MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by entropyneur | 2025-09-11 07:45:38+00:00
> Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie?

He made it because he predicted that it will have some effects enjoyable to him. Without knowing David Lynch personally I can assume that he made it because he predicted other people will like it. Although of course, it might have been some other goal. But unless he was completely unlike anyone I've ever met, it's safe to assume that before he started he had a picture of a world with Mullholland Drive existing in it that is somehow better than the current world without. He might or might not have been aware of it though.

Anyway, that's too much analysis of Mr. Lynch. The implicit question is how soon an AI will be able to make a movie that you, AIPedant, will enjoy as much as you've enjoyed Mulholland Drive. And I stand that how similar AI is to human intelligence or how much "true understanding" it has is completely irrelevant to answering that question.
by otterz | 2025-09-11 07:45:47+00:00
I love custom handheld computer projects like this.

Few years ago I wanted to build one as a hobby/toy project with parts that are more or less easily available. So I did [0]. Instead of using a pre-made keyboard I used simple push buttons and instead of specialized keyboard controller I used an Atmega328P. Most of the components are through-hole and easy to solder. Anyway, the couple of the handhelds I built are sitting in a drawer at home, but it was fun building it nevertheless.

[0] https://github.com/jovan3/rpi-ibex-hyperpixel
by Erem | 2025-09-11 07:45:55+00:00
> they don’t respect you or your laws.

You have to ignore just about every other part of the story to arrive at this breathless conclusion.

Let’s remember that for this project alone Hyundai invested more money than 99% of us will ever see into this country, and more sum labor hours than any of our individual lives. That’s not what disrespect looks like.

Maybe their visas were not in order so ok enforce that. But not by having their engineers perp walked on live television.

As a side note, if we are going to judge the Hyundai engineers then we must also believe that Elon Musk should have been deported due to his well known early career visa violations. or be damned as hypocrites.
by stefs | 2025-09-11 07:46:55+00:00
as far as i know, e-bikes (does that count as a motorized vehicle?) are more dangerous per kilometer traveled (especially if the infrastructure is lacking and not to a small part due to predation from cars, but most of the bike accidents happen without a second party).

compared to driving, riding a bicycle is very healthy so the net effect for bicycling is still positive.
by racktash | 2025-09-11 07:47:20+00:00
I used to think this, and I was so wrong. Or course some attend the rallies for foolish reasons, but I found that a lot of what I believed about the Israel-Palestine situation was effectively Israeli propaganda (and grossly untrue).

The mistreatment of the Palestinians is long running, deliberate, calculated. The recent blood bath in Gaza is another entry in a long running tragedy.

Between River and Sea by Dervla Murphy is a wonderful, humane examination of the country. It's over a decade old but still very informative without being academic or dry. I would recommend it highly.
by yibg | 2025-09-11 07:47:24+00:00
Problem is the current visas are fairly vague and ambiguous. B1/B2 visa allows for business travel for things like negotiations, conferences and such. You can't "work", but the definition and the practical enforcement of work is nebulous.

For instance, here is a category listed by the government explicitly for "Engineer(s) install, service or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery sold by a non-U.S. company to a U.S. buyer".

Now if someone travels to the US to meet with a team here but also checks email / slack, or write some code together, is that work and in violation of the scope of the visa? If so, what's the alternative? Can't get any actual work visa since those require employment and being paid in the US.
by mikewarot | 2025-09-11 07:47:25+00:00
I was fairly skeptical all the way until a month ago, when I got access to Github Copilot's preview of ChatGPT5 agent, it writes code, tries it out, and fixes any problems. Up until last month, it was letting the LLM write code, then have errors, and spend forever trying to figure out the code, or figuring out how to get the LLM to fix it (usually making it worse each time!).
by FinnLobsien | 2025-09-11 07:47:28+00:00
Agreed. Though for a layoff/redundancy, it's slightly different. What I'd add to the situation described here would be:

a) Practice talking about that situation until it no longer triggers anger/resentment. No employer wants to hear an impassioned rant about how horrible your last job was.

b) Be as specific as possible when talking about the challenges of the last job and what you attempted to do about it. If you just say "toxic environment", "bad culture" or "menial work" or whatever, that could make it look like you're super negative.

When I was interviewing while in a pretty bad job, a way I framed it was:

"I wanted to do [explain project and rationale] and took initiative in that direction, but [person with authority] obstructed me by [what they did] and that made me like I was in a culture that [negative characteristic of culture], while I value [positive characteristic of culture], so I don't believe I'm in the right place anymore. This was an example to illustrate this, but I could dig deeper and share more if you want me to."

