MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cobzilla | 2025-10-18 21:37:12+00:00
He’s not selling the schematics for the “Produce Preamp”, that’s a freebie on his website.

I downloaded it. It’s a PDF of a circuit where instead of a 9v battery, there’s 2 nails and a banana.

Then he demos the sound in the video. A sound that could not possibly be produced by the circuit in the PDF or any reasonable variation of the circuit.

This is all presented without any tongue in cheek. It’s presented in the video, the website and PDF as being 100% real.

Yet, it’s objectively and indisputably fiction.

To go through all the trouble of setting this channel up and fabricating all the devices and the website with schematics and recording and editing the videos at a very high level seems extremely unlikely.

That’s a lot of work for very, very little or no gain. Unless I’m missing the big scam and there is a bunch of money to be made, but I don’t see it.

However, if this was AI slop. That’s 100% reasonable. Who cares, just write a prompt and out comes the video.

“Create a video of a new pedal that uses a banana for electricity.”

The whole thing has the feel of long AI hallucination for a vague prompt. It fits really well.

Except, I haven’t heard of any service that could generate a video with that level of quality and duration.

I totally expect that to be available sometime in the relatively near future. But from my understanding, currently available AI models can’t possibly be responsible for high quality videos of that length.

And given these videos have been showing up for many months makes the whole thing that much more strange.

It seems incredibly improbable that a person would put so much energy into creating high quality videos of nonsense for no purpose. Not impossible, but it just doesn’t add up.

It seems completely possible that, in 3 or 4 years time, publicly available AI services will be able to produce videos of this quality and duration.

I can’t think of any reasonable explanation for why these videos exist or for how they were made.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 21:37:38+00:00
I think if you read the thread history you'll see that I said nothing of the sort. But a conclusive answer to the question of how much direct genetic influence there is on intelligence (outside of disease/disability genetics) is very much not supported by current evidence. It's an open question. Right now: it's not looking great for the hereditarians (define them as "there is a very strong genetic component to cognitive ability"), but that could change as molecular genetic methods improve. Nobody knows.
by RandomBK | 2025-10-18 21:39:33+00:00
I see a lot of discussion in this thread stemming from some confusion+not reading the actual report[0].

Some key points:

1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme pressures.

2. The encryption was done via a variant of LUKS/dm-crypt, with the key stored on the NVRAM of a chip (Edited; not in TrustZone).

3. The recovery was done by transplanting the original chip onto a new working board. No manufacturer backdoors or other hidden mechanisms were used.

4. Interestingly, the camera vendor didn't seem to realize there was any encryption at all.

[0] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
by ben_w | 2025-10-18 21:40:12+00:00
> Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.

I'm sure I've seen people say this about language translation and playing go. Ditto chess, way back before Kasparov lost. I don't think I've seen anyone so specific as to say that about medical licensing exams, nor as vague as "write code", but on the latter point I do even now see people saying that software engineering is safe forever with various arguments given…
by XorNot | 2025-10-18 21:40:41+00:00
The NTSB report noted that if the TrustZone secure enclave system was being used, then yeah this data would be toast.

But it speaks more to Oceangstrs negligence that this situation even existed: why wasn't any potential encryption keys escrowed ashore to ensure they could be recovered later? This shouldn't have even been an issue.
Am I missing out in my 20s living in South Bay instead of SF?
by fishmeat | 2025-10-18 21:40:53+00:00
I've been living in South Bay for work (tech/AI) and family/relative (cheap rent, lower cost of living, convenience). I want to eventually settle down and get my own house in the Bay because my family lives here but torn between living and working in SF short term vs South Bay.

SF pros:

- Bigger AI scene, younger people, more cool network and job opportunities at the frontier of AI

SF cons:

- Low WLB, 996 culture, most likely I get paid in paper money, low safety, higher cost, further from family, traffic and parking sucks, SFH prices are insane.

South Bay pros:

- Very good WLB and family first culture, a lot safer neighborhoods, still in Bay Area, decent selection of AI opportunities, lower cost, close to family.

South Bay cons:

- Less young people, further from the heart of AI, more stable Big Tech opportunities also mean slower career and network growth, traffic sucks, SFH are also pricey.

Anyone with experience in both areas can comment? Is my FOMO justified?
by j1elo | 2025-10-18 21:41:06+00:00
Problem with that solution is that Youtube is not an independent company that one could be happy to pay for their services. You're paying Google, and there are more than enough reasons to not wanting to give Google any money at all.

