MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kortilla | 2025-09-27 16:15:31+00:00
If you think either of those represent any meaningful portion of science you need to re-evaluate your understanding of science because it’s based on a layman’s perspective.

If you’re not actually involved in science you only see the scientists making news, which disproportionately selects for politically intersecting areas of research.

When I was working at a major US research university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal if the scientific publications got any mainstream press at all.

Countless papers push the boundaries of science in major journals and conferences every year and you never hear about them because they have no political implications and usually no immediate practical applications.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-09-27 16:15:50+00:00
Thanks.

Culture is fluid. Music is about exploring the boundaries of what sounds good, often because of feelings. Related to the society in which the music is "consumed".

AI music is a commodity and generally uninteresting, like artists who only imitate styles.

But just like annoying over-commercialized music that only tries to scratch existing itches and match expectations, it can still work to a degree.

Intent is not a lofty concept, it's at the heart of what art is.
by ajkjk | 2025-09-27 16:16:26+00:00
I don't think so. Something very particular happened that year, financially. That was the year the covid stimulus haze wore off and everyone started talking about inflation and grocery prices and layoffs, was it not?

I guess my full theory would be "that, plus political disenchantment". Which you could say happens every year, but no, it was especially bad that year: Trumpism coming back for real; plus Israel-Palestine and the backlash in the US when everyone realized the Democratic party was going to be completely sold out regarding it; plus everything with Biden being senile and everyone knowing it. It's the year everything started to feel truly hopeless.
by jghn | 2025-09-27 16:17:05+00:00
What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group.

I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-09-27 16:17:07+00:00
> Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?

I can say that, having promised to deliver medication to someone, a capricious cut in medication supply will be causative in whatever change may result. And that is exactly the setting in which this poll was conducted.
by zeta0134 | 2025-09-27 16:18:14+00:00
The model's weights are fixed. Most clients let you specify the "temperature", which influences how the predictive output will navigate that possibility space. There's a surprising amount of accumulated entropy in the context window, but yes, I think eventually it runs out of knowledge that it hasn't yet used to form some response.

I think the model being fixed is a fascinating limitation. What research is being done that could allow a model to train itself continually? That seems like it could allow a model to update itself with new knowledge over time, but I'm not sure how you'd do it efficiently
by parsimo2010 | 2025-09-27 16:18:48+00:00
Loops can happen but you can turn the temperature setting up.

High temperature settings basically make an LLM choose tokens that aren’t the highest probability all the time, so it has a chance of breaking out of a loop and is less likely to fall into a loop in the first place. The downside is that most models will be less coherent but that’s probably not an issue for an art project.
by avs733 | 2025-09-27 16:19:03+00:00
This is unfair. It presumes a universal understanding of something largely because it is obvious to us. Most computer users have little to know detailed understanding of how any computer technology works, and because they are invisible and abstract, even less understanding of the risks they expose themselves to.

The answer to you gun analogy is false because it assumes basic knowledge of a gun. This is part of why so many kids shoot themselves or family members with guns - because they don’t know if you pull the trigger something violent will happen until they are taught it.
by maisonry | 2025-09-27 16:19:13+00:00
The world’s infrastructure seems to be consolidating into three “operating systems”: 1) Surveillance Intelligence (Palantir, Anduril, national security AI contracts) 2) Health OS (payments + logistics becoming the new healthcare backbone) 3) Financial Plumbing (CBDCs, programmable money, tokenized assets)

I put together a breakdown of recent BIS papers, CEPI reports, and Palantir filings that suggest these three systems will define the next decade.

Curious what others here think, is this a natural progression of tech/governance, or does it represent a dangerous level of consolidation?
by tdb7893 | 2025-09-27 16:19:44+00:00
So firstly most scientists already aren't really activists in any meaningful way, it seems like you're implying most are on twitter/bluesky doing activism and the vast majority aren't really. Secondly I'm confused who people think should be able to be activists in a democracy? Scientists seem like a good candidate for people that should do activism in a healthy democracy.
by isamuel | 2025-09-27 16:19:58+00:00
It’s not the cues that get you. That is an idea promoted largely by treatment centers and the rehab industry, who need to be able to plausibly claim they are teaching their customers how to avoid relapse. I’m a recovered alcoholic and I can assure you, my “cue” for drinking was being alive and awake at the same time.

