MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by octo888 | 2025-09-27 07:58:00+00:00
My point isn't that you should wash it down the toilet because it serves no purpose (of course this is a useful strawman to employ when anyone criticises it); rather, perhaps, that obsessing about it and fully believing it can protect you against eg a Trump presidency isn't very healthy. A bit too much tunnel vision?*

> Well, for one thing, it's not a transactional question of what it "buys"

Let's not play semantics. It's just a phrase

> defense against future repression or manipulation by politicians on a power trip.

Why hasn't it defended against current or past ones? It's not a new amendment, is it?

> For example, given Trump's current and blatant attempts to crush free expression against his own policies and bullshit, or even those who constantly insult and criticize him (whining about it like a little kid actually) imagine how much easier he'd have had it if there were no U.S 1st amendment to use against him.

What has all that criticism gotten you? He's still President right? And there is a worrying number of people talking about a '3rd' term

> when governments can legally censor speech they decide is misinformation, disinformation or "hate speech"

Your government via its plethora of agencies absolutely does this

> At least, in a place like the U.S, where free speech remains protected (for now at least), any misinformation, disinformation or whatever speech by those in power or outside of it who create it, can be countered by others trying to speak more truthfully.

How's that working out?

> There, my good faith response to your completely absurd line of rhetorical questioning.

Wow, Americans really think they are protected from criticism like 'civis Romanus' were protected from harm.

I think your opinions are exactly those I was questioning. Maybe it isn't as useful as you think it is

* another phrase, not to be interpreted literally
by kerningije | 2025-09-27 07:58:27+00:00
I have come to realize that we barely understand complexity. I've read a lot on information theory, thermodynamics, many takes on entropy. Not to mention literature on software development, because a lot of this field is managing complexity.

We severely underestimate how complex natural systems are. Autonomous agents seem like something we should be able to build. The idea is as old as digital computers. Turing famously wrote about that.

But an autonomous complex system is complex to an astronomical degree. Self driving vehicles, let alone autonomous androids, are several orders of magnitude more complex that we can even model.
by atoav | 2025-09-27 07:58:39+00:00
Yeah good point. The question is how can we effectively change incentives in such way the decision-makers in big corporations will feel they are taking a personal risk that can ruin their lives instead of a situation where the worst that can happen is a (compared to revenue) tiny symbolic fine made by the company and not by them?

For me the important thing is that the buck needs to stop somewhere human in certain cases. And in doubt that should be the CEO, potentially even multiple people at once.

If we want a free market where new players can enter and compete, big corporations needs to fear harsher punishment not lighter ones.
by sebastiennight | 2025-09-27 07:58:41+00:00
For things like this (extracting precise computed data from unstructured blobs) I find that it's often more effective to ask your AI tool to provide a program (I usually ask for a HTML page with a JS form, or a bookmarklet) that can do the actual math.

Otherwise you're just as likely to be getting hallucinated answers based on the AI model's existing biases and training (if it's an American model, it might start telling you the sentenced convicts are young male and non-white even without looking at the data on the page).
by teiferer | 2025-09-27 07:58:46+00:00
That's underestimating human intelligence.

Even low-IQ humans can in principle learn how to use Lean to represent a multivariate system. It might take a while, but in principle their brain is capable of that feat. In contrast, no matter how long I sit down with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatnot, it won't be able to. Because they are not intelligent.

It's a great achievement of the AI hype that the burden of proof has been reversed. Here I am, having to defend my claim that they are not intelligent. But the burden of proof should be on those claiming intelligence. The claim that earth is a sphere was extraordinary and needed convincing evidence. The claim that species have evolved through evolution was. But the claim that LLMs are intelligent is so self-evident that rejecting the idea needs evidence? That's upside-down!
by NoboruWataya | 2025-09-27 07:58:59+00:00
> CAT bonds are generally tied to the specific natural hazard ("this bond triggers if a hurricane of Category 3 or higher land falls in this segment of Florida") or to industry losses, as estimated by an agreed upon source.

A big part of the reason for this is that if payout is tied to actual loss, it starts to look a lot like actual insurance, which is specifically not what you want. Because while anyone* can buy a bond, only insurers or reinsurers can write insurance. This is something that needs to be considered whenever an insurer (or anyone, really) tries to transfer risk to a non-insurer.
by Too | 2025-09-27 07:59:16+00:00
Why are they supporting Android 5? It’s over 10 years old, the devices running it after updates even older. Mobile devices from that era must have a real tough time to browse the modern bloated web. It shouldn’t even be possible to publish to Play store when targeting such an old API level. Who is the user base? Hackers who refurbished their old OnePlus, run it with charger always plugged in, didn’t upgrade to a newer LineageOS, and installed an alternative App Store, just for the sake of it? While novel, it’s a steep price to pay, as we see here it is slowing down development for the rest of us.
by small_scombrus | 2025-09-27 07:59:30+00:00
I feel like I get ${local_country} politics* because I follow people from ${local_country} and most the other people I follow who do post about US politics tend to spoiler their posts with USPOL, so I can just scroll past if I'm not feeling it.

