MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brookst | 2025-09-27 01:34:57+00:00
Flash brights at them, as you would do with anyone else. I drive a lifted 4x4 and through honest oversight failed to re-adjust headlights after the lift.

Just took a few people flashing brights at me to make me realize and do the (very easy) adjustment to proper specs.

Doesn’t solve people behind you, but it’s not like they’re going to pull over and adjust anyway. Flash brights and consider it a favor to the person in front of the offender.
by card_zero | 2025-09-27 01:36:15+00:00
I dug up some antique privacy anxiety from Duncan Campbell in 1986, about the National Insurance numbercards introduced in 1984.

https://archive.org/details/onrecordsurveill0000camp/page/88...

It's an interesting museum piece.

> Through this new network, much personal information which the individual has to provide, for example to claim a benefit, or to an employer - will be routed through successive computers to wind up on a ‘central index’. Even if no new law is passed, the effect of the system will be to create a national population register which each individual is obliged to inform of changes of name and address (and often a great deal more). Moreover, by the same time, the majority of adults (on present plans) will have been issued with a National Insurance (NI) ‘Numbercard’, laying an easy basis for the future introduction of a national identity-card system.

> Since the start of 1984, a NI Numbercard - resembling a standard plastic credit card, complete with signature space and a magnetic strip encoding the bearer’s name and number — has been issued to everyone reaching the age of 16, and to anyone else registering in the NI system for the first time or applying for a new card.

> Eventually, the cards could be used in automatic readers, similar to the present automatic telling machines (ATMs, or cash dispensers) installed by most banks.

> Despite government claims to the contrary, the Lindop committee concluded that the British NI number was already close to being used as a personal identity system. Although no further government proposals have been made for the use of the NI Numbercard, it is fairly certain that - for benefit claimants at least - its carrying will become obligatory. It did not take long for suggestions about compulsory carrying of NI cards to creep into public discussion. In August 1984, in what NCCL called the ‘thin end of a nasty wedge’, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons suggested that casual workers should be issued with the new Numbercards and required to produce their cards when being paid - so that information about payments made to them could be collated successfully by the Inland Revenue.

Here's also a picture of the thing in an advert in Smash Hits:

https://archive.org/details/smash-hits-5-18-june-1985/page/n...

I think they got rid of the magnetic strip at some point, and it never became mandatory to carry them or show them.
by NAHWheatCracker | 2025-09-27 01:40:57+00:00
My ISP in a small rural town supported IPv6. I have a few personal projects that only have a public v6 address because I don't want to pay AWS for an v4 address.

It worked fine for a year and a half after I moved in, then they did some work and suddenly no IPv6. At least I could enable 6to4 on my router, but that has intermittent issues.

As someone who wishes IPv4 would just die, I wish I had options to push back on such nuisances.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-27 01:41:45+00:00
> The only thing that matters is - Have you personally implemented your ideas in the real world or not?

Yes.

And I have made the mistake of "being a dictator" early in my career, only to learn that collaboration and valuing team members yields success much more often than me unequivocally imposing my viewpoint due to reporting structure.

> It is irrelevant what you can "confirm" about me and my views - what a pompous thing to say!

If you have management philosophies which differ from the limited communications in this thread, then obviously I am unaware of them until and unless you decide to share them here. Until such time, all I can do is draw conclusions from what you have posted thus far.

As to "what a pompous thing to say!"

This is the second time in this thread you have projected a judgemental position regarding my prose. The first time can easily be rationalized as perhaps a reaction "in the moment" or a poor choice of words. Now that you have done so again, I have to surmise the origin resides in yourself.
by ii41 | 2025-09-27 01:42:40+00:00
About the `if else` producing a value matter. Well, if you look at things that way, C can be said to be syntactic sugar of assembly, as for every C program you can write equivalent assembly. `if else` producing value is very useful because it allows you to write if else wherever a value is expected. You can call methods on an `if else` or pass one as an argument of function. When such an expression is sufficiently complex your equivalent code using non-value-producing `if else` would be a lot more verbose and unreadable.
by reddit_clone | 2025-09-27 01:43:20+00:00
There are other benefits.

- You can read your favourite books every couple of years and not be bored.

- You can watch your favourite Movies and TV Serials every few years. (almost time for Expanse rewatch..)

