MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by feoren | 2025-09-26 14:49:50+00:00
> I don't think anyone ever really measures the elecromagnetic field. We might, for example, measure the displacement of a charged object attached to a spring in an electromagnetic field.

I don't think anyone ever really measures the displacement of a charged object attached to a spring in an electromagnetic field. We might, for example, measure the difference in strength of neuronal activation in our brain from neurotransmitters emitted in a chain traveling from the photoreceptor cells in our fovea, which are responding to differing quantities of photoisomers that have had their shape altered by the absorption of different frequencies of photons reflected differently off the needle of a gauge in the display of an instrument which is measuring the displacement of a charged object attached to a spring in an electromagnetic field.

This is what I mean when I say it's overly reductive to say a measurement is necessarily a displacement. A measurement is lots of things, and not all of them can be represented as a spatial displacement unless you really shoehorn it.

> all the values we might measure are the eigenvalues of hermitian operators and they are, in fact, restricted to the real numbers.

Is that even true? Spin is a measurable quantity, and you cannot possibly get a spin of 0.2. Most measurable quantum numbers are essentially integers (integer multiples of some conventional base). Remember this discussion is about whether complex numbers are "lower-class citizens" than real numbers in physics. If you're going for measurable quantum numbers, these are almost all counterexamples to the idea that real numbers are special, and instead hint that it's simply integers that are the only first-class citizens in physics. I also fundamentally disagree that the possible eigenvalues of hermitian operators are the sole criteria we should be using to "rank" the truthiness or realness of mathematical structures.

I deeply do not care what philosophy has to say about this, either. Philosophy as a discipline is completely incapable of determining the truth, because it is unwilling to ever reject a single idea; all it is is a giant collection of shower thoughts. Every philosophy page, including the one you linked, somewhere includes "According to Aristotle ...". If you're trying to learn evolutionary biology and you read "according to Lamarck ...", then you are not learning science, you're reading science history. Yet this is all philosophy ever can say about anything. Science curates ideas; philosophy hoards them.
by maratc | 2025-09-26 14:49:55+00:00
> people who prefer mechanical keyboards already have the muscle memory

The problem with that is that every mechanical keyboard is different, so that muscle memory needs a refresh with each new keyboard. More importantly, people who are used to Pi 400 or Pi 500 (non-plus) have a different muscle memory.

> I depend on Delete and Home/End/Page Up/Page Down

For me, Fn-⌫, Fn-←, Fn-→, Fn-↑ and Fn-↓, respectively, do the job. On my keyboard, Fn is the button in the lower left corner, so it's easy to find by feel, ⌫ is in top right corner so it's easy to find by feel, and the negative space above half-height arrows makes it easy to find the arrows too.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-26 14:49:57+00:00
Inside-Out is a reversal of the stimuli model and a reversal of the cog-sci cognition model.

https://academic.oup.com/book/35081

The senses can't be excluded from consciousness or intelligence, otherwise the notion of intelligence is reduced from an arbitrary set of tests/criteria.

Robotics and trained analogies, arbitrary ideas of affordance (which are not affordances) are definitely interesting, but they're not paths to intel. They're paths to homogenization posing as intelligence.

This is the classic robotics idea of computer vision backing itself into a corner.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Wkno8pKzWiav1a7c8IOr...
Show HN: WebGPU FTW with Splat-Transform
by slimbuck | 2025-09-26 14:50:07+00:00
It's annoying having so many ML and GS training tools rely exclusively on cuda/nvidia .

So for our open-source command-line gaussian splat converter/compressor, we decided to try WebGPU instead.

It's working well so far and a single codebase runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows without too much fuss. This is mostly thanks to Google's dawn project <3.

Eventually some of this could also run directly in the browser.
by simgt | 2025-09-26 14:50:41+00:00
Nice! I hope keyboard computers will find their niche market. I've been looking for one that I could carry around, mostly in-between home and my coworking where I already have displays. My MacBook works just fine but I've grown to dislike carrying around a laptop. It's a bit heavy, there's the temptation of using it everywhere, and it's just average on comfort when sitting in front of a bigger display.