-> This keeps it free of judgment/resentment while also being assertive about what you want. It also frames you in a position of agency, not victimhood (you're not escaping something horrible, but proactively finding a better fit). It also shows your values in a specific (believable) way, not the typical job interview talk.
by camillomiller | 2025-09-11 07:48:28+00:00
I believe that social media tapped inadvertently into the most effective way ever existed to do this. None of the billionaires really wanted them, I think it was just a happy accident. But instead of recognizing that, they all doubled down with gaslighting and toxicity, because admitting they created a monster would just go against them becoming powerful and rich. And also, let's admit it, because they genuinely can't see it as the monster it is, because it doesn't affect them directly.
by mikewarot | 2025-09-11 07:49:40+00:00
Why would you want to snap windows to edges? It took me forever to figure out how to turn that crap off with later versions of windows. Sometimes you just want to look at part of a window, so having the rest of it hang off the screen where it's not wasting space, is a good thing.

As for starting commands, usually just ctrl-escape, or the windows key, and I had a command line right there in the main menu. Search on a desktop still seems silly.
by vidarh | 2025-09-11 07:50:07+00:00
One of my fun experiments recently has been putting ChatGPT in conversation mode when I go for a walk. I recently had a 45 minute conversation where "we" fleshed out a multi-agent platform. I think a key is that you need to give each agent an "inner conversation" and criteria for when output from it gets copied to the other agents and the main chat, coupled with a process to regularly compact. I intend to set up a test system I want to run continuously, and given I enjoy working on compilers maybe I'll see how much cheaper you can do something like what OP did if you orchestrator a few agents with domain knowledge in specific areas.

I think I'd want to test a state of the art model, but it'd be fascinating to see how far you can get with Ollama as well - especially whether you can compensate for less smarts by just giving it far more runtime than I could afford with e.g. Claude.
by smat | 2025-09-11 07:50:19+00:00
A very interesting read.

The article states that they added a computational correction step which is run whenever a result might be incorrect but skip it most of the time.

I am wondering whether this might cause problems for small real-time systems that do not have an FPU. If the runtime cost of an operation depends on the input, it is very hard to figure out whether deadlines can be met in all operation conditions.
by mettamage | 2025-09-11 07:50:21+00:00
This is in part why I have a job I'm overqualified for at a slow-ish moving corporate. To be fair, I fell into it and the job suits me better than being a software engineer. Being a software engineer isn't bad. But being a data analyst while having the same pay at a marketing department is infinitely easier. I'm the only technical person, so anything I make has more impact, despite the fact that it's easier. Also, one knows how long it takes so I can set my own schedule. Finally, because of this I'm hard to replace. It helps that the IT department is barely functioning, which is why I'm able to fill this gap anyway. It also helps that being multidisciplinary is my biggest source of strength. I'm an okay programmer, I'm an okay psychologist (academically speaking - I've neve worked in the field but published a paper and finished a bachelor in it), and a few other disciplines like that. Here most of that comes together.

I don't work the amount of hours I should, but no one bats too much of an eye since I have already saved them +250K within the first 3 months of working there (not due to my talent, the IT department really isn't functioning there). It was a bit of a lucky homerun to be fair, but I make enough impact for a normal Dutch salary.

So while I am overqualified, it's in part because there are some natural advantages I have in the role of a data analyst as it is a really generalist role. And in the Netherlands, it pays about as well as a many SWE salaries (unless you work for Databricks or Optiver - to name 2 very different but both high paying companies).
by ayush_xeneva | 2025-09-11 07:50:49+00:00
Thank you for your comment and we love your take on this! Coming to what we think about John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta,

It's kinda hard to have a single answer for this but we like to think that this project did not work out for META particularly. We believe that it was perhaps not the right project for someone like META who already had other on-going projects to deal with. Although a setback, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a fault in the idea itself. We'd like to address the problems that were mentioned with the development of a custom XROS -

1) Cost : We've managed to do everything up until this point at the cost of 0$. However, we're in initial stages and expect to incur costs in the next few months. But those costs are mostly associated with building the company and our own line of products, not in the actual development and engineering of the OS. We've managed to remain extremely cost efficient and intend to continue that practice.

