MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-10-11 11:39:33+00:00
> My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction

That's a huge part of it but not only. Tech is being used to remove humans from the loop of interactions, people feel disdain to have to answer a robot when trying to call somewhere to get support (banks, telcos, etc.), they also disdain being surveilled all the time, online or offline, it's enabled by "tech"; there's disdain for applications to jobs, grants (scientific or cultural) being triaged by robots, one just feel swallowed by a system they have no power to appeal, the robots decided and there's no one to talk to about it.

There's a lot of tech that is useful, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think the disdain comes only from social media/phone addiction, those are just the more visible, talked about parts of it. In my immediate circle of the non-tech people they just constantly feel the encroaching of tech mediating real humans, we're being herded by a multitude of systems working on their own programming, and people just defer to those systems.

A prime example of such systems going haywire was the British Horizon Post Office scandal, a system to automate detection of fraud was trusted more than any human, causing untold suffering to postmasters flagged as criminals, pushing some to the point of suicide.

The trend for now is for this to only increase, more automated systems taking over decision-making roles, people who would be making decisions just blindly deferring to the system, with no recourse or way out for anyone affected.

It's bleak, it's understandable that people don't like this. I've been working in the tech industry for 20+ years and I don't like what it is now.
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-10-11 11:39:34+00:00
How many (public and private) colleges does the United States even need? 100, maybe? 50? 25? I think too many people have been going to college over the past, oh, 40 years or so, and part of that is because we have so many freaking colleges and universities. We don't need so many. There are so many jobs out there that do not require a degree, and even more that should not require a degree.
by mcdonje | 2025-10-11 11:41:15+00:00
The sad demise of Robin Williams made me a believer of assisted suicide. The option to go out with dignity should be available to everyone.

That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. That needs to be solved. Seems like an easy solve. Just don't do it.

There is a cost reduction incentive, though, which is why it happens. Costs can be reduced for abled people by convincing them to exercise and eat more fiber, so the same pressure can do good instead of evil. At some point we have to decide to care about people.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-11 11:43:04+00:00
> Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game?

Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
by Simulacra | 2025-10-11 11:43:26+00:00
Ever since I watched my father waste away in agony and die in a veterans home, it has become my greatest fear in life to suffer until the bitter end. I choose euthanasia because I don't want to put my family through that, and the last thing I want to do, if you'll pardon me, is to waste away in my own urine and feces in what will likely be a sub optimal care situation.
by vitorbaptistaa | 2025-10-11 11:43:30+00:00
Thank you for sharing this. My grandpa passed away earlier this year at the young age of 97. We discovered a kidney cancer and decided not to treat him and bring him back home.

During his final days, he became unresponsive, only sleeping. The doctors gave us the option of feeding him through a tube. We made the hard decision of not doing it. Gave him all the medicine to help his body heal, but no invasive procedures.

We stayed by his side for the next 5 days. Playing songs that he enjoyed. Audiobooks that he loved. And just taking care of him.

Finally, his breath became slower and slower until it stopped and he passed away. I had the opportunity of being beside him during his last breath.

The passing of loved ones is always difficult, but I am grateful for how he went. He lived a full life and was incredibly healthy until the end.

Without knowing, we decided on a sallekhana-like process for him. It was the right thing to do.

Thank you for showing me this.
by bramhaag | 2025-10-11 11:44:13+00:00
I think it's beautiful he got to go out on his own terms, when he felt it was the right time to do so.

I'm often reminded about a case in my own country: a young person had decided it was time to end her life after struggling for many years, without a sign of improvement. She was denied the right to euthanasia. After multiple failed suicide attempts, she went for the nuclear option and jumped in front of a train.

Everyone deserves to die in a dignified and humane way, not in multiple pieces or with a mind deteriorated beyond recognition. Forcing prolonged suffering is unnecessarily cruel. I wish more countries were as progressive with euthenasia as Switzerland.
by bmacho | 2025-10-11 11:44:27+00:00
The system is periodical; not counting the absolute angle but the velocities, angular velocities, and the angle at the joint are all periodical functions.

When the angle at the joint is 180° the Energy and Angular momentum determines v_1 and v_2, the velocities of the masses. It is known that Energy and Angular momentum both conserve.

Therefore the system will play out the same after states when the inner joint is 180°, and all the parameters will be periodical between 2 such states.

