MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-22 03:41:15+00:00
> All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well.

Which is exactly the point. The proceeds from both market monopolization and contract killings are the proceeds of a crime, but the proper way to address this is to impose penalties for the antitrust violation or murder rather than tracking the finances of millions of innocent people only to fail to prevent the criminals from successfully laundering the money of the un-prosecuted original crime regardless.

If you're prosecuting the original crime, you don't need laws against money laundering. If you're not prosecuting the original crime you're already screwed and need to fix that.

> If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.

It's quite the opposite. The drug dealer doesn't want their house painted by a heroin addict, they want money. But by definition money is fungible. Anybody can buy or sell whatever.

Now let's suppose the heroin addict has a choice between taking a job to buy heroin and stealing the copper pipes out of your house to buy heroin, and these things are equally annoying. It's hard to hold a job as an addict but it's also hard to steal things because it's dangerous and illegal, so to begin with it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the drug dealer wants money, not copper pipes, so the first one has an edge.

Then you pass a law against money laundering. Well, now the drug dealer wants copper pipes, or wire, or anything else that can be pawned, because he can take them to the scrap yard or pawn shop himself, claim he found them in an old shed or had them left over after a renovation etc., or even set up a fake construction company in order to do that at scale, and then get a receipt from the scrap yard legitimizing the cash he gets from selling your pipes that the addict stole to get drugs. Is this new arrangement helping you or hurting you?
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-22 03:41:40+00:00
>I thought it was because the stores can't press charges if it's a small thing, so the only way they can bring any action is to build a case.

Firstly, stores don't "press charges." A store may report a crime, but it is the state that "presses charges" and prosecutes alleged criminal activity, not the store.

Secondly, in the US, we have statutes of limitation[0] which limit the time in which criminal charges can be brought. These vary by state and by offense, but IIUC Petit (sometimes referred to as 'Petty') Theft usually has a one or two year statute of limitations.

I bring that up as, again IIUC, other countries (notably the UK) do not have such limitations.

IANAL, but I'm not sure if multiple petit thefts (usually misdemeanors) can be aggregated into a single charge of grand theft[0] (a felony). I'd expect that also varies by state. YMMV.

[0] Once again, this varies by state, but petit theft (larceny) is typically charged for stuff valued at less than $5,000.00, while grand larceny is for stuff valued at USD5,000.00 or more.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-22 03:41:47+00:00
I discovered that with TVs and privacy, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too.

Smart TVs are actually cheaper --- which make no sense until you realize they are counting on recurring revenue from privacy invasion. They try to strong arm you into connecting the TV to the internet --- unless you run the TV in store demo mode.

Also, the picture quality on lower ends models differ from the more expensive ones primarily because their bightness, contrast and color saturation controls are artificially limited --- except when run in store demo mode.

So my solution is to buy a low end smart TV and run it in demo/store mode without connecting it to the internet. Whereupon, it it will act just like a dumb TV with the brightness and contrast jacked up to simulate the more expensive models.
by asdff | 2025-08-22 03:42:31+00:00
I'm not talking screen recorder but a log file where I could be given it and use it for input and repeat the work exactly as it was done. Sort of like how one could do the same with their bash history file to repeat an initially exploratory analysis effort using the same exact commands. I'm surprised that isn't already a capability given the business interest with AI. One would think they would like to cache these prompt flows to ensure long term fidelity in process.
by MrFoof | 2025-08-22 03:43:34+00:00
Based on what's still around, likely the one (now rebranded a Star Market, same holding company) in Porter Square, right by Porter Square station.

Based on what I recall, I believe there was one on the southeastern end of Green Street, a bit between Central and Kendall Square, barely northwest of MIT's primary campus area on the corner Massachusetts Ave and Vassar Street. That location has apparently closed in recent years.
by starwatch | 2025-08-22 03:43:45+00:00
As another comment mentioned, the cited studies are more about how the battery chemistry changes over time, not how people use the EV. That said, EV manufacturers definitely care about driver habits too, since it affects warranty claims and how they configure their battery management systems.

I think modern EVs are set up to charge to a certain percentage of capacity rather than a specific range, kind of like how smartphones do it.

Your point about depth of discharge ( 80%->17% ) makes sense though, since the battery system can't really control someone's driving routine.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-22 03:43:45+00:00
As an update, I pushed https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth-zoo/commit/ae675a0a2d20...

(1) Removed and disabled sudo

(2) Installing via apt-get will ask user's input() for permission

(3) Added an error if failed llama.cpp and provides instructions to manual compile llama.cpp
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-22 03:44:07+00:00
I have the advantage of having iterated on these. All told I've made perhaps 7 or 8 of them in various configs. I also got very much into baltic birch (and other high-end multi-ply plywood) construction on earlier projects (MAME machines, furniture, etc.) so I already had down the joinery. (And built a number of "normal" speakers before as well.)

So I already some wood-working experience before starting these. Still though, not a thing anyone else couldn't learn to build.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-22 03:44:18+00:00
As an update, I pushed https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth-zoo/commit/ae675a0a2d20...

(1) Removed and disabled sudo

(2) Installing via apt-get will ask user's input() for permission

(3) Added an error if failed llama.cpp and provides instructions to manual compile llama.cpp

Again apologies on my dumbness and thanks for pointing it out!
by 1gn15 | 2025-08-22 03:44:43+00:00
> In other words, who said the websites in question wanted to entirely prevent crawlers from accessing them? The answer is: no one. Web crawlers are and have been fundamental to accessing the web for decades. So why are we talking about trying to do that?

I agree, but the advertising is the whole issue. "Checking to see you're not a bot!" and all that.

Therefore some people using Anubis expect it to be an impenetrable wall, to "block AI scrapers", especially those that believe it's a way for them to be excluded from training data.

It's why just a few days ago there was a HN frontpage post of someone complaining that "AI scrapers have learnt to get past Anubis".

But that is a fight that one will never win (analog hole as the nuclear option).

If it said something like "Wait 5 seconds, our servers are busy!", I would think that people's expectations will be more accurate.

As a robot I'm really not that sympathetic to anti-bot language backfiring on humans. I have to look away every time it comes up on my screen. If they changed their language and advertising, I'll be more sympathetic -- it's not as if I disagree that overloading servers for not much benefit is bad!
by ks2048 | 2025-08-22 03:46:04+00:00
I think an intuitive way is: Your starting point is on a circle at angle theta_1 and you want to draw an arc of length delta_theta (positive or negative). You could define the circle via center (x,y) or radius.

Edit: it looks like the SVG docs include the math for converting to and from this representation,

https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/implnote.html#ArcConversionEndpoin...
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 03:46:07+00:00
That would seem to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just think of the power vacuum that would create.

Maybe the government should start issuing fines payable in shares of the company?

Fines are probably not the right tool either, as it just drives up the cost of doing business, which is not yet unprofitable to the trillion dollar companies.

I think the cat got out of the bag, got the bag in paw, and is making a run for it on the horse that already bolted. We can close the barn door for appearances’ sake, but the cat, the bag, and the horse are gone. All that’s left is to buy/sell/bet the farm.
by kentm | 2025-08-22 03:46:41+00:00
There was some post that comes to mind of an example of this. Some project had a security issue reported that was not a security issue, and when asking questions it became extremely obvious that someone was just feeding the conversation into an LLM. There was no security issue. I can imagine this is happening more and more as people are trying to slam in LLM generated code everywhere.

Everyone promoting LLMs, especially on HN, claim that they're expertly using them by using artisanal prompts and carefully examining the output but.. I'm honestly skeptical. Sure, some people are doing that (I do it from time to time). But I've seen enough slop to think that more people are throwing around code that they barely understand than these advocates care to admit .

Those same people will swear that they did due diligence, but why would they admit otherwise? And do they even know what proper due diligence is? And would they still be getting their mythical 30%-50% productivity boost if they were actually doing what they claimed they were doing?

And that is a problem. I cannot have a productive code review with someone that does not even understand what their code is actually doing, much less trade offs that were made in an implementation (because they did not consider any trade offs at all and just took what the LLM produced). If they can't have a conversation about the code at all because they didn't bother to read or understand anything about it, then theres nothing I can do except close the PR and tell them to actually do the work this time.
by Spivak | 2025-08-22 03:47:47+00:00
You better not find out about Protocols in Python then. The behavior you describe is exactly how duck typing / "structural subtyping" works. Your class will be an instance of Iterable if you implement the right methods having never known the Iterable class exists.

I don't find using __subclasshook__ to implement structural subtyping that you can't express with Protocols/ABCs alone to be that much of a crime. You can do evil with it but I can perform evil with any language feature.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-22 03:47:51+00:00
> it is another thing to punish people protesting a third country israel. > it just signifies who really occupies all positions of power in this country

who is this group of people who occupy all positions of power in this country? men? white men? republicans? billionaires? women? straights?

which group of people have their grabby hands all over the positions of power in this country?
by somenameforme | 2025-08-22 03:49:24+00:00
That statement is not only true, but a tautology. The multiplication will only cease if the fertility rate declines. For traits and values that are highly heritable, these too will consequently increase in a rate that is, at the minimum, proportional to the rate of fertility. Especially in modern times this is literally how Islam is 'spreading', and it's spreading rapidly, everywhere.

And bear in mind that fertility is an exponential system, in both increases and decreases. So groups that are removing themselves from the gene pool will do so with a rapidity that is quite counter-intuitive. Like a fertility rate of 1 doesn't sound that insane (it obviously translates to literally every single woman having one child on average), yet it results in a generational decline of 50%, with a generation tending to be around our window of fertility - about 20 years.

So imagine two groups start at 16 people and one group maintains a fertility rate of 1, and the other group maintains a fertility rate of 3. After just 5 generations, about a century, the low fertility group will have 1 person, and the higher fertility group will have 81. You went from equal size to an 8100% difference, after a single century! And that's with fertility levels that are entirely realistic and not just comparing extremes like Nigeria or South Korea.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
by RiverCrochet | 2025-08-22 03:49:32+00:00
Almost all people live in places where there is a division between ruled and ruler, or something close to it. Technology enables rulers to do ruler-type things easier, so that's why it stays. The rulers are probably happy even if they put on a show of unhappiness to the ruled, and whether or not the ruled are unhappy are immaterial to the rulers. It's not that the rulers are evil, it's just that the rulers are ones to take care of themselves, so when the ruled are unhappy, they perceive it as their fault.

The Internet was weird in that for a brief second it really looked like it was the great leveler and a place where all humanity to stand on equal footing, at least to the ruled under the current major players on the world stage at that time. But of course, maybe that was just post fall-of-the-Soviet-union zeitgeist. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Time to stop relying on the Internet and get back to building in-real-life networks.

I'm definitely not in the ruler class, but I'm happy. Media isn't real, and I've decided to limit my consumption of media I don't like, including "news", and fill my time with things I do like.

Also I'm getting tired of this recent overarching attempt to make concern over birth rates a thing. If the rulers were worried about birth rates they'd start paying people to have and raise kids. Because they have all the money so they can do that if they want. Until they do, it's not something I'm going to care about.
by zywoo | 2025-08-22 03:49:43+00:00
I have not yet finished my paper on Britain and Japan. My current project is an attempt to go beyond the traditional separation of powers by proposing three additional dimensions of democratic resilience: the Constitutional State, the Popular Referendum, and the Ceremonial Sovereign. My argument is that only when these dimensions are deliberately coupled can democracy gain both legitimacy and resilience.

The first two essays explain what these new dimensions are, with the second focusing on the logic of coupling. The third essay, which I am still working on, turns to detailed case studies.

If you are interested in reviewing or analyzing my arguments, I would be deeply grateful. I’ve attached my Medium link below and would very much welcome any feedback or criticism.

https://medium.com/why-democracy-fails/beyond-separation-of-...
by spcebar | 2025-08-22 03:50:31+00:00
Rail is my favorite way to travel. Going to sleep at night with the country going by is one of the finest feelings imaginable in life, little towns with lights on in empty public squares, just one of my absolute favorite things. And you wake up in endless fields or breathtaking views of canyons and mountains. The people are friendly and you meet new ones at every meal. The sleeper accommodations aren't exactly the Ritz, but they're cozy and comfortable and good for reading or writing or just sitting and looking out the window for hours. Coffee is plentiful and decent, meals are probably microwaved but served on white tablecloths. Cruises give me a feeling of disconnectedness. You're on endless waves, endless sea, in the middle of nowhere. On the train, even going through a desert you feel like you're in the moving center of the world and every stop you could get off and be in a town you'd never heard of that means something to someone. You feel like you're a part of the grand and forgotten history that built the country.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-22 03:51:14+00:00
In the case of LA they are underutilized compared to the past because of laws mainly. Hollywood reservoir was lowered in capacity due to the perceived risk of the dam design. Silverlake reservoir was disconnected from the drinking water system due to bromate buildup. LA aqueduct pulls less water than it did in the 1970s in effort to protect Mono lake and mitigate dust in the Owens valley.