- IMO it makes you a better/gentler person. I don't hold grudges because I can't be arsed to remember why exactly I was mad at someone.
by Spivak | 2025-09-27 01:43:29+00:00
Technically on Bluesky even if you don't own your own domain you can still move all your stuff to a competitor and everything will still work. The only thing you can't do is keep your original handle but no "links" to your account (posts, followers, comments) will be broken because there's a stable identifier for your account that's independent of your handle. You will still be verifiably the same person on the other server.
by koolala | 2025-09-27 01:44:37+00:00
"As of 2015, less than 1% of polypropylene generated was recycled.[57] Heating degrades the carbon backbone more severely than for polyethylene, breaking it into smaller organic molecules, because the methyl side group of PP is susceptible to thermo-oxidative and photo-oxidative degradation." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-27 01:45:45+00:00
> It feels partly true

I think that's the most we can ever expect from studying a complex system.

On the arbitrariness, I wonder how it goes if a triggering event happens, the circumstances are retroactively prioritized as well, but down the line the event itself gets forgotten/deprioritized.

In computer terms, it's probably not some atomic transaction that will be fully rolled back, and it probably can misfire as well, so there must be a wealth of memories that are attached to the same prioritization principle but in some broken way.
by georgecmu | 2025-09-27 01:47:06+00:00
Pyrolysis is a less energy intensive way to produce hydrogen, and does deserve more attention. But it still requires methane as a feedstock.

So why is methane as feedstock a problem?

Isn't it better to spend less energy convert a ubiquitous, but environmentally harmful gas into hydrogen along with useful materials, than spend 4x more energy to convert a critical resource -- fresh water -- into hydrogen without any valuable by-products?
by toyg | 2025-09-27 01:47:13+00:00
> People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media

Disagree. The punk phenomenon was largely about reclaiming that ownership and agency over cultural output, and it was massive in the 70s/80s/90s. The early web was very punk in attitude, with people basically self-publishing. Even in the '00s, there was still a clear distinction between "corporate" portals and grassroots.

This phenomenon where even creatives and intellectuals are Just Fine with playing in someone else's heavily-tweaked, hyper-monetized sandbox, is a new development.
by ajb | 2025-09-27 01:48:23+00:00
I wonder if we should take seriously the idea that the brain can process information faster in emergencies, rather than this just being our perception. After all, we know our neurons work orders of magnitudes more slowly than transistors, so there would seem to be plenty of room for increase. Obviously there must be some biological reason why we're not usually faster, but perhaps it doesn't preclude a temporary speedup.
by radq | 2025-09-27 01:49:46+00:00
The 'point' skill is trained on a ton of UI data; we've heard of a lot of people using it in combination with a bigger driver model for UI automation. We are also planning on post-training it to work end-to-end for this in an agentic setting before the final release -- this was one of the main reasons we increased the model's context length.

Re: chart understanding, there are a lot of different types of charts out there but it does fairly well! We posted benchmarks for ChartQA in the blog but it's on par with GPT5* and slightly better than Gemini 2.5 Flash.

* To be fair to GPT5, it's going to work well on many more types of charts/graphs than Moondream. To be fair to Moondream, GPT5 isn't really well suited to deploy in a lot of vision AI applications due to cost/latency.
by gwern | 2025-09-27 01:51:07+00:00
I think OP is an instance that proves the point

this is a lazy, clumsy editing attempt, done through a document registration service which exists to prevent exactly this and yet, you have to be an experienced nerd (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Garrett has a doctorate and decades of software development experience) who will jump through a bunch of hoops to even begin to build a case beyond he-said-she-said. And he still doesn't have a settlement or criminal conviction in hand, so he's not even half done... Or look at the extensive forensics in the Craig Wright case just to establish simple things like that they were edited or backdated to a legally acceptable level.

Meanwhile, the original PDF edit in question took maybe 5 minutes with entry-level PDF tools.
by georgecmu | 2025-09-27 01:52:47+00:00
On the subject of methane pyrolysis, it turns out if you look at the Gibbs free energy calculation, about half of the energy of methane combustion is released from the formation of water, and the other half from the formation of carbon dioxide.

About 70% of the energy is in hydrogen, 30% is in carbon. 1 GJ of methane weighs about 20 kg, 5 kg of which comprise hydrogen. At 142 MJ/kgH2 (higher heating value, which implies condensation of the produced water), 710 MJ out of that 1 GJ is due to hydrogen.

With a 60%-70% efficient hydrogen fuel cell, about 50% of the electricity generated from hydrogen from pyrolysis of methane would drive the process, and 50% could go into the grid.
by Nursie | 2025-09-27 01:53:39+00:00
Of course it won’t help. Never claimed otherwise. That’s my whole point - while everyone’s lives and the state of the country seem to get worse, people blame the other and look for the person offering them easy answers.

If their lives were looking good, if government services weren’t a mess, and if they perceived the government was actually changing things for the better, reform would have a hard time finding suckers to vote for them.