You can observe this in the demonstration in TFA: set gravity to 0, and observe how the graph rotates, especially the furthest points from the origin (where the angle at the joint is 180°).

edit: there are probably 2 different solutions for when the joint angle is 180°? I've found a graph where one furthest place from the origin is really pointy, and then the other is rather round.
by Pannoniae | 2025-10-11 11:44:30+00:00
>I think this take is an extremely subjective take.

Okay fair but that's all takes on this site :)

Yes, vertexAttribPointer is a footgun (in my project I wrote an analyser to generate a compiler error when you write it down...) but luckily in modern OpenGL it doesn't matter because you have separated vertex format. The names are confusing because it's legacy shit but the functionality is there. It's very much not as clean as other APIs but it gets the job done.

If you stick to the modern versions (so bindVertexBuffer / vertexAttribFormat / VertexAttribBinding) and do one VAO per vertex format, it's quite nice. And just forbid using the old ones. ;)

More broadly, I admit it's a subjective thing but I find these issues much smaller than like, broader conceptual issues. You mix the function names up a few times then you learn not to do it. But when an API is just fundamentally unergonomic and inflexible, you can't really get past that. Maybe you get used to it after a while but the pain will always be there....
by 0xEF | 2025-10-11 11:45:08+00:00
I think the suggestion needs more thought, but I don't necessarily disagree with the idea of making my exit before the dementia really sets in. I've directly cared for two family members who suffered from it (collective 5 years of my life, which I'd like to think gives me a pretty good view of what the disease can actually do to people) and I decided for myself that I'd rather be quietly killed than put my loved ones through what I went through as a caretaker. While also trying to work a full-time job and maintain my own sanity while I watched people I'd known all my life be destroyed, becoming tortured versions of themselves like something out of a body-snatchers horror film.

We, the loved ones, made the decisions to keep them going and I wonder how fair that was to them. We tend to not want to let people go, choosing to sacrifice quality of life for the sufferer and those around them for, what, a few fleeting moments of possible clarity? The opportunity to say goodbye to someone who may or may not even understand what is happening?

The events I went through with my family hurt us in ways that will not likely ever heal, despite effort on at least a few of our part, and it did leave me wondering if I would put my son or wife through that should something similar ever happen to me. I decided against it, seeing as I am at the age where these are very real possibilities. In the US, we have DNRs ("do not resuscitate") and living wills that offer prior directives, but something like assisted suicide is not allowed here unless some very extreme circumstances are met, because insurance companies and hospitals make more money from suffering people than dead ones. I'm a strong advocate of the right to die, but it is a decision that needs to be made some extensive consideration and documentation before one actually needs it.
by zenmac | 2025-10-11 11:45:09+00:00
>In October 2025, data stolen from the Salesforce....

Seems like a salesforce leak. Not to single out sales force here. Could easily be fill in the ____ big corp. When are people going to get there is no absolute digital security. And at currently state, it is much more secure to NOT have all the data aggregated in one place. Of course this would go against the data mining operation. We should look at this from a perspective that benefits the user in the long term.

Server/relay should be very thin layer NOT storing any identifiable info about the user except for public keys. All other info should be stored locally where ONLY the user has access to them.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-11 11:47:03+00:00
That’s the problem. If there’s a financial incentive people will find way to push it.

That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this.

The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.
by chrismorgan | 2025-10-11 11:47:50+00:00
The numbers still feel pretty outlandish to me.

The biggest factor in your count, and I think it is the one with the highest ceiling, is smart devices. Trouble is, even by sources like https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/average-number-of..., around half of all households still have zero, and the average household has only 2.6 people.

In this thread (from its root), we have various users defending the reasonableness of the numbers, some providing numbers in their own houses: 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 23, 28, 34, over 50, 60+. Averaging, I’ll say, about 27, and that’s with two pretty big outliers—if you excluded them (maybe reasonable, maybe not), you’d be down to 19.5. And these sorts of users are already likely to be above-average, it’s the nature of HN, compounded by them being the ones commenting (confirmation bias). Yet already (with the fiddling of removing what I’m calling outliers) they’re under the claimed average. And for each one of them, there’s another household with zero smart home devices; and the 20% of the population with no broadband are, I imagine, effectively using zero wifi devices, though discounting in this way is a little too simplistic. However you look at it, the average will drop quite a bit. In fact, if you return to the original 27 and simplify the portion of the population without smart home devices to a 30% zero rate (mildly arbitrary, but I think reasonable enough as a starting point) and let the other 70% be average… your 27 has dropped to about 19. In order to reach the 21 across the population, you’d need to establish these HN users, defenders of high wifi device counts, to be below average users of wifi devices, which is implausible.

If the number was 10, I’d consider it plausible, though honestly I’d still expect the number to be lower. But I think my reasoning backs up my initial feeling that 21 is pretty outlandish for your national average. I’d like to see Deloitte Insights’ methodology; I reckon it’s a furphy. I bet it’s come from some grossly misleading survey data, or from sales figures of devices that are wifi-capable even though half of them never get used that way, or from terrible sampling bias (surveys are notorious for that), or something like that. Wouldn’t be the first wildly wrong or grossly misleading result one of those sorts of companies have published.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-11 11:47:52+00:00
Replit has a lot of "value" that's actually dead weight that's going to fall by the wayside as AI gets better and humans move out of the loop. Cursor and the IDE agent companies have the same problem. They need to cannibalize their products to build for the fully autonomous engineering future, but I'm 95% certain that they won't, and the business that DO focus on full automation and moving the human out of the loop will eat their lunch.
by cornholio | 2025-10-11 11:48:01+00:00
I wonder when we will see generative AI codecs in production. The concept seems simple enough, the encoder knows the exact model the decoder will use to generate the final image starting from a handful of pixels, and optimizes towards lowest bitrate and minimum subjective quality loss, for example, by letting the decoder generate a random human face in the crowd, or give it more data in that area to steer it towards the face of the team maskot, as the case may be.

At the absolute compression limit, it's no longer video, but a machine description of the scene conceptually equivalent to a textual script.
by em500 | 2025-10-11 11:48:26+00:00
I'm surprised and fascinated that this is apparently legal in Switzerland. The Netherlands, famous for allowing assisted suicide, has pretty strict criteria for this[1].

In particular, the physician must "be satisfied that the patient’s suffering is unbearable, with no prospect of improvement", which from this article sounds far from the case here.

[1] https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/is-euthanasia-al...
by ThatPlayer | 2025-10-11 11:48:54+00:00
Not just loading times, but I expect more games do more aggressive dynamic asset streaming. Hopefully we'll get less 'squeeze through this gap in the wall while we hide the loading of the next area of the map' in games.

Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5 games off USB anymore.
by delusional | 2025-10-11 11:49:09+00:00
> Lack of GPS essentially killed the resurrected Pebble for me. > GPS > Do not need a phone to be connected to function

I don't really think you're in the target demographic for a pebble at all. It sounds like you want a standalone device that's essentially a smartphone on your wrist. I know you say you don't want it to be a smartphone, but if you want battery-life, a GPS, and phone independence, that's the product you're going to get.

Pebble is (and was) more of a smartphone companion, it has basically no smart functionality on its own.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-10-11 11:53:05+00:00
thats not a general substitution since you omit the latent qualifier.

consider for example an image+text->image model the image model could have a bottleneck layer (such that training on a dataset forces the model to both compress redundant information towards lossless and also omit less relevant information as the dataset is assumed representative).

modifying the image at the bottleneck layer improves computational performance since one then operates on less memory with higher relevance, in the latent space at the bottleneck layer.

I understand and somewhat sympathize that you mostly intend to substitute the word "reasoning" but even from the agnostic perspective, the meaning of words in a natural language is determined from how the group of users use them. I don't see you complain about overloading meanings for 99.99% of other words in our dictionaries, open any and you'll see many.

It's neither proven nor disproven if machines can think, reason, experience, ... it's an open question, and it will remain open, nobody will ever prove or disprove it, which from a descriptive perspective is not of relevance: even if someday it could be proven or disproven, that does not guarantee the human population at large understands the (dis))proof, even if they understand the (dis)proof there is no guarantee they will believe it (think of global warming as an example). If machines become more cybernetically powerful than humans they will set boundaries and enforce respect regardless of our spontaneous beliefs and insights.

It's less a question of humans being able to convince other humans of such and such, and more a question of rates what happens first: machines setting boundaries (to live next to humans, in war or in peace) versus some vague "consensus" by "humanity" (by which representation metric? the beliefs of tech leaders? of the media owners? of politicians?).
by sodapopcan | 2025-10-11 11:53:23+00:00
Ya, yes sorry, well aware of what `%` is, I was leaving out a lot of context there. Of course, as it turns out I was thinking in terms of my own mappings and not even then, I'm not sure why I thought `` came into play because my mapping is `gysiw<space>` (`w` can be replaced with other text objects) which populates the commandline with `%s/\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>//g` (and moves the cursor left twice). I just press `` a lot, sometimes even before replacing because I have it remapped to not autojump to the next match and rather `set hlsearch`. So ya, I'm all kinds of wrong bitten by my own config, lol.
by simonsarris | 2025-10-11 11:53:58+00:00
Parent comment was correct to say "Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery." Actually they're extremely common anywhere any kind of finish construction is involved, including DIY.

Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in your car for everyone to enjoy). They speed up curing. I don't recommend them! But they're very, very ordinary. If you want a product without them, you have to go out of your way to get it, unfortunately. (I recommend Tried and True Danish oil, which you'll find is significantly more expensive, and takes far longer to cure, but has no ill health effects)

https://www.rustoleum.com/MSDS/ENGLISH/65151H.pdf
by nabla9 | 2025-10-11 11:54:00+00:00
Canada. The critique is that people opt into euthanasia because of poverty, and that the government sees MAID economical alternative to investments in social programs and welfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada

I don't think things are as bad, but I also think that old age in poverty is a valid reason for euthanasia if there is no alternative. If the society is cruel to the poor, holding poor elderly as hostage to improve situation is cruelty on top of the cruelty.
by fleebee | 2025-10-11 11:54:01+00:00
That'd open a whole new can of worms. Browsers are already gargantuan pieces of software even with the relatively primitive tags we have today. We don't need to further argue with each other what the <toc> tag should look and behave like, deal with unforeseen edge cases and someone's special use cases which end up requiring them to implement the whole thing with <ol>s and <li>s anyway.
by 0xEF | 2025-10-11 11:54:30+00:00
Old Pebble watches are still very useful due to the Rebble community. I am still rocking my OG Pebble to this day because of them, so they get all the kudos, here.

In fact, because my old one still works for my needs, it's making it difficult for me to invest in a new Pebble, despite wanting to support the project. Part of that is the idea of upgrading for the sake of upgrading directly opposes my ethos of keeping as many electronic devices out of landfills as possible, but part of that is also straight up nostalgia that I get to experience every day when I use what essentially amounted to the perfect watch for me.
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 11:54:31+00:00
> Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions.

This claim explains a lot about our previous interactions. It's also the polar opposite of my experience.

I have never heard a single advocate of nuclear advocating for fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do it myself. I've also never heard them speak against solar (and again I also don't do this). It's purely about defending nuclear from fear-mongering and trying to make it possible faster, rather than being crushed under ridiculous and unjustified regulations.
by piva00 | 2025-10-11 11:54:31+00:00
I can't find the article right now because the keywords for searching just bring a lot of noise around OpenAI articles, pure slop most of the time, but Sam Altman said in an interview something around the lines "real innovation happens only through financial innovation" (or enabled by, can't remember the exact words), a statement that triggered a lot of red alarms in my head when I read it.

It's the same type of stuff Enron, the CDOs/CDSs from the 2008 crisis, and other financial frauds through history have thought. Let's repackage this unattractive financial product into layers of other stuff, hide the risks, rebrand it as something new and exciting, promising returns, and fuck everything up in the end.

“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” - Sir John Templeton
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-11 11:54:32+00:00
We value productive work because there's always so much of it to do. We have programs to fund the arts already. If we want to expand those programs, we should just do that. At some point though we will have enough artists (especially since ML models can now generate soulless corporate art). Given that we're currently relying on an underpaid foreign underclass for basic needs like food, and every developed country has a policy of leaning on large amounts of immigration to fill in gaps in the workforce, it seems to me that we haven't demonstrated that we have enough to go around to then support people doing nothing.
by James_K | 2025-10-11 11:55:51+00:00
> A mutable reference type is covariant on read, and contra on write.

No it isn't. The type is covariant because a reference is a subtype of all parent types. The the function read must have it's argument invariant because it both takes and returns an instance of the type. I think you're confusing the variance of types for the variance of instances of those types. Read is effectively a Function(t: type, Function(ref t, t)). If it was covariant as you suggest, we would have a serious problem. Consider that (read Child) works by making a memory read for the first (sizeof Child) bytes of it's argument. If read were covariant, then that would imply you could call (read Child) on a Parent type and get a Parent back, but that won't work because (sizeof Child) can be less than (sizeof Parent). Read simply appears covariant because it's generic. (read Child) ≠ (read Parent), but you can get (read Parent). It also appears contravariant because you can get (read Grandchild).

Scala doesn't simplify anything, that's just how variance works.