MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadc0de5 | 2025-08-22 10:15:40+00:00
Forgive my skepticism but this doesn't pass the smell test. In order to transplant the new spinal cord, they must first remove the old one. This involves cutting through the spinal bones and discs, then cutting the existing spinal cord out and severing all of its nerve connections to the rest of the body. The reason spinal cord injuries are so problematic is because the spinal cord nerves do not heal when cut. (The only exception being the lower lumbar portion.) I'm failing to see how severing the old cord to replace it with a new one won't just result in a more seriously paralyzed patient.
by farseer | 2025-08-22 10:15:48+00:00
Less happy compared to some earlier time period, but which one is the question. The 1950's, 1960's perhaps when single income was enough to afford a middle class life style? Likely less happy than our boomer parents. But are we less happy when compared to the gilded age when workers toiled 12 hours daily? Definitely not.

The answer lies not only in technology/social media but as other commentators have pointed out, but perhaps in inflation and cost of living crisis. Family breakdown due to one income not being sufficient could be a major factor.
by themafia | 2025-08-22 10:17:04+00:00
It really almost is. Especially on the California Zephyr[0]. We didn't put train tracks down at random. We built them early and used techniques that saw them follow terrain features that were convenient to follow. I ride quite a bit and the mountain tunnels are the only part I can think of that don't fit my description.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zccf1KpdTOs
Ask HN: Are SSH keys with passphrases considered 2FA?
by h43z | 2025-08-22 10:17:05+00:00
It could be argued that from the servers perspective only one thing was provided, so it's not 2FA.

Then what about ssh keys AND user/password authentication?

Like this sshd_config

PasswordAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthenticationMethods publickey,password

I guess it boils down to if one thinks ssh keys are something you know or something you have? The passphrase and password is very clearly something I know.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-22 10:17:34+00:00
I would like to be in (1) but I'm not a packaging person so I'll need to investigate more :(

(2) I might make the message on installing llama.cpp maybe more informative - ie instead of re-directing people to the docs on manual compilation ie https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/troubleshooting-and-faqs#how-..., I might actually print out a longer message in the Python cell entirely

Yes we're working on Docker! https://hub.docker.com/r/unsloth/unsloth
by tdsanchez | 2025-08-22 10:17:38+00:00
Sounds like you’re terrified of immigrants for lack of human understanding. Like a child. Here’s the thing - this whole experiment was built on stolen land with slave labor and there can never be immigration “justice” on stolen land. What problem is being solved by making “a few mistakes” because that’s what you have to do in such situations? Libertarian conservatives like yourself have created a service based economy where labor can’t afford to live where the work is making the economy inherently dependent on immigrants of any stripe. But like so many other things understood by people who think like 8 year olds we will have to learn the hard way that, for example, scaring away all the illegal Mexicans will result in billions in food losses and price increases on everything, but at least we got some bad immigrants, right?
by imtringued | 2025-08-22 10:19:02+00:00
Calling these things modern experiments even though nothing fundamental has changed since the Roman age seems pretty foolish.

If anything, the experiments you're talking about are just the logical consequences of doing the same thing over and over.

After all, the experiments never seemed to modify the problematic element, all they did was increase the quantity according to the logic of accumulation.

In fact, isn't it remarkable that the last 2000 years have produced the exact same pattern over and over again?

The logic is always the same. Money from period A can be carried over to period B. This means there is too little money during period A and too much during period B.

Since period A is perpetually today, and period B is perpetually tomorrow, one could get the idea to at least fix period A, which isn't as stupid as the Austrian economists would like to tell you. But fixing today through quantity means there is even more money carried over to tomorrow. The problem is being fixed with more of itself. It certainly isn't being fixed by having a competing system for trade.

Abandoning gold, fractional reserve banking, QE, etc all exist due to the fundamental mistake of making it possible to carry something that is time and location bound away from the time and location it is bound to.

Reintroducing a gold standard doesn't change this logic. It just makes it slightly more visible.

When you look at Arrow-Debreu models, you see the assumption is that utility maximizing economic agents will spend their entire budget on either present utility (consumer goods) or future utility (investment goods). The concept of carrying money from one period to another doesn't exist and is inherently incompatible with equilibrium and yet you don't see economists warning us about the carrying over of past balances into the future with the exception Keynes and Wolfgang Stützel. Not even Marx thought that this was problematic. Even the Austrian economists know the problem, as they argue that the single individual with the lowest time preference should own the entire planet and that the real problem is the national central bank (which happens to be quite small in contrast to world domination).

