MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-29 02:25:15+00:00
> Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation?

Because translation requires a thorough understanding of the source material, essentially up to the level of AGI or close to it. Long-range context matters, short-range context matters, idioms, short-hand, speaker identity, etc... all matters.

Current LLMs do great at this, the older translation algorithms based on "mere" deep learning and/or fancy heuristics fail spectacularly in the most trivial scenarios, except when translating between closely related languages, such as most (but not all) European ones. Dutch to English: Great! Chinese to English: Unusable!

I've been testing modern LLMs on various translation tasks, and they're amazing at it.[1] I've never had any issues with hallucinations or whatever. If anything, I've seen LLMs outperform human translators in several common scenarios!

Don't assume humans don't make mistakes, or that "organic mistakes" are somehow superior or preferred.

[1] If you can't read both the source and destination language, you can gain some confidence by doing multiple runs with multiple frontier models and then having them cross-check each other. Similarly, you can round-trip from a language you do understand, or round-trip back to the source language and have an LLM (not necessarily the same one!) do the checking for you.
by scythe | 2025-12-29 02:25:19+00:00
The main issue with the euro has been the stinginess of the ECB. The Fed always makes plenty of dollars available but during the Great Recession this was not the case in Europe. This is a problem for euro-denominated debt. (It is also a problem for the yuan.) The unusual political structure of the EU — not a single country — is also potentially concerning, as is its apparent dependence on the United States for defense.
by zephen | 2025-12-29 02:26:18+00:00
> someone writing a library with a costly abstraction

That's not what happened here.

> it's not like C++ doesn't have some costly abstractions

This is simultaneously both completely orthogonal to my observation that the Rust FFI is borked, and a great example of a problem that wouldn't happen in C++, because in C++ you could completely ignore the costly abstractions if necessary.
by fkafldkj | 2025-12-29 02:27:19+00:00
> It’s like everyone on social media learned about PE in the last ~3 years and now sees it lurking in every shadow

What a silly criticism.

Trickle down economics is from the 80s and people are still just starting to wake up to it.

PE has been around a while, but has also intentionally been hiding itself in your "shadows" because it knows its behavior is antisocial.

> enjoying this new ragey vibe Steve has going but I guess it must be getting clicks

Or you know maybe it's because he is front row watching as greedy fucks are destroying his passion that he also turned into his livelihood.
by its_ethan | 2025-12-29 02:27:20+00:00
The price of entry is actually just being born in the country (or at least that's all that's required in most democracies).

You personally might have the expectation that when you vote, you should be informed about what you're voting on/for - but that is entirely optional.

edit: I'd love to hear about some of your proposed solutions to solving this problem ;)
by torlok | 2025-12-29 02:28:25+00:00
How much is "a lot"? Trump has cut almost all aid since taking office. The EU is paying for the aid now. I'm assuming that the reason Zelensky cares to talk with Trump is for appearances, military intelligence, and to stall the restart of trade relations between US and Russia. The US has no real place at the negotiating table anymore. Everybody's just catering to Trump's ego, because it's the easiest way to stop him from doing any more harm.
by pembrook | 2025-12-29 02:28:31+00:00
Owning 1 in 9 "rental" homes means they own less than 1% of all homes.

You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.

PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
by elliotto | 2025-12-29 02:28:37+00:00
I think there are reasonable things to expect from someone's morality calculus. Leaving the country you were born in for moral reasons is a complex and life changing undertaking and beyond reasonable expectation for anyone not extremely politically motivated, let alone resourced enough to do so. Not working for a company whose moral values you disagree with (when you have an extremely lucrative skillset) is a smaller and more reasonable ask.

I'm also not really asking that people leave these roles - everyone has their own path to take. Just that they don't make posts dismissing criticism of these structures as silly cynicism. Or else they will have to contend with me writing a comment disgreeing with them.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-12-29 02:30:52+00:00
> why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less?

Maybe this is nitpicking but just to satisfy my own record more than anything: that would be individual action and I agree Al gore shouldn’t be telling anyone to fly less.

> Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more?

Carbon taxes affect big consumers more than small ones, and I would absolutely support eg a Canadian “carbon price” model where the money is doled out to everyone at the end of the year. And if anyone is still worse off, tax oil companies more until poor people are least-bad-off :)

So far I’m on board with both.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-29 02:31:13+00:00
Don't you understand that the reason housing prices are exploding is primarily because everyone is going broke? We as a country have more dollars than ever but less conventional wealth every passing year. Boomers generally live in their home, which is completely normal. They are not generally getting ahead on it, except according to bullshit inflation. Zoning is a very small part of the puzzle. National impoverishment and degradation as we keep getting deeper into debt is the biggest problem.
by mpyne | 2025-12-29 02:31:42+00:00
Fractional time shouldn't be an issue as long as the ratio is a rational number. It's how durations are already handled behind the scenes.