The RPI computers aren't a good fit for software dev, the closest thing I found is Project CJ64 [0] that relies on a Framework board, but that's not a finished product.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQEN17L84jg
by glenstein | 2025-09-26 14:51:00+00:00
>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.

The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.

What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
by Lio | 2025-09-26 14:51:10+00:00
I think it's 100% about the data.

I beleive that Labour see this new ID system as the solution to all the age verification questions now required by the Online Safety Act. e.g. access to things like Reddit, BlueSky messaging, Spotify.

With that in mind I think new data you're talking about will be enhanced tracking and monitoring on everyday online activity of UK citizens.
by margalabargala | 2025-09-26 14:51:13+00:00
Thanks for the condescension. It really helps me file your comment's suggestions appropriately.

Here's a general rule of thumb: If the options are

a) answer someone's question, and

b) answer someone's question but also then spend triple the word count telling them it was a stupid question

Then picking (b) makes you an asshole. If all you had written was your first sentence this could have been a pleasant interaction for us both.
by qsort | 2025-09-26 14:51:14+00:00
I'm surprised nobody is working on a "git for normal people" kind of software. Part of the reason why Codex or Claude can work the way they do is that even if they screw up you always have a clear picture of what were the changes and what to roll back.

If for some hypothetical reason we still were in the era of tarballs, I doubt they'd be as useful.

(also yeah, I have iCloud pretty much for the same reason)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-26 14:51:38+00:00
> Most tools can only diagnose abnormalities that are common in training data, and models often don’t work as well outside of their test conditions.

I don’t understand this. All data in existence is fodder for training. Barring the privacy issue which the article implies as orthogonal, training data and actual data are the same set of things.

Test conditions should be identical to real conditions. What in the world is the article saying. What actual differences are there?

The only issue I can think of is when there is LLM like language logic in looking at the results of a scan. Like for example the radiologist looks at 30 sections of the image and they all have different relationships with each other and those relationships end up influencing the outcome. But I doubt it’s like that, radiology should be much simpler than learning a foreign language.
by bsoles | 2025-09-26 14:51:40+00:00
Like when my company's bosses decided:

- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.

- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

And always supported with "data".
by icedchai | 2025-09-26 14:52:12+00:00
If Sun had been more liberal with Solaris licensing on x86 in the early years (before, say, 2000), we might all be running Solaris servers today. Sun / Solaris was the Unix for most of the 90's through the dot-com crash.

Almost all early startups I worked with were Sun / Solaris shops. All the early ISPs I worked with had Sun boxes for their customer shell accounts and web hosts. They put the "dot in dot-com", after all...
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-26 14:52:15+00:00
>>Would be particularly interesting to see where they are in blue states

>The answer is going to be "the snooty inner ring suburbs and wealthy rural-ish commuter communities that already had overstaffed PDs harassing teenagers"

TFA is about Evanston, IL[0] which is in Cook County[1] and abuts the city of Chicago.

It is relatively wealthy, but is certainly not a "rural-ish commuter community," in fact it's not suburban either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_County%2C_Illinois
by netdevphoenix | 2025-09-26 14:52:26+00:00
That is not what I mean. Doing checks using your passport number is not good enough . It only proves that you someone used your passport number for a job. It doesn't prove it's you. It doesn't prove that you didn't swap with someone else (worker proxy). A digital id is a token fully controlled that opens compliance possibilities that are not possible or financially feasible by using just a passport number because the government does not control the passport numbers of everyone (especially those for which this policy is intended).

Think: the ability to verify that the id owner's face resembles the face of the id holder. The ability to check that the id owner address matches that of the id holder. The ability to flag employers containing id owner employees regularly failing those checks. The ability to do this regularly without previous notice to the id owner at national scale remotely or in person is a level of compliance you will never get even halfway with just using a passport number.
by masfuerte | 2025-09-26 14:52:34+00:00
They've already said you won't need a mobile phone. They mention phones as a deliberate distraction from the fact that they will be building a huge central database.