* Usually spoilered with "${local_country_code}POL"
by gapan | 2025-09-27 07:59:32+00:00
Some of us never did. Well, it's XMMs in my case, but that's besides the point. A complete music library with stuff that I actually like only takes a very part of my storage. It's even possible to carry everything on my phone these days.

I keep hearing horror stories about online music platforms, from disappearing content, to AI slop and I'm so glad I never jumped on that.
by imiric | 2025-09-27 08:00:59+00:00
Typst is great. I'm sure it's not a complete LaTeX replacement, given the dominance of TeX for many decades, but for simple documents it's a breath of fresh air.

Not having to deal with the insanity of the LaTeX distribution system alone is worth the switch. Everything is contained in a single binary. The language itself is much simpler to read and write, and seems just as flexible. LLMs do a decent job of generating it. Compilation takes less than a second, making it so much faster to iterate.

Many thanks to the authors and contributors, and please don't ruin it. :)
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-27 08:01:18+00:00
Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations.

Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.
by jaggederest | 2025-09-27 08:01:34+00:00
One of the things that is true of humans is that we have an extremely mutable body plan and sensorium.

https://plasticity-lab.com/body-augmentation

https://www.carlosterminel.com/wearable-compass

https://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.h...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...

Bolting on extra senses, tools, limbs is no big deal.

Humans are also some of the most physically adaptable animals on the planet, in terms of being able to remodel our bodies to serve new tasks. "specific adaptation to imposed demand" is one of the things that really sets us (and a few other animals) apart in a remarkable way. Few animals can practice and train their bodies like we can.

In addition, I understand research shows that people with amputations very quickly adapt both practically and psychologically, as a general principle (some unfortunate folks are stuck with phantom pain and other adaptive issues).

The old discussion about "adding 20 minutes to your commute is worse than losing a leg below the knee" takes into account the fact that most people underestimate how large a negative effect commuting has, but also overestimate how large a negative effect losing a portion of a limb has.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-27 08:02:22+00:00
> Two US transit agencies, RTD and SORTA, bought similar 40-foot, diesel-powered buses from the same manufacturer in 2023, but RTD's 10 buses cost $432,028 each, while SORTA's 17 cost $939,388 each.

Huh. TFI, the Irish transport authority, currently has a deal to pay 400 million euro for 800 electric buses, mostly double deckers (so a lot bigger than these ones). Diesel double deckers cost them significantly less (about 250-350k IIRC), but obviously cost more to operate. That's for custom jobs (in particular TFI has weird beliefs about what shape windscreens should be).

I wonder if part of it is just that these US transit agencies are buying them on such a small scale; a state-level agency responsible for sourcing the buses might be more effective.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-27 08:02:36+00:00
Note how the whole thread has been about cost of diesel fuel vs electricity from the start, and how I'm explicitly talking about operating costs for them.

From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.
by presentation | 2025-09-27 08:02:38+00:00
Sorry for being dismissive - but I think that’s just a failure of imagination.

Does every app using an adapter for Better Auth need to implement every plugin’s many thousands of operations, even if they’re only using basic functionality and a handful of operations?

Auth.js differed in that you could let them handle it if you’re doing your low impact side product, but once you did care you can opt out. You’re telling me that Better Auth knows better what you need than you do, and so giving you the option to opt out would just be too onerous for you to decide if you want to do it or not.

Why couldn’t Better Auth plugins individually declare what they need and let you implement those functions as you need them?

For what it’s worth my company also makes money in a sensitive industry, Auth.js did everything we need regarding authentication (and we just use other things entirely for billing/etc, which arguably is much more modular), and we only had to implement like 8 functions that took a day and has worked since we started a few years ago. Probably would take me an hour or two today thanks to AI.

Honestly I’m fine with Better Auth taking its stance, but basically saying “you should use Better Auth unless you have this one random fad technical issue, why would you need any alternative like Auth.js??” while saying that there will only be security patches; and no real probable alternative I can think of; and that stance is basically a non starter for what I believe to be a large set of use cases, rubbed me wrong.