The problem and its half baked attempts at solutions is at least as old as Christianity. Possibly all the way back to mesopotamia.
by sjw987 | 2025-08-22 10:19:29+00:00
I think the technology that has had the most impact on modern humans is the computer (in whatever size and format). Our lives aren't worse because of technological development in agriculture, manufacturing and so on.

I think that computers are simply too good for us. They are incredibly useful tools which fill in for gaps in our own human abilities (memory, processing, analysis), but are largely misused by most of the population (including myself).

We shouldn't be staring at glowing artificial screens filled with unnatural colours and designs, especially not for several hours a day. We shouldn't be consuming as much media as we do. We shouldn't be swapping real life socialisation for a sub-par digital rendition. We shouldn't be bombarding ourselves with so much easily acquired information every day.

Sure, there's many people who do moderate well, but they are a complete minority (getting ever smaller). If you use computers for work, for study, for entertainment, for hours every day, they are rewiring your brain. The best thing anybody can do is to reclaim their life. Use computers (including phones) sparingly, where they boost your abilities, and try to minimise the harmful effects of them.

I cannot even imagine how the brains of young people (I am 30) growing up today are developing with constant and very early onset exposure to computers, the internet and media, and the changes in the real world to reflect the online world. It's not natural, in any format. You can't truly adapt to it.
by hennell | 2025-08-22 10:23:07+00:00
I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).

I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!
by themafia | 2025-08-22 10:23:24+00:00
They don't have baskets at this store. You have to use a push cart. This probably has something to do with the amount of theft that occurs in this area. I'm also probably not equally abled to you so a _bicycle_ is more useful to me and pushing that around a store with a cart getting groceries would be a ridiculous chore.

The world would probably be better if you didn't assume that everyone's experiences are identical to yours. Otherwise I can just keep using my gas powered truck to get groceries. I can easily afford that and it's "not a problem" for me.

An EV bicycle just seemed more considerate in several ways, and unless it has the features that speak to my needs, I don't see myself using one.
by andreasflakstad | 2025-08-22 10:23:57+00:00
I wrote The Creator’s Oath as a pledge for software builders who want to create tools that honor integrity, simplicity, and the user’s freedom.

The Oath sets out eleven principles (integrity, empowerment, data ownership, AI as servant, simplicity, disciplined craft, transparent profit, long-term durability, respectful collaboration, stillness, and finding reward in the work itself).

Full manifesto here: https://creatorsoath.org/
by gabriel666smith | 2025-08-22 10:24:08+00:00
I found some weird results when messing around with different embeddings in text generation.

I'm not sure if this is meaningful, and - if anyone on here is interested - I could use some help figuring out what's going on.

I was invited to repost this by the mods' (thank you!) second-chance system.

In the meantime, I've added to the repo a small study I did. This study seems to initially indicate that appending Fib words generated by the model the model to a prompt quite drastically improves LLMs output on creative writing tasks.

Again, I'd love to know if anyone could take this thing further.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-22 10:24:53+00:00
Calm down, ASCII is a UNICODE compatible encoding for the first 127 UNICODE code points (which maps directly to the entire ASCII range). If you need to go beyond that, just 'upgrade' to UTF-8 encoding.

UNICODE is essentially a superset of ASCII, and the UTF-8 encoding also contains ASCII as compatible subset (e.g. for the first 127 UNICODE code points, an UTF-8 encoded string is byte-by-byte compatible with the same string encoded in ASCII).

Just don't use any of the Extended ASCII flavours (e.g. "8-bit ASCII with codepages") - or any of the legacy 'national' multibyte encodings (Shift-JIS etc...) because that's how you get the infamous `?????` or `♥♥♥♥♥` mismatches which are commonly associated with 'ASCII' (but this is not ASCII, but some flavour of Extended ASCII decoded with the wrong codepage).
by V__ | 2025-08-22 10:26:16+00:00
I really like this video [1] from 3blue1brown, where he proposes to think about significance as a way to update the probability. One positive test (or in this analog a study) updates the probability by X % and thus you nearly always need more tests (or studies) for a 'meaningful' judgment.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG4VkPoG3ko
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-22 10:27:11+00:00
In addition to the modern US structural labor concerns sibling highlighted,

> the maximum wage the company is willing to pay

This is the primary method I was thinking of. A company/CEO has a variety of reasons for paying its labor more than the minimum (retention, moral belief, working next to colleagues, etc). Shareholders really only have executive comp (and its structure) to discourage CEOs from paying labor more than the minimum necessary.
by tomsmeding | 2025-08-22 10:27:27+00:00
It's not unlikely that what you would ideally use here is the number of grapheme clusters. What is the length of "ë"? Either 1 or 2 codepoints depending on the encoding (combining [1] or single codepoint [2]), and either 1 byte (Latin-1), 2 bytes (UTF-8 single-codepoint) or 3 bytes (UTF-8 combining).