I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.

(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)
by motbus3 | 2025-09-26 14:53:08+00:00
I guess the guy above is right. It is about the data and the right to use your face and track you everywhere. This can be easily paired with that UK bonkers camera ai thing. They might not need to know who is illegal, but if the camera does not know you, you might need to explain yourself and show an id.

At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc
by tdeck | 2025-09-26 14:54:30+00:00
As someone who has never shoplifted in my life, this makes me deeply uncomfortable.

If it's acceptable for a business to use drones to tail a (suspected) shoplifter, what stops a business from using them to tail a regular customer to collect marketing data?

What if I am curious where someone I work with lives, is it OK to use a drone to follow them home?

I would argue that it's obviously not OK but it seems like there is no law against this in the US unless you have a restraining order, perhaps.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-26 14:55:09+00:00
I'm more concerned that the above reasoning is flawed just because it's untrue.

I don't know any yacht owning people but the few people I know with boats are very happy with it's size. The people looking for a football field on water are _limited_. Human desires are limited and if that limit can be achieved without the collective efforts of all humans then under our capitalistic model somebody is going to starve.

While I agree that the replacement of humans with AI would lead to joblessness, I think you'll see far sooner mass joblessness as a human with better technology can replace 50+ other humans (like containership engineer vs sailship crew).
by iamnothere | 2025-09-26 14:55:42+00:00
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!

This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
by garciasn | 2025-09-26 14:55:51+00:00
I have a degree in Public Administration. This is basically an MBA for the public sector; but, the difference between the two largely lies in an MBA looking for opportunities to maximize the business and its shareholders vs an MPA looking to implement policies that best serve the public good.

Government employees are NOT well-equipped to compete with private sector ones; they don't think like them and they don't act like them. Why? Because the public sector is driven by a completely different model: bottoms-up management, led by the citizenry, not led top-down to maximize shareholder value. In addition, because private sector jobs pay 2x+ what the same level in a public sector organization will pay and thus the candidate pool is simply not at the level that you would expect at a similarly sized private sector organization. Because of this flip-flopped model of operation (bottoms-up vs top-down) Public/Private partnerships are NOT equal arrangements and the private sector companies know exactly how to leverage these differences in their favor.

In this instance, a public sector employee may feel that paying more for a bus will better serve the public good because it /may/ be better engineered, have a longer lifetime, and offer value to the public that's above and beyond what a less expensive model will do. But! Even if the support staff look for multiple quotes from a variety of vendors, all of which may be at the cost level a private sector company may prefer, that public sector staff member may very well be directly overruled by the elected officials; who, for reasons that can only be hypothesized (take your pick: corruption, brand/personal preference, whatever) may prefer the more expensive vendors that were not included in the research and bidding process.

While I have laid out that the public sector is not well-equipped for public/private partnerships and business dealings, there are MANY reasons for this including: candidate pool, different underlying model of operation, and elected official decisioning.
by stronglikedan | 2025-09-26 14:56:07+00:00
> the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day.

I think that's more likely related to how little they actually sleep, and trying to fill their waking hours, more than it is related to an addiction. It seems to be a pattern with these people that only need 4-5 hours a day of sleep.
by noosphr | 2025-09-26 14:56:10+00:00
Yes, that's been the downside of these forever.

If you use quantized differentiation you can get away with using integers for gradient updates. Explaining how takes a paper and in the end it doesn't even work very well.

At university, way back at the end of the last AI winter, I ended up using genetic algorithms to train the models. It was very interesting because weights were trained along with hyper parameters. It was no where near practical because gradient descent is so much better at getting real world results in reasonable time frames - surprisingly because it's more memory efficient.
by astonex | 2025-09-26 14:56:10+00:00
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.

A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.

Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.

https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work
by roryirvine | 2025-09-26 14:56:10+00:00
What's causing the rattle?

