MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-09-24 03:38:09+00:00
I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I found the controller UI to be really weird and counterintuitive compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer.

Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.
by ath_ray | 2025-09-24 03:38:13+00:00
I enjoyed the emphasis on optimising the context window itself. I think that's the most important bit.

An abstraction for this that seems promising to me for its completeness and size is a User Story paired with a research plan(?).

This works well for many kinds of applications and emphasizes shipping concrete business value for every unit of work.

I wrote about some of it here: https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09/15/ai-unit-of-work/

I also think a lot of coding benchmarks and perhaps even RL environments are not accounting for the messy back and forth of real world software development, which is why there's always a gap between the promise and reality.
by hopelite | 2025-09-24 03:38:22+00:00
How do you think these public officials with massive paychecks and life long massive pensions operate; they drive around in the most noticeable little vehicles that you can spot from a mile away. If you needed to track them for some reason you would just follow them, and most likely people in the neighborhood probably already know their routes anyways.

It seems you are fixated on something you just can’t let go, as if these are some kind of undercover agents selling kidnapped and trafficked young children and he’s blowing their cover … they’re writing traffic tickets off $480 dollars … the least we spoiled be able to do is track the public official while they’re writing excessive fines.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-09-24 03:38:27+00:00
My zip code maps to two different cities in two different counties. This causes endless problems with registering my car because the state wants to know what county my car is in and the webpage was programmed with the false assumption "every zip code exists entirely within one county."

USPS doesn't much care about counties. They assign postal routes based on geographical convenience, not political borders.
by nullfield | 2025-09-24 03:38:27+00:00
Non-whitelisted extensions are blocked in Edge, and Edge is the default browser. Chrome/FF are less locked down, more due to incompetence than not trying to be heavy-handed.

…of course, Zscaler with “all Wordpress sites blocked” is also a thing, along with the majority/nearly all of European non-English countries, because god forbid you want to read the emmet docs or something.
by onecommentman | 2025-09-24 03:38:29+00:00
I wonder, in the case of mass violence events that were used as advertisement for the (assumed) murderer’s POV, whether there should be an equivalent of a House of Lords for the exceptional situation of censoring what in any other context would be breaking news. You don’t want or need (or be able) to censor a manifesto for all time, but you would want to prevent the (assumed) murderers from gaining any momentum from their heinous acts. So a ninety day (but only 90 day) embargo on public speech from bad actors, with the teeth of governmental enforcement, sounds pretty reasonable to me. Even cleverer to salt the ether with “leaks” that would actively suppress any political momentum for the (presumed) murderers during the embargo period, but with the true light of day shining after three months.
by D-Machine | 2025-09-24 03:38:35+00:00
Basically, yes. However, if we make a distinction between respirators (e.g. N95 mask) and masks (including "surgical" masks, which don't really have a meaningfully better FFE than cloth masks), then at least respirators offer some protection to the wearer, provided they also still minimize contact. But, in keeping with this distinction, yes, masks were never seriously scientifically supported. It is incredibly disheartening to see mask mandates still in cancer wards, despite these being mandates for (objectively useless) cloth/surgical masks.
by YZF | 2025-09-24 03:39:09+00:00
This just seems incredibly difficult. Even between people who are highly intelligent, educated, and consider themselves to be critical thinkers there can be a huge divergence of what "truth" is on many topics. Most people have no tools to evaluate various claims and it's not something you can just "teach kids". Not saying education can't move the needle but the forces we're fighting need a lot more than that.

I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
by grahameb | 2025-09-24 03:39:13+00:00
I've noticed this – I'm a former software engineer, now a full-time priest. It's been fascinating to reflect on how the base of my analogies has shifted from software/tech to theology/the Christian tradition. Not entirely though, there are many times when I've found resonances in between.

One extension I'd make from your comment is how rich interdisciplinary work can be, because all the resonances between different fields can come to life and some really wonderful creativity happens.
by drnick1 | 2025-09-24 03:39:19+00:00
I don't see what's wrong with Python for a first course. In fact, you can go very far with Python alone (in terms of performance) if you learn to use Numba well. If that isn't enough, I would go straight to C (opportunistically augmented by C++98 when needed), and learn how to use the GNU Scientific Library and Eigen (the linear algebra library).
by jbm | 2025-09-24 03:39:34+00:00
I'm sorry about your wife.

There was scientific basis for N95 masks and similar masks. If you are talking about cloth and paper masks, I mostly agree. Even then there were tests done with using even those surgical masks with 3d printed frames. I remember this as one example of people following this line of thinking.

https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/07/26/surgical-ma...

As for dehumanization, I used to live in Tokyo and spending years riding the train. I think blaming masks for dehumanization when we have entire systems ragebaiting us on a daily basis is like blaming the LED light for your electric bill.

Social Distancing having "no scientific backing" is very difficult to respond to. Do you mean in terms of long term reduction of spread, or as a temporary measure to prevent overwhelming the hospitals (which is what the concern was at the time)?