Likewise it's annoying to cook up your own type, but as long as you can come up with 'number of ticks' type that acts like an arithmetic type then it should work with std::chrono. E.g. if I just Boost's Multiprecision library as a quick example:

#include <chrono>
#include <iostream>
#include <boost/multiprecision/cpp_int.hpp>

using namespace std::chrono_literals;

int main()
{
using BigInt = boost::multiprecision::uint128_t;
using BigNanos = std::chrono::duration<BigInt, std::nano>;

std::cout << "Count for 1s: " << BigNanos(1s).count() << "\n";
std::cout << "Count for 300 years: " << BigNanos(std::chrono::years(300)).count() << "\n";
}

Then that code (when compiled with -std=c++20 or better) should output:

Count for 10s: 1000000000
Count for 300 years: 9467085600000000000

If you're willing to use gcc/clang builtins for 128-bit types you won't even need Boost or your own custom type to do basic arithmetic (but serializing the result may be difficult, not sure how gcc/clang handle that for custom 128-bit types).
by saghm | 2025-12-29 02:32:04+00:00
> But the point is that the exact same external library code has a _lower_ cost if called from the non-abstract horror of a language C, and the (partial) fix for that is really ugly looking low-level Rust crap that that took a _long_ time to figure out and is the exact opposite of an abstraction, and the full fix is not even known yet.

No, it's not the exact same external library. There's an additional Rust library in between that they used, which provides the `FFISafe` type, and that has overhead. This is not a standard Rust library, or even one that I'm able to find within a few minutes of googling despite having used Rust for over a decade. It's not clear to me why you think this is necessarily representative of Rust rather than one specific library; someone could just as easily wrap a C library in another C library in a way that adds overhead, and it would be equally nonsensical to cite that as an argument that C isn't efficient.

Your argument seems to boil down to "Rust claims to be efficient, but it's possible for someone to write inefficient code, and for me to use that code, so therefore those claims are wrong".
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-29 02:32:24+00:00
No sh*t about smoking. You have whole social circles that you can easily join just for afternoon or morning smoke breaks. My head misses it but also remembers the nicotine headaches I used to get as well so I guess I’ve somehow overcome that after more than a decade after quitting. The social aspect is undeniable though, and I’m glad there is social pressure against it now, as well as limiting places where people can smoke to far off isolating places.
by saghm | 2025-12-29 02:34:01+00:00
> > someone writing a library with a costly abstraction

> That's not what happened here.

Yes it is. Where do you think the `FFISafe` type that they used came from? It's not anything inherent to how Rust does FFI; it's a type someone wrote in an attempt to try to provide an abstraction, and that abstraction happened to have a cost. There's absolutely no reason anyone has to use it in order to do FFI in Rust.
by some_furry | 2025-12-29 02:34:19+00:00
> What am I supposed to do? Be lonely and without any kind of company and human connection my entire life?

This is called catastrophizing. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing

If you take nothing else away from my comment, I would suggest finding out why you do that, and try to change that mental behavior. It might not directly help with loneliness, but it might make your life more satisfactory.

That said, while other folks on HN will have some advice you'll find useful, I'm not sure how applicable my experiences are to anyone else. My advice would be to examine the things you're interested in, especially if they're weird or "cringe", and find people who share those interests. Be shamelessly authentic.

If you don't have any such interests, I dunno.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-29 02:35:07+00:00
Original title "CBH Talk | Discussing Waterworks,” Stanley Greenberg’s Photographs of New York’s Hidden Water System" compressed to fit within title limits.

---

We take our water for granted; turn on the tap and it’s there. Yet New York City’s faucets are endpoints in a journey through a vast, sophisticated, and visually humbling infrastructure of aqueducts, tunnels, water mains, pipes, pumping stations, treatment plants, reservoirs, gatehouses and more.

Photographer Stanley Greenberg has spent over three decades documenting these public structures; the subject remains a constant source of fascination for him. Now he has published a completely re-designed and expanded version of his original 2003 book, with 362 photographs and a large two-sided insert map, all paying further tribute to the history, engineering, and beauty of our far flung water system.

Published by Kris Graves Projects, with maps co-created by Larry Buchanan, this redux volume – Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York – comes at a moment when public thinking about water resources is increasingly complicated, and awareness of a system that has been continually under construction since the 1830s is heightened.

Greenberg, Graves and Buchanan discuss the artistic work, and also help us grasp the systems that are so vital to our lives, in a conversation led by Mariana Mogilevich, editor in chief of Urban Omnibus. Leave with a new appreciation of what it takes to provide over a billion gallons of water a day to our city, and the beauty of the hidden structures that do the work.
by NiloCK | 2025-12-29 02:37:19+00:00
You may know that intermittent rashes are always invisible in the presence of medical credentials.

Years ago I became suspicious of my Samsung Android device when I couldn't produce a reliable likeness of an allergy induced rash. No matter how I lit things, the photos were always "nicer" than what my eyes recorded live.