That's the problem with corporations: they cover too much. I cannot pay Youtube while at the same time not giving an ounce of support to the company that wants to remove all remaining freedoms of the Android ecosystem.
by culi | 2025-10-18 21:41:32+00:00
This is true about a lot of sites and I'll often remove the unimportant part when saving or sharing urls for brevity sake. E.g.

https://apnews.com/article/4bb0bca02fab9b3d06ae6f45ac67b7ab

This is true for most news websites as well as online shopping sites
by yndoendo | 2025-10-18 21:42:47+00:00
There was a Standford professor that was wondering why he had void of cancer patients around 63 and 64. Turns out people wait to get on Medicare for treatment because they cannot afford it with their standard health insurance.

USA would save money in the long run with Universal health care. Since people in the US wait until it gets bad before seeking treatment. This means fights cancer at stage 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. Latter the stage the more it costs and less likely for success.

This is one reason foreign doctors come to the US to study and train. Modern countries with Universal Health Care treat at stage 1 and 2 with 3 and 4 being rare ... except for the USA. Need to study advance cancer and aggressive, this USA is a great place.

[0] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/03/Cancer-diagno...
by kadoban | 2025-10-18 21:42:53+00:00
That's likely an issue of tuning or the thermal paste is dried out or something. No particular reason the fans should have to go that hard immediately. The fan speed should really be a function of the liquid temperature more than the cpu temp. The cpu temp will fluctuate a good bit, but the water temp goes up quite slowly under load.

Is it an AIO, or a custom loop with a resevoir and such?

But yeah, short story: water cooling is very rarely worth it in a consumer pc. But it shouldn't sound like you're describing, it's just overcomplicated and too expensive.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-18 21:43:46+00:00
> I think if you read the thread history you'll see that I said nothing of the sort.

You said "the sort we have numbers from peer-reviewed articles on" is "not genetically causal". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624902

That's not true. There is peer-reviewed evidence for genetic causation.
by kjellsbells | 2025-10-18 21:44:29+00:00
Even if you are a govt that likes Trump, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the he and his administration are very much not "clean on opsec".

We have had, in no particular order: the boxes in the bathroom at mar-a-lago, the Chinese lady wandering around the property unescorted, the casual tweeting of classified satellite imagery, the adding of journalists to group chats, the use of unsecured phone messaging picked up by photographers. Then we have people in the presidential orbit demonstrably funded by adversaries (Tim Pope, Maria Butina). Oh and the obvious conflict of interest around the leaderships investments. Amd we havent even got to the blackmail risk posed by materials alleged in the Epsteim files.

If you were a regular civilian whose employer was looking to get you a clearance, any of these kinds of things would put your application in the shredder.

Given these facts, I would not expect any of the EU or FiveEyes partners to share everything they learn.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-18 21:44:41+00:00
> The way to do it without using a nullable column

I mean, you could, but having separate tables for every optional field would be an organizational and usability nightmare. Queries would be longer and slower for no good reason. Not to mention a gigantic waste of space with all those repeated primary keys and their indexes.

And you could have databases that prohibited NULL values, but we mostly don't, because they're so useful.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 21:45:16+00:00
There would need to be (1) an existing valid contract, (2) knowledge by the defendants of it, (3) intentional and unjustified inducements by the defendants to break it, followed by (4) an actual breach that (5) caused damages.

Doesn't seem like that would fit here.

This seems like more of an ethical dilemma than a legal one.
by Krasnol | 2025-10-18 21:45:26+00:00
> Or pay for a YouTube subscription?

At this point, if I had no choice like ublock: I'd still not pay them. Why should I? To enforce this behaviour so everybody suffers more? What about those people who can't afford a subscription? Why is their mind and attention free to be abused?

The advertisement industry has became disgustingly evil. I hate everything about it.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-18 21:45:59+00:00
I'll add this. When I first mentioned it to my Dr (GP, not ENT), he looked in my ears and saw scar tissue. That was all he had to go on.

I was also driving an old car w/ heavy cabin noise and the timing fits. I recently moved into a different old car and will see if anything changes.

edit: The last time I tried to gauge my freq, I put it at about 1150Hz. Today I would say it's closer to 5300Hz. I guess ignoring it includes ignoring changes.

ref: https://onlinetonegenerator.com/
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-18 21:46:13+00:00
First of all I said people who claim to be programmers and cannot write original code are either autistic or low intelligence. The emphasis there is on original code. Secondly, I know something about autism, because I have a child with autism.

Look at the comments in this thread. A guy asked a question about vanilla JavaScript, a completely valid question on a site about comments upon programming links, and yet notice all the comments that are instead not about that.

There are so many comments about writing React, which is not what this thread is about. There are so many comments from people talking about themselves instead of actually about programming, much less anything about vanilla JavaScript. There are also comments like yours that are instantly hostility towards anything about original code, a subject that you seem to find horrifying.