Your reaction is a sane and normal one: you remember a good time, and you have some inkling to recreate it. Certainly. And to most people that makes sense. But alcoholics are different from most people, and their understanding that is an essential first step to recovery.
by watwut | 2025-09-27 16:19:59+00:00
His arguments is that people who voted for Trump made decision to destroy "social fabric". Which is true, it was vote with the hope harm will be done to liberals, trans, low level goverment workers they hate.

It is not argument about loss of personal friendship, but about values those Americans have. And those values do not have space for social fabric other then domination over "other".
by dave_wright | 2025-09-27 16:20:29+00:00
I've noticed that my male colleagues are, generally speaking, outpaced by my female colleagues. The latter tend to have more drive to succeed, higher social intelligence, and are more competent.

I'm not sure why this is, but I expect it's because women and girls are now being given equality of opportunity to a greater extent than ever before, and it turns out they're just better at most things in our modern society.

So I'm not convinced that "male inequality" is the best term to describe this state of affairs. When women having more equal opportunities leads to worse outcomes for some men, is that really inequality for the men? Or are we just seeing natural differences play out.

Maybe the future for most men is work where brute force and strength is required, as that's the only edge they really have on women, comparing group to group.
by drweevil | 2025-09-27 16:20:35+00:00
>The RPi integrated into a keyboard looks very cute.

Indeed. And you can still access the GPIO pins for hardware projects.

The RPi OS is Linux, derived from Debian, so apps or your favorite programming language are just a 'sudo apt install' away. Performance is good for both RPi 4 and 5. If "effortless and lag free" are important then choose the RPi 5. As for form factor, Rasperry Pi has just announced the Rasperry Pi 500+. For laptops, see https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-best-raspberry...
by majormajor | 2025-09-27 16:21:00+00:00
Speaker box design advanced dramatically since the 90s too. The start of it was then - Bose made a lot of noise with compact-for-the-time stuff - but it's really advanced since then. Compare the sound quality of a laptop then with a larger MacBook now. And when you can get decent sound at decent volume out of a small package a lot of people don't want to give up a ton of space for extremely-good sound at high volume.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-09-27 16:21:05+00:00
whose fault is that though? It's not the Israeli's fault the surrounding countries are blocking refugees and it's certainly not their fault that the terrorist's strategy depends on a large civilian population acting as a shield. It's a rock and a hard place situation because the whole area pretty clearly needs to be pacified from anyone sane living in Israel's perspective, as the raping, pillaging and murder orchestrated against israel that started this latest campaign can not be allowed to happen again and from the Hamas position their whole goal is to exist and cause atrocities against the Israelis until they leave. This all seems like a very measured response given the reality of the situation.
by rdiddly | 2025-09-27 16:21:50+00:00
Bluesky is a public benefit corp which at least nominally means they don't have to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else.

Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.

I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.
by shrinks99 | 2025-09-27 16:23:37+00:00
Sharply declining usage? I don't see the stats to back that up on https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-27 16:23:48+00:00
Those may not be the solutions, but the problem certainly exists. I'm in academia and even I'll admit it has a lot of nepotism. People who are famous or infamous are identified despite peer-review (stylometry and subject) and the reviewers are biased for or against them. Also see comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396377#45396617: "It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately". If attaching your name to a paper becomes taboo, perhaps promotion will be less important, and if results can be judged algorithmically, definitely so.
by strgcmc | 2025-09-27 16:24:02+00:00
True of course that dollars is the end goal, but frankly it'd be better if they just took the dollars out of my pocket directly, instead of poisoning my brain first so that they can trick me into giving some dollars...

Obviously I'm being hyperbolic, but I think eventually if society survives past this phase, our descendants will look back and judge us for letting psychological manipulation be a valid economic process as a way to generate dollars, in much the same way we might judge our ancestors for ever building up a whole industry to hunt whales for oil for fuel (meaning, they might acknowledge that fuel is important and necessary to power an industrializing society, but they would mock us for not understanding how to refine petroleum sooner, and how silly going through the tech tree of fucking whale hunting is, just to get some fuel).

It is fucking silly/absurd/dangerous, that we go through the tech tree branch of psychological manipulation, just to be able to sell some ads or whatever.
by ebiester | 2025-09-27 16:24:07+00:00
1. It's a very small community and peer review is even hard. Think about it this way: what do you think two physicist colleagues talk about at a conference? How do you know who to talk to to collaborate on a problem? (Yes, people still talk voice about problems.)