I’ll take patches over nothing, but that doesn’t invalidate my feeling that auth in JS is in a sorry state and this isn’t making it better as far as my concerns go. Anyway who am I to talk, I’m not going to make an alternative regardless.
by kerningije | 2025-09-27 08:03:25+00:00
People said we have outsmarted downturns just before every major downturn in the past century and a half.

Boom and bust is how complex systems develop. The biosphere down to that slime mold mapping out food sources. It's always a pulse.

Oh it makes for a bumpy ride for the monkeys? Yeah. It does. Will the monkey outsmart the physics of complexity? Unlikely.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-27 08:03:34+00:00
An MoE model will not activate most of the model for any given query, so there is zero compute happening across an increasing part of the model.

Dense model means 32B parameters => 32B get used in calculation for every token. Every calculation takes time, and assuming similar latent space size (which they all have). For example Qwen-32B

MoE model has for example 80B parameters, but only 3B get used in calculation for any given token. For example Qwen3-Next 80B A3B

Performance comparison:

Qwen-32B => 56 tok/sec, 32 GB of VRAM

Qwen3-Next 80B A3B => 167 tok/sec, 85 GB of VRAM

So despite being close to 3x "bigger", Qwen3-Next is more than 3 times faster with the same compute capacity. There's a but though. But because what gets activated from one token to the next is a different subset of the model, it is still critical to have all 80B parameters loaded into memory.

So MoE performs much better with less compute, at the cost of more memory. It also performs better on benchmarks, it is a better model.

Similar techniques have long been used in ML to great success, rather than trying to create one brilliant model, create many that each have pros and cons, and then train a second model to figure out the best model for the task in front of you. There's even a name for the practice "ensemble models". MoE only kind-of fits (because you can't easily swap out models)

There's other factors, the big one being attention. That's why non-attention models, like MAMBA, will wipe the floor in terms of performance per flop (a compute unit), with anything else. When it comes to intelligence however ...
by 7bit | 2025-09-27 08:03:35+00:00
Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with mailing lists does not exist

If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.

With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.
by figgyc | 2025-09-27 08:05:27+00:00
Thus is quite interesting IMO, the fact that it will work on apparently all devices with no version limit will probably be a surprise to many.

I suspect, given the fact that ADB can bypass the requirement, that Google is using the pre-existing Android mechanism to gatekeep app installs which is currently used for Google Play Protect. The Advanced Protection variant of this removes the "Install anyway" option [1] which is quite irritating, either you have to install every new F-Droid apps from ADB or disable Advanced Protection which I ended up doing.

(I wonder if Shizuku can be used to install apps without a PC? Haven't tried myself)

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/9764949?hl=en
by pjmlp | 2025-09-27 08:06:22+00:00
That and F-18 as well.

I think that magic is now gone, back then playing games was a bit like reading a book, we had to make use of our imagination to compensate for the lousy graphics, especially when being able to visit arcades.

Then suddenly having computers at home with similar arcade like graphics felt like the future.

Now we get real time rendering without useful gameplay, in many AAA games.
by renerick | 2025-09-27 08:06:56+00:00
Typst is fantastic and I recommend to dive into it to see how much value it offers. To me personally, the biggest strength is the ergonomics of both the tooling and the language, and how ergonomics persist even between documents of various complexity. Writing a paper in LaTeX is nice, but making something like a CV takes some patience. Meanwhile, in typst it was quick to get started and go all the way to building resumes, character sheets, and I know of at least one occurrence of implementing symbolic math in typst language. It's not without quirks, but still, very solid alternative
by godelski | 2025-09-27 08:07:59+00:00
> 16 cents Cheapest photodiode on digikey

On DigiKey the cheapest is $0.125[0]. On Alibaba I can find much cheaper, including less than penny [1,2]. Now pretend with me that you're building in lots. You're going to get cheaper than Alibaba, though maybe not by much.

> I do board level designs and drop down LEDs. If you are not specialising in indicators, its hard to visualise how bright 10mA through your diode is going to be.

I think if it is annoying enough that at presumably >10m away it can keep the gp awake you don't really need to be that precise in your measurement. It's basically way too bright.

But if you want to get creative you could use the diodes in the circuit or even your led if you'll blink it. But that last one doesn't tell you the led brightness, only ambient.

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/harvatek-corporat...

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1-4V-20-30-45-60_6253...

[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/JST3-3MM-receiver-pho...
by simianwords | 2025-09-27 08:08:01+00:00
You are right but in a roundabout way. It’s true that most problems in US can be explained by this but it’s also true that the west and US particularly are successful because they can bypass the principal agent problem to an extent.