2) Burden on third-party/new developers : We anticipated this problem right when we started building the OS. Over time, we've come up with plans to encounter it and are currently working on making sure that the barrier to enter and create applications and software on Xeneva remains as non-existent as possible. We intend on making the process easy, try to bring no learning curve whatsoever, thus allowing developers to port their existing software and applications to XenevaOS conveniently. Also create a beginner friendly environment so that new programmers are able to create an app on XenevaOS from scratch easily.
by peterashford | 2025-09-11 07:51:36+00:00
Yeah I think that's an important dimension. David Hume said that there was no action without passion and I think that's a key difference with AIs. They sit there passive until we interact with them. They dont want anything, they dont have goals, desires, motivations. The emotional part of the human psyche does a lot of work - we aren't just calculating sums
by colechristensen | 2025-09-11 07:51:49+00:00
Even when they had majorities, Democrats didn't get anything done. Didn't do anything to try to prevent what is happening now which was entirely expected. Allowed Republicans to steal a supreme court spot.

In opposition Democrats are utterly failing to prevent the Republican agenda anywhere near the way Republicans prevented the Democratic agenda.

I would say it's embarrassing how badly my party has done but that underrates how I think their incompetence has put an extremely real risk of the republic falling into our imminent future.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-11 07:52:32+00:00
Unfortunately an ESP32-based gadget is not really in the same class as a rpi-based device; it won't be able to send/receive email, browse internet, run applications like ping/traceroute/tcpdumpetc (useful as a mobile diagnostic tool), run MAME (seriously, a portable computer that doesn't have games is useless to me) and can't easily be programmed for.

At this point, and at these prices, there are very specific use-cases for esp32-based devices, and they are mostly all single-use devices (i.e. capture then process some video, caching it then transmitting it for remote storage is one use-case I have seen in the wild).

An rpi device is much more general.
by yibg | 2025-09-11 07:52:35+00:00
Even team members visiting from Canada were told very explicitly to not say they're coming to the US to "work" but rather for a business trip. But practically of course everyone do some amount of actual work. From checking their email / slack to doing some white boarding designs etc. If those aren't even allowed, then I don't see how any in person team meetings can be conducted.
by lm28469 | 2025-09-11 07:52:50+00:00
There are handungs used for defense against brown bears, look at 10mm, or even 500 mag, 454 casull, you can shoot this from a handgun. It's very unlikely to be the case here but you wouldn't be able to tell just from the damages

https://youtube.com/shorts/JluEbL5H48o
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by Mario10 | 2025-09-11 07:52:52+00:00
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by npteljes | 2025-09-11 07:52:54+00:00
The actual thing that the man was promoting:

>Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk said of gun deaths on April 5, 2023, "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."<

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-gun-deaths-qu...
by freakynit | 2025-09-11 07:53:44+00:00
The transfer of life from one planet to another("panspermia") seems plausible in principle. However, the immense energy released during asteroid impacts makes survival unlikely in many cases, as the very organisms hitching a ride may be destroyed in the process. That said, evidence suggests that microbes shielded deep within rocks could potentially endure the violent stages of ejection, space travel, and planetary re-entry.

Beyond panspermia, I lean toward another perspective:

Life exists because it serves as a natural means of accelerating "entropy" production. In an otherwise relatively stable system, life provides a shortcut, catalyzing processes that dissipate energy gradients far more efficiently than non-living chemistry alone.

At the microbial level, metabolism drives the dissipation of redox gradients, pushing chemical systems toward lower free-energy states. While cells locally maintain order and complexity, their activity increases the overall entropy of their environment. In this sense, life is not a violation of thermodynamic laws but a direct expression of them.

If this is true, life may be extremely common in the universe, arising naturally wherever the right conditions exist to favor energy dissipation.

What may be rare, however, is complex life. Complexity requires not only a lucky balance of stability and change, but also the ability to endure, or even be forced forward, by catastrophic events such as mass extinctions, without wiping out all of it. Earth's active techntonic plates provided yet another means to enable evolution.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-11 07:53:55+00:00
I always just skip video installations in modern art museums. Because these are usually a bit meh and dated technologically, and you always walk in mid way through some screening of some random thing.

Somehow it never occurs to them to just put that stuff on Youtube or one of the other streaming platforms. I guess that would be a bit too modern. It always annoys me when they have a lot of this going on; especially when the ticket price is high. Usually a sign of a weak curator and exposition. If filling the space with interesting art is a challenge, that's what you do. And the art is why I go there.
by lproven | 2025-09-11 07:54:14+00:00
> i remember a time when MS Word was run within DOS

The penultimate DOS version of MS Word is freeware. MS released Word 5.5 as freeware as a Y2K fix for all previous versions.

It's quite usable. I've written articles using it.

You can run it under Linux or macOS easily using DOSemu, on 64-bit Windows with VDOS+.

I wrote about how, with a pic of it working:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_runn...