The small boats issue is enough in the public eye it’s going to have to be tackled. But beyond that, reform need to be beaten by the UK government fixing things and making the UK optimistic about the future, rather than just same-old same-old and the whole place feeling like it’s in managed decline.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-09-27 01:54:30+00:00
Original commenter here. I don't disagree with your larger point. However, it turns out that the default settings for PostgreSQL have been super conservative for years; as a stable piece of infrastructure they seem to prefer defaulting to a constrained environment rather than making assumptions about resources. To their credit, PostgreSQL does ship with sample configs for "medium" and "large" deployments which are well-documented with comments and can be simply copied over the original default config.

I happen to have a good bit of experience with PostgreSQL, so that colored the "5 minutes" part of it. Still, most of the time, you "have" more than 5 minutes to create the orchestrator's deployment config for the service (which never exists by default on any k8s-based orchestrator). I'm simply saying to not be negligent of the service's own config, even though a default exists.
by saghm | 2025-09-27 01:55:04+00:00
I fully understand what you're saying; I just don't agree with it. For starters, people can be complex and have more than one goal. The effect of making an open source project isn't necessarily just the utility of the project itself, and if some of those other potential effects are desired, the best way to do things won't necessarily be the same as if there's only one output that someone cares about.

For another thing, even if there aren't any other specific effects that are desired, there still might be some that are specifically not wanted, and avoiding those might be important. Mr. Beast is a exactly the type of example that demonstrates this point; by focusing on making the "best" YouTube content as measured purely by popularity, he's done all sort of things that someone might very understandably want to avoid. I agree that he's not confusing, but that's not the issue with him. He's extremely transparent in how little he cares about whether what he does actually helps anyone other than himself (or if he hurts other people in the process of helping himself). I suspect this is quite different from the mentality of most open source developers, who are putting in personal time and effort towards contributing to something that realistically has little likelihood of direct personal benefits for those involved. What you're perceiving as a lack of focus comes across to me as having the humility and thoughtfulness to try to look at the big picture and understand one's actions in the context of a larger environment that isn't improved in the long term by pursuing a single narrow goal to the exclusion of literally everything else.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-09-27 01:55:14+00:00
Your personal life is abundant with meaningful human activity that cannot at all be explained by money incentives. The principal agent problem has this same problem: once we stop talking about money, “interests” can be vague and overlapping, making the problem disappear with scrutiny.

To me, a great majority of problems in the US fundamentally boils down to people looking for markets and money where there aren’t any. Great examples include rising healthcare costs (what is the right price to pay for saving a child’s life, for example? Culturally, it’s basically unlimited!) whereas rising legal costs are NOT seen as a crisis (suing other people over BS grievances, unlike saving lives, is not compulsory); infrastructure investment (cars don’t make financial sense everywhere and everything all the time, but they’re REALLY cozy, so we will spend exorbitant amounts of money on infrastructure for them compared to everything else); the obesity crisis (eating feels GOOD, even if it costs EXORBITANT amounts of money); worsening education outcomes; lack of growth of alternatives to single family homes…
by adetrick | 2025-09-27 01:55:39+00:00
Hi all, I recently published a framework on GitHub for creating neural networks, including feed forward, recurrent (RNN/LSTM) and transformer models. It's built from scratch and is meant to be a simpler alternative to Keras for sequential data/time series forecasting. It's really fast too. Is this something that could be of interest to practitioners? Looking for feedback! Thanks
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-27 01:56:16+00:00
Most of my devices have had ways to turn them off.

Router has a button which disable all lights until it's pressed again, monitors have the setting in their menus.

The only device thats shining brightly in my home is a storage controller I've got in my home server, with no way of turning it off - or at least dimming it down
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-09-27 01:56:38+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.

It definitely depends. The traditional yellow school buses here (Canada) use diesel, so they need things like glow plugs [0] and block heaters [1] to be able to run in the winter. But even that only helps so much, so when the nighttime lows are below –40°C, they cancel the busses since they know that they won't run.

Most of the city busses here use natural gas, and they're considerably more reliable in the cold weather but if they're parked for too long on a really cold day (even while running), the brakes will freeze up and they won't be able to move [2].

Similarly, the busses need a fairly powerful heating system, since it's tricky to heat a large space when it's really cold and the front door is open half the time. But conversely, most of the busses have no A/C.