You just have to look at India or Africa a bit to understand the severity to which this problem permeates day to day in these countries.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-27 08:08:38+00:00
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

Hmm, not sure about that. I live in Dublin, which is, generally, very flat, and where the temperature rarely goes far outside the 0 to 20 degrees C range. The buses can be fairly unpleasant on rare very hot days (no air conditioning), the electric ones can be unpleasantly cold on rare extremely cold days (heating not specced for it; this isn't an issue for the diesel ones as those produce so much waste heat anyway), and when I was a kid I lived in one of the few hilly parts of Dublin, and bus breakdowns going uphill were somewhat common (in fairness I think this is less of a thing now). Geography absolutely matters; Dublin's buses would be basically unusable anywhere very hot or cold.

There's other stuff, too. Buses here are almost always double-decker, but one specific new bus route requires single-decker buses, because the double-deckers won't fit under some of the older railway bridges. This will also require modifications to some road infra, which won't currently take long buses (to have a decent capacity single-deckers need to be longer; the single-deckers will be about 13m long vs 11m for the normal buses). Some cities use articulated buses; those wouldn't work here at all.
by waterhouse | 2025-09-27 08:08:43+00:00
Yup. In real situations, one element is that sometimes things are misunderstood, and in particular sometimes collaborating is mistaken for defecting, so if all sides are playing pure tit-for-tat, then one can end up in a defect-defect loop forever (or, I guess, until the opposite misinterpretation occurs). Therefore, an element of forgiveness (some percent chance that you'll respond to a defect with a cooperate) can be helpful.
by card_zero | 2025-09-27 08:08:57+00:00
Something internal to some shellfish, I believe, a kind of mixing rod that rotates. Hold on, I'll check if it's powered. (Also rotifers but they're tiny.)

Hmm, no, it sounds like it's externally powered:

> The style consists of a transparent glycoprotein rod which is continuously formed in a cilia-lined sac and extends into the stomach. The cilia rotate the rod, so that it becomes wrapped in strands of mucus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_...

Or maybe the cilia ( = wiggly hairs) could be seen as a kind of motor. Depends how you count it and exactly what the set-up is, I can't tell from this.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-09-27 08:09:05+00:00
As I understand it they don't make much money from the sale of the Kindle itself as they want to lock you into their ebook ecosystem which is where they make their money. I don't have hard figures though.

They may market it like that now, but that can change. If Google can stop you sideloading apps on Android, I have no doubt Amazon could try to stop you sideloading books on your Kindle.
by protocolture | 2025-09-27 08:10:03+00:00
Doesnt have to be a Hitler, imagining the worst case scenario for laws is absolutely apt.

Consider the Australian Access and Assistance bill. Among other things, it permits ministers to issue TCN's verbally. As far as we know (theres no oversight) this hasnt been done. But its concerning that the government can verbally require a corporation to (open endedly) change app functionality.

It would be better if Jim Hitler, had to fight the existing democracy to erode our freedoms, rather than just having to ask a minister to make it so.

Its absolutely better to assume the worst case than the best.
by benrutter | 2025-09-27 08:10:10+00:00
> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

I think it depends on what the thing is. I use LaTeX for occasional documentation, a better version would save me a maximum of 5 minutes a year. I probably won't be an early Typst adopter.

But, I spend loads of time for example, working with dataframes in Python. I got into Polars fairly early because improvements in that space can massively affect my productivity.

If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.
by godelski | 2025-09-27 08:12:01+00:00
Additionally human eyes are sensitive to near infrared. Go look at a TV remote in a really dark place. Check with your phone because your phone can see it. If you can't then check with the nearest child, they'll tell you.

You lose sensitivity to this bandwidth as you get older. But if it's bright enough you'll see it. It's not like there's a hard cutoff in your eyes detection, it decays and you're very insensitive to big bandwidth, but not necessarily blind to them
by WastedCucumber | 2025-09-27 08:13:02+00:00
God it's so much easier than LaTeX. I wrote so many things in LaTeX over the years, and writing (and debugging) switching to Typst felt like, well, like somebody had been fighting me every step of the way, and then finally stopped. I'm not going back, if I can help it.

But I will say I've mostly written relatively simple documents in it, so maybe that colors my experience.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-27 08:13:12+00:00
> But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?

A lot of people have a broken sense of fairness where they're only willing to help someone else if everyone else is required to do it too. It's one of the things causing the world to burn.

Some of this is even learned behavior. A lot of the dumbest econ 101 classes teach people that giving to charity is irrational. (It's not irrational. It's something you do because you want to do it, like eating cake or buying a fast car. Once your basic needs are met, the purpose of having money is to use it for the things you want to use it for. It's not irrational to want to do something good instead of something insalubrious.)