2. Labs are specialized. You choose a lab to work at based on what they're working on. How are you going to choose where to spend your Ph.D or postdoc if you don't know what the lab is working on and how productive it is?

3. We are all still humans. We are wired to know the social systems around us. This would be an entire charade.
by majormajor | 2025-09-27 16:24:19+00:00
If you never put your personal side-project on the public web you had very few security issues resulting from your personal projects. We weren't talking about companies in this thread.

Are the frontend folks having such great results from LLMs that they're OK with "just let the LLM check for security too" for non-frontend-engineer created projects that get hosted publicly?
by firefax | 2025-09-27 16:24:38+00:00
Most of my hard science contacts (physics, biology etc) from my days in student government have moved to Bluesky. Newer academics seem to be starting out there and skipping Twitter entirely.

If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-27 16:24:43+00:00
Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now. When we were kids it was Austin, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia for the insane IDGAF kids. For awhile it was Paris and maybe parts of Spain. Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."

I think self-publishing is the problem. Making music on laptops is neat and everything but where the model in the 1990's was giving the bedroom rock hopeful group eg. Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Creation Records a million dollar record deal which gave a livelihood to the kids making the music the new model is, "have young artists self-finance their own careers and reward them with exposure when they produce something worthwhile with the hope that maybe their music gets licensed for a film." Touring isn't lucrative for many groups. Many tours are self-financed. Not often mentioned is that musician's a group notoriously deprived of healthcare due to healthcare being tied to traditional employment.

How could we combine the best parts of Johnny Marr's idea of, "being a working musician" while still affording young talented musicians the livelihoods and opportunities presented by the music industry of, "yesteryear?" My feeling always was in expanding the musician's reach into the world of pedagogy and, "play as a means of meaningful research." Delia Derbyshire comes to mind. Brian Eno half comes to mind. There's a better thing but it requires institutions and social democracy-- it requires a society with the social sensitivity to not envy or disdain, "people who make weird noises for a living and get to travel the world." The United States is not that right now unfortunately. The western world is in crisis and needs music but it lacks the scaffolding to create, "great musicians and bands."

As much as the world needs another John Lennon right now much more we need Brian Epsteins that can create John Lennons, Mick Jaggers, and Peter Noones with pen strokes. Where are the Don Kirshners of the world creating product groups like The Monkees and The Archies? I can tolerate greed if we can get another Smiths, Beatles, or another Paul Weller. I can tolerate another Andy Warhol is he'll produce another Lou Reed.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-27 16:24:49+00:00
I think the word you're looking for is more like avant-garde movement, cubism, surrealism, communist constructivism, post-modern deconstructivism, postmodernism, or something towards that rough general direction towards the MoMA and the Guggenheim museum, rather than skeuomorphism/anti-skeuomorphism dichotomy.
by anonym29 | 2025-09-27 16:25:13+00:00
You choosing not to care about Microsoft's extensive and well-documented history of adversarially abusing, misleading, lying to, spying on, harassing, and stripping control away from their own end users doesn't mean Microsoft isn't malicious.

Microsoft sees and treats their end users simultaneously as adversaries, as incompetent children, and as data cows to be milked without genuine informed consent for Microsoft's own profit, not as customers deserving of respect, dignity, and autonomy.
by locao | 2025-09-27 16:25:45+00:00
My first thought was "why would anyone want to ditch LaTeX?". But it's been almost 20 years I left academy, so I knew I would be missing something.

Reading the comments reminded me of the pain.

I didn't see anyone mentioning, maybe it was me "holding it wrong", but boy what have I done to get proper references. After a year or so writing articles I had an unfailing process to get them right, but whenever I tried to explain it to my colleagues I heard "yeah, ok, I'm staying in MS Word".

I also did a pixel-perfect template for my university. As a programmer, I never felt so ashamed of sharing something. I felt like it would be selfish to keep it to myself, so I did it, but it almost physically hurt me. After 10 years people stopped emailing me asking for help. Maybe they fixed the template or just ditched LaTeX at all.

As I'm planning to get back to academy next year, it was good to learn about Typist.
by CyberMacGyver | 2025-09-27 16:25:49+00:00
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.