The metrics you care about are likely number of letters from a human perspective (1) or the number of bytes of storage (depends), possibly both.

[1]: https://tomsmeding.com/unicode#U+65%20U+308 [2]: https://tomsmeding.com/unicode#U+EB
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-08-22 10:27:56+00:00
> Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?

For me, it's just physical books, basically.

Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
by tim333 | 2025-08-22 10:28:11+00:00
How it works, I'm in the UK, is the government passed a law saying lawyers are responsible for knowing the source of fund and can be fined if they don't do it. It isn't really spelled out how you are supposed to prove the source. In the end I found some paperwork from a more recent source of funds and used that. It's not very organised - they just want some bit of paper in their files saying source was x in case the government has a go at them.

The proof I did use - a more recent inheritance, I could probably use multiple times as there doesn't seem any check on you doing that. The system is not very organized.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-22 10:28:43+00:00
I have scaffolded projects using LLMs in languages I don't know and I agree that it can be a great way to learn as it gives you something to iterate on. But that is only if you review/rewrite the code and read documentation alongside it. Many times LLMs will generate code that is just plain bad and confusing even if it works.

I find that LLM coding requires more in-depth understanding, because rather than just coming up with a solution you need to understand the LLMs solution and answer if the complexity is necessary, because it will add structures, defensive code and more that you wouldn't add if you coded it yourself. It's way harder to answer if some code is necessary or the correct way to do something.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-08-22 10:28:53+00:00
> The main problem now is that the product I bought now appears as a completely different product on that site, which is baffling, how can a product that’s been sold be “updated” with having a completely new photo, title, description, etc (now it’s basically a car Bluetooth adapter for 5 euros), which makes me unable to start the return process.

It's to buy fake reviews. They "sell" something very cheap so fake reviewers can buy it and write a positive review. Once done, they change the page back to the actual scam.

By the way, you should contact Kingston and notify them that you have a fraudulent drive. Chances are they'll exchange it for a new drive so they can investigate it.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-08-22 10:30:04+00:00
> Two days later, US Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson warned big tech firms they could be violating US law if they weakened privacy and data security requirements by complying with international laws such as the Online Safety Act.

How will this work with chat control?

> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."

If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
by bullen | 2025-08-22 10:30:49+00:00
The best SSD purchases of my life was the last Intel X-25E (64GB 45nm SLC with 100.000 writes per bit from 2011) I found on ebay ~2021.

I ordered one first expecting it to be used or fake, but the packaging looked good (original and untampered) and the Intel disk software said it had only factory number of read/writes so I went all in and bought all the disks they had...

30x at $100 instead of the original $1.000 price tag. Still $3.000 sounds like an aweful lot when it's only 64GB disks, but I know how it feels when your OS drive corrupts and that's not something I want to keep experiencing over and over every 5 (if you are lucky) years.

Now with a few (24/7 operation) years under their belt I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-22 10:31:06+00:00
That’s a solid point about the bond market. I’ll have to work it into my paradigm.

We’re on the general same page (i.e., conventional wisdom is wrong) but I have a counter-point.

Yes, trust is important. Those who have been favored and enriched by the Fed trusts that it will continue to do so (for them). Sum that up over time and we have what we have:

- wider and wider financial inequality

- more money and assets in fewer hands

- excessive federal gov debt

- more frequent bubbles of some sort

- etc.

I’m not so sure the bond market is at fault.
by zahlman | 2025-08-22 10:31:24+00:00
> This is such a bizarre sentence. The way its tossed in, not explained in any way,

It reads naturally in context and is explained by the foregoing text. For example, the phrase "these theoretical & empirical considerations" refers to theoretical and empirical considerations described above. The basic idea is that, because everything correlates with everything else, you can't just look at correlations and infer that they're more than incidental. The political implications are not at all "weird", and follow naturally. The author observes that social scientists build complex models and observe huge amounts of variables, which allows them to find correlations that support their hypothesis; but these correlations, exactly because they can be found everywhere, are not anywhere near as solid evidence as they are presented as being.

> Like I guess the implication being made is something like "because there is a hidden latent variable that determines criminality and we can never escape from correlations with it, its ok to use "is_black" in our black box model which decides if someone is going to get parole?

No, not at all. The implication is that we cannot conclude that the black box model actually has an "is_black" variable, even if it is observed to have disparate impact on black people.
by newpavlov | 2025-08-22 10:32:32+00:00
This actually one of my many gripes about Rust async and why I consider it a bad addition to the language in the long term. The fundamental problem is that rust async was developed when epoll was dominant (and almost no one in the Rust circles cared about IOCP) and it has heavily influenced the async design (sometimes indirectly through other languages).