Yes, this is incredibly autistic. Some common traits of autism, among many more that each autistic person may or may not have:

* low social intelligence, which in this context displays when developers are only thinking about themselves, what's easiest for them, and cannot think about anything else such as users or business owners

* fragile ego, which in this context results in hostility at subjects that expose a developers shallow capabilities and results in false displays of high confidence to mask deeply felt insecurity

I got tired of working with immature people who, in a technical capacity, could only do a little more that copy/paste template code and were otherwise generally hostile because of high insecurity. I am now in a different line of work where I don't have babysit people.

Writing original code or writing applications without a giant framework isn't challenging, but the subject certainly feels like the world is caving in for a great many people who call themselves seniors or engineers.
by isr | 2025-10-18 21:46:24+00:00
Because it leaves it up to the object being called what to actually do with the message. The object you're talking to might be forwarding its messages to another object in another ruby instance on another machine (if the current machine is getting fully loaded, etc), and the caller would be none the wiser. And crucially, the caller wouldn't have to be modified to enable this. The logic for this would be entirely within the object being called.

So the difference isn't just with method_missing.

With "method calling" as you put it, the program blows up if that object doesn't have that method, WHEN YOU CALL IT.

Basically, this smalltalk oo paradigm is about shifting where you put more of your logic. At & around the "call" site, or within the object whom you're calling & entrusting to do something useful with it.

All hearkening back to Alan Kay's original ideas about biology influencing how we organise code, and having a program be 1000's of "little black boxes" where work gets done by all these boxes talking to each other.

Which is why smalltalk (& ruby implements the Smalltalk object model to its entirety) actually has an awful lot in common with Erlang & other BEAM runtimes, even though those are functional languages. Because once you get beyond the techy buzzwords, the main ethos behind them is actually quite similar.
by rayiner | 2025-10-18 21:46:28+00:00
Ireland is a homeland for Irish people. That was the whole point of the country. The same is true for my country. It was something achieved at great cost for the sake of a people.

How many Bangladeshis had Irish citizenship in 1950? Almost none. Ireland was 87% Irish as recently as 2006, probably more if you exclude residents with UK citizenship. Virtually anyone who doesn’t have Irish citizenship but whose grandparents did have Irish citizenship is ethnically Irish. For most European countries, there is no difference between “ethnicity” and “familial lineage” until recently.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-18 21:46:33+00:00
> There are also concerns about the quality of sequencing and false positives in all DTC genomics testing.

Even when the raw results are accurate there is a cottage industry of consultants and snake-oil sellers pushing bad science based on genetic testing results.

Outside of a few rare mutations, most people find their genetic testing results underwhelming or hard to interpret. Many of the SNPs come with mild correlations like “1.3X more likely to get this rare condition” which is extremely alarming to people who don’t understand that 1.3 times a very small number is still a very small number.

The worst are the consultants and websites that take your files and claim to interpret everything about your life or illness based on a couple SNPs. Usually it’s the famous MTHFR variants, most of which have no actual impact on your life because they’re so common. Yet there are numerous Facebook groups and subreddits telling you to spend $100 on some automated website or consultant who will tell you that your MTHFR and COMT SNPs explain everything about you and your ills, along with which supplements you need to take (through their personal branded supplement web shop or affiliate links, of course).
by mojomark | 2025-10-18 21:47:01+00:00
Didn't read. An LLM, of course, will think differently if it was trained natively on material written the "other" language (capturing the probablistic word associations inherent to the source material author's native language). However, if you train solely on English text and then simply translate the results to a different language, then no, there will be no difference. Seems pretty obvious.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-18 21:49:14+00:00
>Where are the huge open floor plans with an army of developers wearing noise-cancelling headphones?

30 years in the future, when everyone and their dog learned to code and the market got flooded with programmers.

If you look at SW from the NEXT era, there were like 1 to 5 programmers, all stallions, per SW product, so no wonder everyone had their own office.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-18 21:49:50+00:00
I'm not sure I agree.

If I have a column for the ID of the customer's current active subscription, and that column is NULL, it seems perfectly fine to interpret that the customer has no active subscription.

That is a valid inference. You don't need a separate has_active_subscription field.

On the other hand, your phone number example is just common sense. The database doesn't represent the external world. The database just knows the customer didn't provide a phone number.
by ben_w | 2025-10-18 21:50:12+00:00
> Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.

While true, I think it's fair to make certain guesses about other tech also being developed (such as, as you mentioned, batteries).

Even if they did not exist, constraints lead to conflicts, and conflicts can lead to exchanges of power.

(Different topic but same idea, constraint and conflict: when it comes to the never-ending battle of encryption, I do not see how to square the unstoppable force of "unbreakable encryption is very easy to make and vitally important to the use of the internet" with the immovable object that is "no state can survive when conspiracies are opaque to investigations and prosecutions").
by godelski | 2025-10-18 21:50:15+00:00
Just last week I said something inline with that[0]. Many people conflated my claim that Meta has a lot of good people with "Meta /is/ winning the AI race". I just claimed they had some of who I think are some of the best researchers in the field, but do not give them nearly the same resources or capacity to further their research that they give to these "rock stars". Tbh, the same is true for any top lab, I just think this happens more at Meta because Meta is so metric and rock star focused.

