaminophen might be over-simplifying things. It depends on the person (their meds, their pre-existing conditions, their genetics etc)
by uncircle | 2025-08-24 20:58:05+00:00
Funny, I had issues with my adapter where I had to turn BT fast connect off. In computing there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?

EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 20:58:10+00:00
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.

> These events tend to be uncorrelated,

Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.

It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:

How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?

> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.

Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.

I already gave you the link:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.

In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.

You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.

You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.

That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
by svantana | 2025-08-24 20:58:47+00:00
No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.
by rendx | 2025-08-24 20:58:53+00:00
Many, many more but here's a few you might want to start with:

"The meta-analysis showed a significant association between maternal tobacco smoking during pregnancy and increased risk of ADHD in offspring."

Mohammadian M, Khachatryan LG, Vadiyan FV, Maleki M, Fatahian F, et al. (2025) The association between maternal tobacco smoking during pregnancy and the risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in offspring: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE 20(2): e0317112. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317112

"Compared with unexposed controls, individuals with PAE reported significantly higher frequencies of problems with hearing, dentition, heart, cancer, gastritis, kidney stones, bladder, diabetes, thyroid, skin, and seizures."

Coles, C.D., Shapiro, Z.R., Kable, J.A., Stoner, S.A., Ritfeld, G.J. & Grant, T.M. (2024) Prenatal alcohol exposure and health at midlife: Self-reported health outcomes in two cohorts. Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, 48, 2045–2059. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.15441

"Our results indicate that perinatal exposure to maternal smoking is associated with increased risks of CVD events, and such relations are modified by adulthood smoking behaviors."

H., Liang, Z., Wang, H., Cardoso, M. A., Heianza, Y., & Qi, L. (2021). Perinatal exposure to maternal smoking and adulthood smoking behaviors in predicting cardiovascular diseases: A prospective cohort study. Atherosclerosis, 328, 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2021.05.009

"Our findings support previous findings suggesting the detrimental effects of prenatal binge drinking on child cognition. Prenatal alcohol exposure at levels less than daily drinking might be detrimentally associated with child behavior. The results of this review highlight the importance of abstaining from binge drinking during pregnancy and provide evidence that there is no known safe amount of alcohol to consume while pregnant."

Flak, A. L., Su, S., Bertrand, J., Denny, C. H., Kesmodel, U. S., & Cogswell, M. E. (2014). The association of mild, moderate, and binge prenatal alcohol exposure and child neuropsychological outcomes: a meta-analysis. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research, 38(1), 214–226. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.12214

You may not not want to hear this, but let's put it plainly: Prenatal smoking and alcohol is clear and obvious child maltreatment.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-24 20:59:41+00:00
If the only danger is the company itself bankrupt, then please, take all the risks you like.

But if they're managing customer-funds or selling fluffy asbestos teddybears, then that's a problem. It's a profoundly different moral landscape when the people choosing the risks (and grabbing any rewards) aren't the people bearing the danger.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-24 20:59:50+00:00
Here's the MIT report [PDF]

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

A few HN members did submit the MIT report [PDF]^1 but HN discussion has instead centered around articles written about the report and the market's apparent reaction to it

1. For example,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941374

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972204

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978557
by jll29 | 2025-08-24 21:00:08+00:00
It's great how you attempt to hunt down the source, and document your chase.

I often scold my students for doing poor research on sources, not reading them, not going back to the originals, because quite often, someone never said what is commonly attributed to them. The process of active reading means the reader sometimes ascribes something to an author that is really their own idea.