Think about it for a second. Why do we not have this problem with "synchronous" syscalls? When you call `read` you also "pass mutable borrow" of the buffer to the kernel, but it maps well into the Rust ownership/borrow model since the syscall blocks execution of the thread and there are no ways to prevent it in user code. With poll-based async model you side-step this issues since you use the same "sync" syscalls, but which are guaranteed to return without blocking.

For a completion-based IO to work properly with the ownership/borrow model we have to guarantee that the task code will not continue execution until it receives a completion event. You simply can not do it with state machines polled in user code. But the threading model fits here perfectly! If we are to replace threads with "green" threads, user Rust code will look indistinguishable from "synchronous" code. And no, the green threads model can work properly on embedded systems as demonstrated by many RTOSes.

There are several ways of how we could've done it without making the async runtime mandatory for all targets (the main reason why green threads were removed from Rust 1.0). My personal favorite is introduction of separate "async" targets.

Unfortunately, the Rust language developers made a bet on the unproved polling stackless model because of the promised efficiency and we are in the process of finding out whether the bet plays of or not.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-22 10:33:23+00:00
Your description feels relatable.

I think all this stuff is so complex and multi-faceted that we often get only a small part of the picture at a time.

I likely have some attention/focus issues, but I also know they vary greatly (from "can't focus at all" to "I can definitely grok this") based on how actually interested I am in a topic (and I often misjudge that actual level of interest).

I also know my very negative internal discourse, and my fixed mindset, are both heavily influenced by things that occurred decades ago, and keeping myself positively engaged in something by trying to at least fake a growth mindset is incredibly difficult.

Meanwhile, I'm perfectly willing to throw unreasonable brute force effort at things (ie I've done many 60+ hour weeks working in tech and bunches of 12 hour days in restaurant kitchens), but that's probably been simultaneously both my biggest strength and worst enemy.

At the same time, I don't think you should ignore the value of an egg whisk. You can use it to make anything from mayonnaise to whipped cream, not to mention beaten egg whites that have a multitude of applications. Meanwhile, the passport is easy enough to replace, and your pet (forgive me if I'm making the wrong assumption here) doesn't know how to use the whisk properly.
by qoez | 2025-08-22 10:34:00+00:00
I have, and that's definitely not my impression. Again to my ears that's just his natural way of expressing himself in a way that tries to express detailed ideas in a compact way. Nothing he says I find that difficult to understand with some effort (other than the hard physics). Personally I don't believe at all he's purposefully obfuscating what he's saying.
by mattmanser | 2025-08-22 10:34:18+00:00
It's not ridiculous, that's the deal (at least it was). It's not actual property. It's a made up concept, you actually lose nothing physical if it's copied. That concept was created and granted to encourage people to create.

You get a certain period to commercialize it, then it's public property. Hiding it away to prevent that is a breach of the spirit of the agreement society made with the creator.

That you believe it's a "ridiculous" argument shows how much you've been brainwashed by corporations.

All this stuff is generally built on the shoulders of previous works, that are public domain. Copying story structures, phrasing, etc. Even entire storylines.

And that's before we get onto the fact that all these corporations benefited from eveything we paid for. Laws to protect their IP, enforcement, infrastructure paid with by public money, education of workers, etc..

They've got their hands out to take, take, take, but when it comes to holding up to their part of the bargain, it's suddenly extensions on copyright terms, minor tweaks to "renew" IP that was never part of the original deal, etc. while feeding a ton of cash to politicians in what looks like a bribe, acts like a bribe, but is termed "lobbying".
by wongarsu | 2025-08-22 10:34:41+00:00
We don't have enough time to derive everything from first principles, but we do have the time to go over how something was derived, or how something works.

A common issue when trying this is trying to teach all layers at the same level of detail. But this really isn't necessary. You need to know the equation for Ohms law, but you can give very handwavy explanations for the underlying causes. For example: why do thicker wires have less resistance? Electricity is the movement of electrons, more cross section means more electrons can move, like having more lanes on a highway. Why does copper have less resistance than aluminum? Copper has an electron that isn't bound as tightly to the atom. How does electricity know which path has the least resistance? It doesn't, it starts flowing down all paths equally at a significant fraction of the speed of light, then quickly settles in a steady state described by Ohm's law. Reserve the equations and numbers for the layers that matter, but having a rough understanding of what's happening on the layer below makes it easier to understand the layer you care about, and makes it easier to know when that understanding will break down (because all of science and engineering are approximations with limited applicability)