Do you have any data to back this up?

Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing

Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
by oktoberpaard | 2025-09-27 16:25:52+00:00
I got RSI using a touchpad, which then transferred to using a normal mouse. I couldn’t do anything with a mouse for longer than a few minutes. I completely fixed it with a DXT Mouse 2 (and later 3).

My normal (mechanical) keyboard doesn’t give me any issues, as long as it’s narrow enough (75% layout or less) that I can keep my mouse close enough to the center of my body that I don’t have to rotate my shoulder outwards too much.

My natural resting position on my keyboard is with both arms coming in diagonally without bending at the wrists. I do a lot of work on the terminal, including programming, so I’m using it quite intensively and I never feel any strain.

I tried to get used to a split orthogonal keyboard, but I couldn’t use it for extended periods without getting RSI like symptoms. Would I have persisted, I might have gotten used to it. Or maybe it just wasn’t the right one for me.

Anyway, this is not to counter any of the things you said, because I basically followed the same path with my mouse, but it shows how different postures and usage patterns can lead to different outcomes. I’m still interested in ergonomic keyboards, though, and I might try one again in the future.
by thewebguyd | 2025-09-27 16:25:52+00:00
It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times.

It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu.

And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy.

Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.
by xvilka | 2025-09-27 16:25:58+00:00
There is still continued work on LaTeX3[1][2], but it took so long without any release[3], by this time not sure if it will get adopted.

[1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/

[2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3

[3] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/572113/whats-the-cur...
by vel0city | 2025-09-27 16:26:12+00:00
> I would for example claim that very specifically for the shell interface, the GNU/Linux crowd cares a lot more about user-interface backwards compatibility than what Microsoft does.

Maybe if you ignore things like systemd radically changing how services and init systems work. Massive changes with Network Manager and firewalld compared to iptables. Gnome today looks pretty much nothing like it did when I first started using Linux. Now we install software through snaps and what not, or move from yum to dnf or other package managers.

Using Linux today feels very different than it did 20 years ago. I bet most scrips I wrote for Ubuntu over 20 years ago would fail to execute today on a fresh modern install.
by GenerocUsername | 2025-09-27 16:26:31+00:00
You record yourself whistling it and out it in as an input.

I've been recording myself on guitar and using suno to turn it into professional quality recordings with full backing band.

And I'm not trying to sell it, I just like hearing the ideas in my head turned into fully fleshed music of higher quality than I could produce with 100x more time to invest into it
Ask HN: Library that maps clock times to human terms ("early morning", etc.)?
by MollyRealized | 2025-09-27 16:26:36+00:00
I am wondering if people have already done the work on what I'm about to describe. I'm going to try to define what's in my mind by explaining the working circumstance. The humidity part of the below, however, is solved - I'm just trying to explain the kind of substitution I'd like.

For me, temperature doesn't mean as much as stickiness. So I worked out a script that takes the dew point and maps it against a humidity comfort index. I have both the next 24 hours, and the next six days.

Right now, my script reads out the next 24 hours like this:

"From 5-10 AM, it will be pleasant (0). At 11:57 AM, it will be sticky (1). At 12:57 PM, it will be pleasant (0). From 1-10 PM, it will be refreshing (-1). At 11:57 PM, it will be pleasant (0). From 12-4 AM, it will be sticky (1)."

What I'm wondering - before I try to reinvent the wheel - is if there is basically a generalized library or reference that lets you define things using more ambiguous, human terms. I imagine it would have to define not only morning, afternoon, and evening, but also have "early", "mid", and "late" adjectives, as well as overnight.

For example, if this library existed, I could implement it into the script and then it might say:

"This morning, it will be pleasant (0). At noon, it will be sticky (1). The afternoon and night, it will be refreshing (-1). Overnight, it will be sticky (1)."
by glitchc | 2025-09-27 16:26:43+00:00
I concur with the outcome but not with the cause.

A big part of the problem is management at American firms. They are rarely, if ever, run by engineers at the helm. If you put arts and business majors in charge, it's no surprise that outputs look like art and business projects. These leaders pick people just like them at all tiers. Those who do boring and honest engineering work are shunned, excluded from promotions and left out of the leadership circle. It's little wonder that all of the real engineers depart for greener pastures.

Fix leadership and you will fix American industry.