Sadly, the last ever version, 6.0, is much better, with more keystrokes in common with Word 6 for Windows and Mac, and that's not freeware.
by ayush_xeneva | 2025-09-11 07:56:43+00:00
Thank you for your comment and yes we totally get the things that you've mentioned. We're well prepared and ready to tackle a possible "perpetual development hell" and are also aware about the issues with closed source SoCs. It's quite a challenging route and journey but we do not intend on looking back and are sure about figuring out things one way or the other.

Coming to the "vids or it didn't happen" feeling, we totally get that as well. To be fair, we would've had the same feeling if we watched ourselves from a third person perspective. But we're actively working on bringing visible proof (benchmark is a better work) on the claims and promises that we're making. And in your analogy, the vids are coming soon, stay tuned ;)
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-11 07:57:16+00:00
I'm thinking that the calculator analogy is better and better

An LLM will produce a solution for you, but in most cases you need to know enough about the problem to ask it to apply the right tools. Or even have enough "known unknowns" that you can direct it to search for a better solution.

Like a trivial example: an LLM will happily write a CLI argument parser from scratch. It WILL work. It'll also be complete crap UX wise.

But if you know that a specific library (Cobra, Kong, urfave/cli) fits this specific problem better, you can ask it to use it specifically.

Same with calculators - it'll always tell you the correct answer to whatever calculation you give it. But YOU need to know that this specific problem was solved by a really smart person 100 years ago and there's a formula you can apply to solve it faster - still using the calculator, but now you're using refined algebra instead of brute-forcing a solution
by nicbou | 2025-09-11 07:57:28+00:00
We're raised to be productive little machines. There comes a point in most people's careers where they ask themselves "is this it?" We're in a crowd of relatively wealthy people who actually gets to act on those questions.

It's also hard to live in the moment and enjoy those times if you're always working towards something else. Recently I have taken to visiting random neighbourhoods with no plans and nothing on my schedule. I was ashamed to discover places I'd passed a hundred times, beautiful streets just one block away from the main arteries.
by atoav | 2025-09-11 07:57:47+00:00
Maybe I got this wrong but I thought ambiguity refered to the input. So in a deterministic system I would assume that a input of "Give an example of a dice roll" Will always output the exact same example (unless the model also gets the context of the message history).

Ambiguity is what happens when you change the prompt slightly, e.g. by adding a word: "Give an example of a single dice roll". Now as a human our expectation would be that this is the same question and should thus (in a deterministic system) receive the same answer. But to an LLM it may not be.
by philipallstar | 2025-09-11 07:58:56+00:00
Yes, he constantly debated left wing people, sometimes nice, sometimes extremely rude, and almost always seemed to find ways to pull conversations back from ad hominem stuff or thoughtless claims to something useful and uniting between him and the person he was speaking to. The people were generally college students, more used to memorising and repeating still, but he did sometimes seem to spark a genuine thought out of them.
by lproven | 2025-09-11 07:58:56+00:00
> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.

Ha! I'd say it was more accurate to say that MS Word tried to compete with WordPerfect.

It was only with the rise of Windows that Word became a contender, and WordPerfect was relegated to trying to compete.

> a straight port of the text-only DOS version.

Just out of interest: WP was a Data General app. The DOS version was a port, as was the Amiga version, SCO Xenix, classic MacOS, all the others. The native app was a DG minicomputer program.

Part of its competitiveness in the pre-GUI era was that WordPerfect was very portable and the company ported it to almost every OS going, complete with its massive suite of state-of-the-art printer drivers.

If you were not using a DG Nova minicomputer then you were running a port.

But as GUIs became standard, they almost all included printing subsystems, using soft fonts rendered by the same code that rendered stuff on screen. Printers' own built-in fonts became irrelevant: GUIs just dumped bitmaps to the printer.

So WordPerfect's best-in-the-industry printer drivers, which supported every printer in the world and could make it do backflips, became irrelevant.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-11 07:59:04+00:00
The report link in TFA isn't working, I think this is the relevant report but it does not actually contain that sentence.

https://msiu.gov.mt/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/PDF-Safety_In...

https://msiu.gov.mt/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/PDF-Safety_In...

So I wonder what the source for that line is.
by wojciii | 2025-09-11 08:00:02+00:00
I try to limit my kids exposure to electronic devices while they are small.

I can't avoid it, but I try.

I consider blacklisting YouTube at our house. The withdrawal symptoms look like people having tried drugs. This is scary.

I noticed that playing with phones for shorter amounts of time is ok and the kids get creative as soon as they don't have access to electronic entertainment.

Currently I play chess with them and do reading. My kids are 4 and 7.

This was a bit off topic, but I think that parents should stop exposing their kids to electronic entertainment.. its worse than drugs.

I'm sounding like a lunatic.. I know.