I do agree that it was fundamentally dishonest to block people from going to church and then telling other people it was OK to protest (because somehow these protests were "socially distanced" and outdoors). They could have applied the same logic to Church groups and helped them find places to congregate, but it was clearly a case of having sympathy for the in-group vs the out-group.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-24 03:40:15+00:00
Being from a construction family that did commercial high rises, I learned more about concrete testing than I cared to know. The plans will call for a specific type of concrete mix with a specified amount of rebar. Those plans will be based on how much weight the floor is meant to support, and has specific ratings. When they make the pour for the actual building, they will also pour multiple test slabs of the same thickness and rebar. The test slabs will be put under pressure to test their fail point. One slab is tested 24 hours after pour, the next 48 hours, and however many they do based on the plans. The longer it cures, the stronger it gets. They cannot put weight on it and move to the next floor until it has cured to the correct minimum set. My dad would walk away in shame at what you just described, and I can hear him muttering about it in my head.
by moonshinefe | 2025-09-24 03:40:33+00:00
yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours.

I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-24 03:41:04+00:00
Yeah the SD has pretty bad ergonomics. It's too wide and too heavy. I still like it as a portable system. It's like a console I can pack in my bag and plug in to a TV wherever I'm staying.

I'd love to see a steamdeck lite, with a similar size and weight to the switch. But still with the rounded hand grips of the steamdeck. The deck as it is feels like a HN designed product with way too much stuff jammed in it with no regard to size and weight. The trackpads are cool for desktop mode but the space taken up for something so rarely used isn't worth it.
by mothballed | 2025-09-24 03:41:42+00:00
There were no building plans lol, but bear in mind, it's a 1 story light frame wood structure with an average gravity/vertical load of less than 10 psi on the poured concrete part of the foundation, so nowhere near the demand of a skyscraper.

I am basically pushing my concrete to 1% of theoretical limitations, never freeze cycling it, and cold joining it exactly how my civil engineer friend did in rigorous commercial project (when asked about this he laughed, large commercial projects usually need breaks because it's too big to do one continous pour, i simply applied same technique) . Let the unpaid contractors mutter from outside my DIY walls... if they stop standing it's more likely a wildfire than the hand mixed concrete.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-24 03:42:11+00:00
> Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.

The fundamental problem here is exactly that.

We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.

Which means there are no ads, because nobody really wants ads, and so their user agent doesn't show them any. And that's the source of the existing incentive for the monopolist in control of the feed to fill it with rage bait, which means that goes away.

The cost is that you either need a P2P system that actually works or people who want to post a normal amount of stuff to social media need to pay $5 for hosting (compare this to what people currently pay for phone service). But maybe that's worth it.
by joshfraser | 2025-09-24 03:42:28+00:00
There are a ton of interesting use-cases for public city data. When I was an Airbnb host, I built an early alert system to send me email if my address was ever reported or under investigation. The government moves at a snails pace, so anyone who was paying attention would have plenty of time to cure any issues before any formal investigation was even started. I even had a personal dashboard showing how the enforcement office operated, how many investigators they had, which neighborhoods were getting the most enforcement actions, stats on how cases were resolved, how long they took, etc.
by NoPicklez | 2025-09-24 03:43:01+00:00
The thing is that there is such an enormous amount of research in this area regarding blue light and its impact on melatonin. So I am quite surprised its considered a scam, for over a decade and even when I went to University did a subject on sleep psychology it was believed that blue light impacted melatonin, which impacted sleep, either directly or indirectly.

Unless I am misunderstanding this, this goes against almost every area in which we recommended reducing blue light. Heck Apple market it with their Night Shift function "Studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep."

However I agree if you continue to market a product after knowing better than its a scam. But can you also trust the evidence that backtracks science we have considered to be true for so long. You could understand peoples skepticism initially to it being bogus.
by wyldfire | 2025-09-24 03:44:53+00:00
Very casual football/soccer fan checking in - offside seems like a challenging call to make, most of the time. I understand the rules and all of its subtleties. It seems like the AR bears a lot of responsibility for the call - marking the penultimate defender. And yeah - if the ref just glanced at the sideline -- lack of AR flag means no offside because I didn't see it and AR didn't see it ergo there's no one left to consult ergo it didn't happen.

But yeah the objection IIUC was not over offside despite what the announcer says. He realizes at the end that it's an apparent handball. "At what point was he offside ... or was it a use of the hand that England are complaining about?"

> ... back peddle to the AR (never take your eyes of the pitch)

Is this because of the risk of violence from the players?
by throw10920 | 2025-09-24 03:44:54+00:00
> Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law

It's not "illegal", it's just illegal. The US does not have open borders. It's illegal to cross without a visa or some other authorization. That's a fact, and in fact the law is a very reasonable one, because people who are knowledgeable about how humans work generally understand that open borders are a bad idea.

> There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing [...] and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries.

Is this meant to make it sound like it's somehow bad? If someone breaks the law, they deserve to be punished. In the case of people who entered the country illegally, the sane and rational thing to do is remove them from the country. This is, in fact, one of the most logical punishments imaginable, up there with being forced to leave while trespassing and being required to return stolen property.

Your comment is real "Hitler breathed air, and this other guy breathed air, therefore this other guy is bad because he's like Hitler" levels of manipulative suggestion that's completely devoid of any sort of points or content whatsoever.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-24 03:45:01+00:00
Iran has not been attacking US civilians. This is nonsense. The best you're going to come up with there is the Iran hostage crisis. And what was that? That was when Iranian students stormed and occupied the US embassy, almost 50 years ago, demanding that the US extradite Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - the tyrant that the US had installed in Iran after overthrowing their government, who was then granted asylum after he was overthrown and fled to the US following events like the Jaleh Square massacre. [1]

In the end 0 civilians were harmed and it led to the Algiers Accords [1] under which its chief provision is that the US would not intervene politically or militarily in Iranian internal affairs. Besides the US obviously endlessly violating that, we also violated another section of the treaty (related to the settlement of litigation) almost immediately after it was signed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1978)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_Accords_(1981)
by mulmen | 2025-09-24 03:45:01+00:00
> How is compelling google to censor less going to entrench their dominance?

If you force Google alone to amplify certain speech then what competitive advantage does a less censorious service provide?

> If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.

Define “suck less”. Now ask yourself if you are comfortable with someone you completely disagree with defining what sucks less.

> And I don't think it erodes any fundamental rights to put restrictions on huge monopolies.

You’re talking about antitrust, not free expression.

Compelled speech is an erosion of the first amendment. You may think that erosion is acceptable but you can’t deny it exists.
by klardotsh | 2025-09-24 03:45:06+00:00
This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button.

But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-24 03:45:58+00:00
They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.

The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
by themaninthedark | 2025-09-24 03:46:16+00:00
Forest for the trees.

Don't take my comment as a declaration for Trump and all he stands for.

My parent had posted "You know how this used to work in the old days? Instead of publishing allegations yourself, you would take your story to a newspaper reporter. The reporter will then do the investigations then, if there is solid evidence, the story will be published in the newspaper. At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story, and citizens know the standing of the newspaper in their community, and how much credence to give to the story, based on that."

Rather than call it an argument to authority, which it is very close to, I decided to highlight two cases where this authority that we are supposed to defer to was wrong.

Perhaps a better and direct argument would be to point out that during the COVID pandemic; Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were all banning and removing posts from people who had heterodox opinions, those leading the charge with cries of "Trust the Science".

This run contrary of what science and the scientific process is, Carl Segan saying it better than I "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else."

Now that I have quoted a famous scientist in a post to help prove my point about how arguments from authority are invalid, I shall wait for the collapse of the universe upon itself.
by Zagorath | 2025-09-24 03:46:20+00:00
> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.

I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.

This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.

> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account

This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.

For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.

By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
by wdr1 | 2025-09-24 03:48:40+00:00
> Did they?

They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)

Not they believed it wasn't airborne.

Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.

That it was fact.

In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
by MountDoom | 2025-09-24 03:50:08+00:00
I suspect what the parent is alluding to is that we tend to reduce everything to computer-world analogies, which we believe we're uniquely qualified to analyze.

It's sort of like a car mechanic telling you "SQL query, eh? It must be similar to what happens in an intake manifold." For all I know, there might be Turing-equivalency between databases and the inner workings of internal combustion engines, but you wouldn't consider that to be a useful take.
by the_snooze | 2025-09-24 03:50:46+00:00
If it's indeed specifically about party invites and not other things, then you're right and I misread it. I wish the author were more explicit about that beyond just a fleeting line at the beginning "We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months."

My read was that Anna never acted like she's actually part the group because she's only ever shown repeatedly declining invitations.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-24 03:51:01+00:00
> g(x, i) = sin(ix) / i

That's an example where the derivative does not exist.

> I guess another issue that could happen is that the original sequence converges, and the derivative sequence converges, but they converge at different rates.

This is a lot closer to what's happening in the video. For a potentially simpler example than an ODE solver, if you had a series evaluator that given a series evaluated it at a point, AD would need a similar fix to make sure the convergence test is including the convergence of the derivative.
by 14 | 2025-09-24 03:51:22+00:00
I do not think it would be easy but with advances in testing and the budget of a 3 letter agency I have no doubt it could be figured out. The way I saw it happening in my mind was somewhere after the flush down the pipe a sample would be extracted.

This is more in the realm of conspiracy theory but I have wondered about it once upon a time thinking of book ideas. But the reality is that this idea is way to complicated. Instead many people willingly have their DNA tested and information is put into a database which I am sure every 3 letter agency already has full access to. Also do a crime and you and your future and past family DNA privacy is gone after a court ordered sample exposes you and all your family. We also have situations like cord blood being tested after birth without permission. So in the end no complicated system is really needed. I think DNA privacy is doomed in the end. Which in some situations is good (horrible crimes) but in others will be really bad (denied insurance based on genetics).