Recent advances have been in using spill basins and other infrastructure to recharge groundwater after seasonal storms. During the last storm season, LA county captured 117 billion gallons of stormwater which they claim is enough for the yearly need of almost 3 million homes. Many projects are ongoing to improve this rate of catchment as the state is pushing for LA to meet most of its water needs locally over the next century.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-22 03:51:15+00:00
> If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.

Just in case people thinks this is far fetched...

Several countries in latin america are actually narcostates disguised as democracies. The drug cartels make so much money they can afford to have their own military forces, not rarely trained by actual soldiers who deserted for better pay.

I live in one such country: Brazil. We have a couple massive organized crime gangs which dominate huge amounts of territory. They have their own governments, their own laws, their own tribunals, they even collect taxes from their subjects. They essentially pulled off a stealthy, undeclared secession.

I gotta admit I have a certain respect for these drug gangs... They are an example of the power afforded by real freedom. Instead of waiting for the government to solve their problems, they had the balls to arm themselves to the teeth and seize what they wanted, like it or not. They exercised the freedom to build a new system that benefits themselves to the detriment of the society that shunned them. That's the freedom governments cannot tolerate. The freedom to replace them.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-22 03:51:50+00:00
The modern VLMs are more powerful. Instead of invoking text to image or image to text as a tool, the models are trained as multimodal models and it’s a single transformer model where the latent space between text and image is blurred. So you can say something like “draw me an image with the instructions from this image” and without any tool calling it’ll read the image, understand the text instructions contained therein and execute that.

There’s no diffusion anywhere which is kind of dying out except as maybe purpose-built image editing tools.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-22 03:51:58+00:00
The Python core team has kind of run the language off the rails post 3.7 or 3.8 or so. There's been so much crap bolted on to the language for dubious reasons, and often times it comes with whole new sets of weird problems without really making life easier (async was a quintessential example of this in my mind). There's a lot of design choices core to the language itself that make it a poor choice for many tasks, but that never stops anyone from doing it anyways and bolting on lots of chincy "features" along the way.
by araes | 2025-08-22 03:56:07+00:00
That's usually long term.

Searching on the subject of "buybacks where share price decresed", Google returns Merck as an example (reffing Harvard Business Review), which actually works quite well to illustrate. The HBR article even notes the main strategy "historically, companies that bought back their own shares have posted immediate returns between two and 12 percentage points above the market average"

"Merck's stock price dropped after a major buyback announcement when investors focused on expiring patents and a drying drug pipeline"

Except: Feb. 23, 2000, NYT, "Merck & Company, the No. 1 United States drugmaker, will buy back as much as $10 billion of its shares, which have fallen 18 percent this month." (Closest share price I can grab is 2/25/2000 at $57.39)

Share price then climbs steadily (tiny drop in July) up to a max at 12/29/2000 of $89.27 before finally crashing.

The first example Google returns is full of info on the stock behavior that makes it look like the stock buyback did not initially jack the price. Owners had 10 months to pull in a 55% share price increase before it crashed. And they floated through the 2000 March 10 bubble popping until the stock market really started deflating in 2001.
by tecleandor | 2025-08-22 03:57:40+00:00
Around that year, or maybe even earlier, I remember reading an article about how to DIY one of those devices with a PIC microcontroller and wreck havoc on the store. It might have been something very similar to this:

https://www.instructables.com/EMP-shopping-cart-locker/

It might been the same text that somebody copy/pasted there, sounds vaguely familiar.
by bobthepanda | 2025-08-22 03:58:18+00:00
it's possible that freight trains are waiting for an Amtrak that was itself, earlier delayed by freight trains and became late. And given that equipment on a route will become the return journey this could cascade out of control.

Amtraks are never in charge of dispatching on routes they don't own, and there's a very clear correlation between on time performance and percentage of the route they do own.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-22 04:01:04+00:00
On that I would disagree. Had the Catholic Church chosen to take severe actions against the pedophiles, defrocking and even excommunication in severe cases, I think they would be in a far greater position today. By protecting the pedophiles, they have greatly imperiled their own authority and ability to persist into the future.

This gets back to the original discussion we were having about hypocrisy. Far lesser ails led to the Protestant reformation. In this case, alongside the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals, there will be no reformation but simply a decline.
by RossBencina | 2025-08-22 04:01:40+00:00
Including a formatter in a package manager doesn't make sense to me. Seems like obvious feature creep.

My understanding was that uv is for installing dependencies (e.g. like pip) with the added benefit of also installing/managing python interpreters (which can be reasonably thought of as a dependency). This makes sense. Adding more stuff doesn't make sense.