Adding glow plugs, and block heaters, and brake dryers shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a more reliable natural gas bus might be double the price of an unreliable diesel one.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_plug

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)#Disad...
by gus_massa | 2025-09-27 01:58:34+00:00
It's hard to be sure, but Quantum Computing is useful only in a few specific problems, for example to calculate the Fourier Transform, because it's easy to parallelize and each part needs a very similar operations. With some clever trick, this can be used to factorize numbers. But it's not clear how to se it to solve arbitrary problems, so I guess a quantum AI is very difficult.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-27 01:58:38+00:00
It's a tough problem.

From the viewpoint of conservation, never mind climate change, it seems we would all win if people who live in tropical forests could be paid to keep them standing.

The thing is the money has to be sustained because they're going to keep living there, and it also has to go to those people and not go to the "tropical gangsters" who run their governments.

It may well be that those countries are dysfunctional and unequal because of the legacy of colonialism but today what those countries need to do is fix the dysfunction regardless of who pays who and just agreeing to pay them $X certainly won't help on it's own, particularly if you think reparations mean you paid $X and now it is all cool.

NGOs like the Gates Foundation have had some success bypassing the tropical gangsters and providing services directly but I believe in the old-fashioned Western and conservative idea that countries like that should develop their economies, tax their people, and be accountable to provide services. In the neoliberal regime Western countries have struggled to do this -- and even if the US has benefited greatly from the current open trading situation, people in the US don't believe it!
by _aavaa_ | 2025-09-27 01:59:46+00:00
Water is critical but not hard to get. The energy and cost required to take a m3 of dirty water and turn it into pure water is a rounding error compared to the energy required to hydrolyze it.

Yes methane is an environmental problem, even small methane leakages have a large GHG impacts. But the best way to deal with that environmental problem is to not pull it out of the ground in the first place

Plus for pyrolysis, you have to deal with the carbon which makes up 75% of the methane by weight. A non-trivial issue.
by accrual | 2025-09-27 01:59:55+00:00
> You smell the same unique smell and it immediately takes you back to the time and place. At least that’s how it works for me.

I have experienced this too. Recently I was in new place I've never been before and while waiting in line at a shop, I randomly smelled something that instantly gave me déjà vu for my very early childhood, like age 5 or less. It was wild how vivid and fleeting it was - it lasted only for a moment but I remember the sensation.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-27 02:00:23+00:00
> from promoting terrorism via UNRWA schools

Massive eyeroll. These stories you've linked to are overcooked propaganda, where any teacher who thinks palestinians are being treated poorly - because they are living in an apartheid state, essentially an open-air prison - is labelled as promoting hate or terrorism.

You could just as easily write a report about israeli schools teaching hate, and promoting terrorism if you sat in and heard how they teach a skewed version of the history of the conflict, or cherry pick teachers who's social media was angry in the wake of oct 7th. Harder story to sell to the ny times tho.

17 year olds can be combatants. Sure. So either all of the dead children are 17 year old combatants or you’re ok with some child murder. Exactly how much child murder are you ok with?

How much journalist murder are you ok with?

How much aid worker murder are you ok with?

How much collective punishment are you ok with?

All of these things are happening - there is no doubt - the only thing we’re debating is exactly how much has happened. Is there a number you wouldn’t be ok with? What specific percentage of the >65k dead would have to be innocent before you’d have a problem with it? 50%… 75%… 95%?
by georgecmu | 2025-09-27 02:00:31+00:00
Exactly right.

Carbon black has the average CO2 intensity of almost 4 kgCO2/kgC [1] and its conventional production is so dirty and low-margin, that companies have been walking away from their plants rather than implement EPA-mandated upgrades. [2]

[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fd161c5b1bc2872873bd...

[2] https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/business/article2703292...
by kazinator | 2025-09-27 02:01:28+00:00
That time I drove to the store three years ago to pick up some milk and bananas, I totally don't remember where I parked.

Memorable moments have to be different:

- They can't be repeating signals that are uninteresting (e.g. remembering a particular time you brushed your teeth)

- They can't be random noise (remembering the pattern of some ceiling tiles or something).

Hofstadter's "aperiodic crystals" concept is related to this.
by terribleperson | 2025-09-27 02:01:57+00:00
I imagine it would be fairly hard to flawlessly forge a split document even today, at least if you used paper with long fibers and the edges were intact. Even if you match the cut perfectly, I'd bet that under a microscope you could tell that cut fibers on the two halves don't match. A remarkably solid approach considering the simplicity.

The split tally is similarly elegant.

Of course, just giving a notary a copy works almost as well.
by Nursie | 2025-09-27 02:02:30+00:00
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.

Respectfully I disagree. We have had curated, manufactured pop, built by committee and sung by pretty mouthpieces with no emotional connection, for a long time now, and they make big money.

And look at the vocaloid stuff too.

Those who care, care. Everyone else?