In the UK, there were always a few buses in any given fleet that rattled more than others, especially when idling or at low revs - something to do with resonance with the body panels, I think. But that was back when diesel engines were universal, so hasn't really been a thing since hybrids and (more recently) BEVs took over.

Looks like New Flyer hybrids use BAE Systems' Hybridrive, which was fairly common in London during the 2010s but didn't produce noticeably excessive vibration as far as I remember. Is there something different about how the engines are mounted in US buses, I wonder?
by motbus3 | 2025-09-26 14:56:10+00:00
Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants? How big is it compared to, for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.

Or are those things somehow related? I would be crazily scared to know that immigrant care workers will leave NHS as most hospitals relies on them. The government already made clear they won't pay people more nor will give more benefits for NHS workers and I am quite sure not Brits will take those spots when Tesco express pays more for less hours of work with more benefits.
by michaelt | 2025-09-26 14:56:26+00:00
To the extent this is technically possible, if the gig economy companies wanted to do this, they could do it already.

When the driver signs up, check their passport or driving license in the normal manner, and take a matching portrait you keep on file. Any time you want to, compare a selfie to the portrait on file.

Reason they don't do this is it's profitable to hire people who can't legally work in the UK, if they can get away with it - and the government lets them get away with it.
by kypro | 2025-09-26 14:56:46+00:00
One of the problems the UK has is that our two primary government IDs – driver licenses and passports – are not universally issued. Instead, these IDs have requirements and must be applied for at a cost, so not everyone has one.

This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).

With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.

They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.
by clifdweller | 2025-09-26 14:56:47+00:00
that is basically the point the author missed. The PE license is to grant an individual a license for them to certify theirs and others works meets established guidelines. Now over time this may become true that something like level 2,3,4 are vague guidelines now but in future they will become more concrete. At that point it might become necessary to certify that a companies system meets those guidelines for the algorithms used.
by mothballed | 2025-09-26 14:56:58+00:00
>It's constitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was in the case Train v NYC. They are the ones who determine what laws are constitutional or not. You can disagree but their opinion is what is acted upon.

We're going in circles, I already addressed this.

>The president must sign spending bills and while he may be overridden with a veto that's the check and balance.

That's a check and balance.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-09-26 14:57:04+00:00
There is nothing undemocratic about checking whether you are compliant with employment regulations on a regular manner anymore than it is to check whether your gas installation is compliant with gas regulations or your voting registration is compliant with voting policy. It is completely orthogonal. You might not be in favour of a policy but that does not mean that the policy is undemocratic.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-26 14:57:10+00:00
I think if you're arguing "taxes are slavery" you are coming from a vantage point that is far too libertarian to have a constructive conversation. We can probably just short-circuit that by saying "The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?

Taxes aren't slavery; they're how we operate modern, functional, post-feudal societies (and whether they are actually "paying for" services or are "redistributing supply and demand more equitably by curtailing the spending power of the ones who have too much so that the ones who have too little can have access to resources at all" is an implementation detail for macroeconomists and operators of fiat currencies).

You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-09-26 14:57:13+00:00
Exact same story; Fedora has been so much more wonderful than I expected. Made me realise just how far the Linux desktop has really come these past years while Pop OS languished. I've tried the alpha, and while bugs were few, Cosmic doesn't look or feel like home to me. The slightly off positioning of items on the taskbar, the high contrast borders... It's speedy, but it's not for me.
by taeric | 2025-09-26 14:57:26+00:00
The idea that you can leverage competition to build public infrastructure things feels dubious, to me. Will try to take a dive on some of that literature.

At face value, though, public infrastructure is largely the sort of thing that enables many things with no obvious stakeholder that could have done it themselves. Certainly not in a way that would have an easy path to profits for the infrastructure.
by octo888 | 2025-09-26 14:57:28+00:00
The voters misunderstood too. How much evidence and examples from the period of 1997-2010 did people need? All a quick google away

A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated