MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blindriver | 2025-12-22 18:27:53+00:00
More wood behind less arrows.

This is good.

Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.

We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
by puddnutz | 2025-12-22 18:27:56+00:00
I worked for 10 years in broadcast, as a director, IT support, and an Engineer.

I love picking errors out of any broadcast, especially with what I know now.

Seeing things like this and other documented cases of broadcast errors always make me happy because I know how hard it is sometimes to be in that line of work and how easy it is to just make little blips here and there.

Making errors is how I learned to never get between older people and their midday TV dramas. They absolutely know how to get a hold of you if they miss a few minutes of Young and Restless!
by re | 2025-12-22 18:28:07+00:00
On mobile there's no info other than "please visit from a desktop/laptop computer", so for anyone else not near one:

> Finds when the sun aligns with your street for a perfect sunset view (like Manhattanhenge).

> * Enter an address to check for alignment with the sunset (or more specifically, alignment a little before sunset, the last moment the sun is at 50˚)

> * Shows street bearing and sun alignment information

> * Displays coordinates and next henge date (if there is one)

https://github.com/vritvo/henge_finder
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-12-22 18:28:14+00:00
> But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine.

You are not wrong. That's what I thought for two years. But I don't think that framing has worked very well. The problem is that even though it is a machine, we interact with it very differently from any other machine we've built. By reducing it to something it isn't, we lose a lot of nuance. And by not confronting the fact that this is not a machine in the way we're used to, we leave many people to figure this out on their own.

> An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.

On suffering specifically, I offer you the following experiment. Run an LLM in a tool loop that measures some value and call it a "suffering value." You then feed that value back into the model with every message, explicitly telling it how much it is "suffering." The behavior you'll get is pain avoidance. So yes, the LLM probably doesn't feel anything, but its responses will still differ depending on the level of pain encoded in the context.

And I'll reiterate: normal computer systems don't behave this way. If we keep pretending that LLMs don't exhibit behavior that mimics or approximates human behavior, we won't make much progress and we lose people. This is especially problematic for people who haven't spent much time working with these systems. They won't share the view that this is "just a machine."

You can already see this in how many people interact with ChatGPT: they treat it like a therapist, a virtual friend to share secrets with. You don't do that with a machine.

So yes, I think it would be better to find terms that clearly define this as something that has human-like tendencies and something that sets it apart from a stereo or a coffee maker.
by epistasis | 2025-12-22 18:28:24+00:00
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.

These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.

People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
by YC34987349872 | 2025-12-22 18:28:56+00:00
Calling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
by graypegg | 2025-12-22 18:29:21+00:00
> The surveillance system spots multiple threats per day, the district said.

… multiple threats a day?! At 1 high school?! Citation needed on that. I know that US high schools have a reputation of being unsafe, but I highly doubt there’s near-HOURLY thwarting of “threats”. Are we talking about rule breaking (vaping in the bathroom, skipping class) or bullying? I would assume so.

The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…

Sure, maybe you go full-prison mode if there’s an hourly murder, but that’s so outside the realm of reality that I’m not willing to even entertain that as being a possibility. You would’ve run out of students by now.
by Towaway69 | 2025-12-22 18:30:01+00:00
Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.

By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.

Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.

AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
by timr | 2025-12-22 18:30:11+00:00
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
by epistasis | 2025-12-22 18:30:21+00:00
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.

If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
by nayuki | 2025-12-22 18:30:39+00:00
> One part that confused me is how I needed to use let() to define startColumn and startRow inside the loop. I don’t understand this…

That's because you wrote a for-loop without braces, so it can only contain a single statement, and that single statement is your let().

Here is an equivalent way to write that section of code (and I did test it):

for (r = [ 1 : numRows ]) {
startColumn = ((c * thicknessWall) + ((c - 1) * batteryType));
startRow = ((r * thicknessWall) + ((r - 1) * batteryType));
translate([startColumn, startRow, thicknessWall])
cube([batteryType, batteryType, heightCompartment + 1]);
}

Side note, related to declaring variables but not an issue that you encountered: OpenSCAD does not allow setting the value of a variable more than once. So this code is illegal:

x = 1;
echo(x);
x = 2;
echo(x);

Second note is that whenever you introduce a construct such as {union(), difference(), if(), for()}, variables declared within the braces are scoped, so they don't exist between iterations or after the scope ends.

if (true) { y = -1; }
echo(y); // Illegal

However, just introducing braces without a construct does not restrict the variable to the scope:

{ z = 5; }
echo(z); // Legal
by bitwize | 2025-12-22 18:30:40+00:00
Projection displays were CRTs, but they were small (10" or so) and monochrome. Three of them—one each for the red, green, and blue channels, were each oriented and focused to project a clear image at the exact same spot on the screen, overlaying each other to form a single color image.

Projection TVs were even prone to CRT "raster burn", perhaps even more so than single-tube TVs due to the brightness of the image required, which is why Nintendo instruction booklets had stern warnings not to use their consoles with projection TVs.
by vkou | 2025-12-22 18:31:28+00:00
> We have sleep walked into it.

We didn't sleep walk into it, we ran into it because of poor basic civics education and a cynical media cycle that biases towards making everyone terrified of crime.

The latter is driven by two forces - a profit motive (sensational, gruesome stories sell), and a political motive (media carrying water for far-right-wing candidates loves to keep you scared on this issue).

The optimal level of crime or unsolved crime in a society is not zero, but a lot of people will look at you like you've got three eyes if you tell them that. Talk to them for another ten minutes, and most of them will see why what you say makes sense, but that's not a conversation their television will ever have with them.
by acuozzo | 2025-12-22 18:31:28+00:00
> Everything can be "sold"

How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?

If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?

The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.

For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-22 18:31:31+00:00
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.

Oh no, it really doesn't.

Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.

> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.

Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.

> Capitalism says nothing about free time.

Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.

Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.

If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
by ntoskrnl_exe | 2025-12-22 18:31:37+00:00
I think you're mixing monitors and TVs together.

CRT TVs only supported vertical refresh rates of 50Hz or 60Hz, which matched the regional mains frequency. They used interlacing and technically only showed half the frame at a time, but thanks to phosphor decay this added a feeling of fluidity to the image. If you were able to see it strobe, you must have had an impressive sight. And even if they supported higher refresh rates, it wouldn't matter, as the source of the signal would only ever be 50/60Hz.

CRT monitors used in PCs, on the other hand, supported a variety of refresh rates. Only monitors for specific applications used interlacing, customer grade ones didn't, which means you could see a strobing effect here if you ran it at a low frequency. But even the most analog monitors from the 80s supported atleast 640x480 at 60Hz, some programs such as the original DOOM were even able to squeeze 70Hz out of them by running at a different resolution while matching the horizontal refresh rate.
by jkubicek | 2025-12-22 18:31:52+00:00
I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
by zingar | 2025-12-22 18:31:55+00:00
I’m uneasy having an agent implement several pages of plan and then writing tests and results only at the and of all that. It feels like getting a CS student to write and follow a plan to do something they haven’t worked on before.

It’ll report, “Numbers changed in step 6a therefore it worked” [forgetting the pivotal role of step 2 which failed and as a result the agent should have taken step 6b, not 6a].

Or “there is conclusive evidence that X is present and therefore we were successful” [X is discussed in the plan as the reason why action is NEEDED, not as success criteria].

I _think _ that what is going wrong is context overload and my remedy is to have the agent update every step of the plan with results immediately after action and before moving on to action on the next step.

When things seem off I can then clear context and have the agent review results step by step to debug its own work: “review step 2 of the results. Are the stated results confident with final conclusions? Quote lines from the results verbatim as evidence.”
by snthpy | 2025-12-22 18:32:21+00:00
In general, his emails read like something I've observed people doing IRL; they coax smart people into talking by saying ambiguous, clever sounding things (which are actually nonsense). The actually intelligent person will give them the benefit of doubt by association with their connections, thinking they must be intelligent to have such friends, and assume they misheard or something. Quite surprising how often nonsense like that passes muster. From the bits I've skimmed so far, he looks like a very successful hanger on that leveraged each connection into other ones.
by kure256 | 2025-12-22 18:32:28+00:00
The goal is to adapt your HTML to be easily readable by crawlers, making it more likely to be cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity, instead of relying solely on traditional search engines.

https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai?tab=readme-ov-fi...
by jandrese | 2025-12-22 18:32:40+00:00
IMHO there are two requirements for a good password:

1. It must be hard for a computer to guess.

2. It must be easy for a human to remember. If you can not set a secure password and then remember it a week later it is a bad password.

This is why I really hate overly strict password requirements that make it hard to remember. These cause people to write it down or do things that appease the password checker but don't make it harder to guess.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-22 18:33:07+00:00
The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.

In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.

On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.

The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 18:33:37+00:00
I've never heard about this Tan guy before, I don't keep up with politics/corporatism anymore, but is that possibly sarcasm? It sure feels like it to me. But again, I don't know this person, but if I came across that by itself I feel like it's pretty clearly sarcastic, as Twitter tends to be. Maybe I'm just tone deaf myself to how tone deaf others could be?
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-22 18:33:40+00:00
> It was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap (lit. 'boss-ship' or 'boss-hood'), which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population.[4] Under this minoritarian system, white citizens held the highest status, followed by Indians, Coloureds and black Africans, in that order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

Israeli settlers living in the West Bank fall under a different legal code than the non-Israeli citizens living there. Israelis fall under Israel's civilian legal code while the occupied non-citizens fall under a harsher military occupation system without due process. That system of segregation and separated legal codes is the very nature of apartheid. One class of people has less protections than the other without a means of redress.

That distinction in practical terms is that people in the citizen status are rarely held to account for violent crimes against the people in the non-citizen class while the people in the non-citizen class are severely punished for extremely minor offenses. For example there are cases were IDF soldiers commit first degree homicide on video and yet still receive lighter penalties than minors of the non-citizen class for throwing stones.

By the way, the US used to have a less formalized system of apartheid system as well called separate but equal, but it was eliminated in 1954.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-22 18:34:00+00:00
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.

Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
by freejazz | 2025-12-22 18:34:02+00:00
>The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive drivers who simply slowed and rolled.

So, you're saying Waymo can't handle a regular 4 way stop sign given how everyone else on the road drives? That's not a problem?
by eightysixfour | 2025-12-22 18:34:18+00:00
This is a different argument than what I was responding to.

> I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?

To which my response is "this is like OSS." What I mean by that is that, in theory, people audit and review code submitted to OSS software, in reality most people trust that there are other people who do it.

> Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look later is no defense.

This is a different argument to me and one that I'm still torn about. I think that if the feeds exist and the government and private entities have access to them, the trade-offs may be better if everyone has access to them. In my mind this results in a few things:

1. Diffusion of power - You said public feeds would "enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time." Well, private feeds allow this too. I'd rather have everyone know about some misdeed than Flock or the local PD blackmail someone with it.

2. Second guessing deployment - I think if the people making the decisions know that the data will be publicly available, they're more likely to second guess deploying it in the first place.

3. Awareness - if you can just open an app on your phone and look at the feed from a camera then you become aware of the amount of surveillance you are subject to. I think being aware of it is better than not.

There's trade-offs to this. The cameras become less effective if everyone knows where they are. It doesn't help with the location selection bias - if they're only installed in areas of town where decision makers don't live and don't go, the power is asymmetric again. Plenty of other reasons it is bad. None of them worse than the original sin of installing them in the first place.
by epistasis | 2025-12-22 18:35:29+00:00
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
by bicepjai | 2025-12-22 18:36:02+00:00
The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high.
So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures.
This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into.

~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread
by vatsachak | 2025-12-22 18:36:13+00:00
You could kinda already do this with all kinds of security cameras. There are only so many people who are computer proficient, and that number is lower than the number of camera installers.

There have been cases of people getting into baby monitors and yelling at the baby.

But as a tech company, this is extremely irresponsible

BTW, Benn Jordan is also known as The Flashbulb, an ambient legend
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-22 18:36:14+00:00
No OP. But if it’s similar to what I believe in, it’s free-market capitalism for business (with provisions for market failure, e.g. antitrust and utility regulation), redistribution of wealth for individuals, strong individual investor and consumer rights, and the state providing the bare basics through the market (housing voucher, food voucher, public education or an education voucher, electricity voucher, water voucher, internet voucher, and public healthcare).