So I agree. The vision is misguided. I think they'd have done better had they taken that same money and just thrown it at the people they already have but who are working in different research areas. Everyone is trying to win my doing the same things. That's not a smart strategy. You got all that money, you gotta take risks. It's all the money dumped into research that got us to this point in the first place.

It's good to shift funds around and focus on what is working now, but you also have to have a pipeline of people working on what will work tomorrow, next year, 5 years, and 10 years. The people are there that can do that work. The people are there that want to do the work. The only thing is there's little to no people that want to fund that work. Unfortunately it takes time to bake a cake.

Quite frankly, these companies also have more than enough money to do both. They have enough money to throw cash hand over fist at every wild and crazy idea. But they get caught in the hype, which is no different than an over focus on the attribution rather than the process or pipeline that got us the science in the first place.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45554147
by vidarh | 2025-10-18 21:50:28+00:00
This is your example in Ruby:

isLarge = -> {|a| a > 100 } numbers.filter(&isLarge)

Or you could replace the first line:

isLarge = -> { _1 > 100 }

Some people hate that syntax, though. I think for trivial predicates like this, it's fine.
by culi | 2025-10-18 21:51:02+00:00
The biggest thing holding Ruby back is lack of gradual typing imo. I honestly think javascript is a better fit for IaC. Not only is already the language of the web (everyone has to know some javsacript) but JSDOC is supported by most IDEs giving it gradual typing. Many people don't realize jsdoc is typescript and is a full replacement.

Nowadays I like to reach for Julia for quick one-off scripts and webscraping. It has a beautiful and accessible syntax with built-in gradual typing. I would love to see it more widely adopted in the IaC world
by Alejandro9R | 2025-10-18 21:52:44+00:00
Completely agree. I've had some light/moderate floaters in my left eye which were very noticeable under a white screen, clean walls, or full bright sky in the evening. It came pretty sure because of a very stressful period at 27.

Here I am, 31. I have to look for them really really hard to see if they are still there. Only when I have a streak of stressful days and bad night sleep, they will be visible again. It comes without saying that I had to change my life in many, many aspects, not only due to these floaters. A much calmer life, better food, gym, financial security, better friends and people around me, and cultivate a spiritual being in some sense. The mind can be shaped in many many ways it's fascinating.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-10-18 21:53:15+00:00
> The current research advances sodium as a viable alternative for batteries, a vital step to combat the rarity and environmental damage of lithium. It's one of many steps ahead.

Curious what some of the many steps ahead are. Seems like these articles about battery breakthroughs WRT non-lithium chemistries come out frequently, but nothing ever seems to come to fruition, and lithium still dominates. Just want to know why all these breakthroughs never make it to industrial scale.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-18 21:54:51+00:00
> Most EVs batteries will outlast the lifetime of the car, with some acceptable loss of capacity. Some small number won’t, and that will be expensive

As far as most people are concerned that is just a claim that is made as they have no idea whether it is true. I am specifically talking about what is the perception.

Therefore it is seen as risky and for something like a car which most people see as a way to get from A to B, they don't want potential headaches.

> It’s the same thing.

No because one is already known and the other isn't as far as most people are concerned.

They also talk about whether these things are any good. They normally talk about the issues that other people have had. Any issue that seems like a PITA, will put them off when the existing vehicles typically don't have many of these issues.

I think we are still in the Early Adopter Stage for EVs and I don't know whether we will get out of it.
by pedalpete | 2025-10-18 21:54:58+00:00
I was hoping you would have said that the issue is that article is comparing a $50k SUV to a $30k work truck, and then turning the price drop into percentage drop.

I'd like to see them compare two similarly priced SUVs.

I am sure the ICE vehicle will still depreciate slower, but perhaps not as drastically different.

The buyers of these two vehicles used in the example are very different.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-18 21:55:49+00:00
Why did I post this banger? Because it's the weekend, and listen to the lyrics, they keep on giving. We don't have to be so serious all the time.

This song is about intellectual property. Is there a better theme song for HN/YC/startups?

If you have a different HN/YC/startup theme song proposal, please share. It might be fun.
by rgovostes | 2025-10-18 21:55:57+00:00
I thought that, in light of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45621067, we're only a few days from seeing the solution. However, the auction now reads

> Upon being notified, the Smithsonian immediately sealed Sanborn's archives for 50 years to protect Sanborn's intellectual property rights.

Sanborn actually showed off some of his worksheets during a PBS interview years ago, which I assume are the same documents later given to the Smithsonian. At one point I looked into buying the B-roll footage to take a closer look at them, but I discovered enterprising Kryptos sleuths had already done so years before.