The incentives here are clear enough - people will prefer a phone whose camera gives them an impression of better skin, especially when the applied differences are extremely subtle and don't scream airbrush. If brand-x were the only one to allow "real skin" into the gallery viewer, people and photos would soon be decried as showing 'x-skin', which would be considered gross. Heaven help you if you ever managed to get close to a mirror or another human.

To this day I do not know whether it was my imagination or whether some inline processing effectively does or did perform micro airbrushing on things like this.

Whatever did or does happen, the incentive is evergreen - media capture must flatter the expectations of its authors, without getting caught in its sycophancy. All the while, capacity improves steadily.
by jsrcout | 2025-12-29 02:37:21+00:00
And not only that, our sensors can return spurious data, or even purposely constructed fake data, created with good or evil intent.

I've had this in mind at times in recent years due to $DAYJOB. We use simulation heavily to provide fake CPUs, hardware devices, what have you, with the goal of keeping our target software happy by convincing it that it's running in its native environment instead of on a developer laptop.

Just keep in mind that it's important not to go _too_ far down the rabbit hole, one can spend way too much time in "what if we're all just brains in jars?"-land.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-29 02:38:10+00:00
> Just because there is an alternative doesn't mean society will adjust.

"It isn't practical to do" and "society at large didn't go this direction" are very different statements.

Hyphenation is two names in a trench coat. Maintaining two names indefinitely works just fine as long as you discard rather than endlessly compound. Presumably the only requirement is that it be straightforward to trace any given lineage.

The traditional approach is for women to keep their maternal name and discard their paternal name on marriage while men do the opposite. But of course any scheme could work, up to and including each person arbitrarily choosing which name to discard (not sure how they decide on ordering in that case).

Another historical approach is the Foo Barson, Baz Fooson (Barson) approach. That scheme treats the male and female lines as being entirely separate so it doesn't quite match what you're after but it was quite practical.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-29 02:38:37+00:00
Do you seriously expect middle aged people to not have like double or more in savings compared to young people? I think you need to do some calculations...

We may not all be on equal footing, but life is a game of skill and chance. It's easy to look at some people who, for example, made money from buying a house, while forgetting all those who didn't actually gain anything. Playing by the same rules is what makes it fair.

If you want to cry about something unfair, cry about inflation. It makes all the supposed "wealth" figures go up as everyone gets poorer. That sure isn't fair. It might be unavoidable at this late stage in our societal decay, but that is hardly any consolation.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-29 02:38:53+00:00
> In this glorious new AI world I need a search diploma just to evade the endless AI slop YouTube is filled with nowadays. And than there are topics that are taboo to search for at all. From what angle do I have to look at this to discover the good part?

It has always been this way, even before AI. When people need to find information on anything, they would rather trust some social media influencer, than look at official docs.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-29 02:38:53+00:00
Kind of - the art of fortune telling plays a big part in things

It's not needed now, but we think that it will be needed in the future

It's needed now, but we don't know if we will use it in the future

How MUCH will it be needed in the future

Will there be a future technology that makes this investment unnecessary, or even obselete before the project ever completes

For the latter, a big argument of "No need to invest in commuter trains" argument was "self driving cars are 'just around the corner' and they will make mass transit a quaint thing of the past" was used to deny investment in trains.
by shagie | 2025-12-29 02:38:54+00:00
This gets into "my French is rusty... and legal French is non-existent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_(employment)_in_Fran...

https://www.rippling.com/blog/termination-in-france

In particular the parts:

> French laws don’t recognize at-will employment. In France, you can’t simply dismiss an employee without reason. In fact, the French labor code makes it extremely clear that it considers termination to be an absolute last resort, especially in cases of voluntary or involuntary personal grounds for dismissal. Instead, it encourages employers to try to find other ways to resolve the problem. For example, let’s say the employee in question is having serious interpersonal issues with their manager or a coworker. You can only dismiss them after you’ve tried everything else, such as holding a meeting in which you talk to the two of them and try to find a solution, or by putting them on different projects so they don’t have to work together directly. If the company is putting technological changes in place to increase its competitiveness, before you can start the dismissal procedure, you must demonstrate you tried another course of action, such as redeployment or employee training.

> Everything must be documented. This is extremely important: You must document evidence of all events and/or incidents that led to the dismissal of the employee, even if the reasons have nothing to do with their conduct specifically. You’ll use this evidence both during the interview when you’re telling the employee why they’re being dismissed and should also keep it in case the employee decides to bring a lawsuit against your company.

---

If someone is having difficulty with their job, you first provide them training before you can fire them. From what I understand, it has to be a "we tried everything for the past year, here's all the documentation and they're still unable to do the basic requirements for the position.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-12-29 02:38:55+00:00
The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.

Why not?

Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship... sinks.

What about EMS-3 recombination?

We've already tried it - ethyl, methane, sulfinate as an alkylating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.

Then a repressor protein, that would block the operating cells.

Wouldn't obstruct replication; but it does give rise to an error in replication, so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation - and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic.

You were made as well as we could make you.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-29 02:39:07+00:00
This stuff exists and it's fairly well-studied. It's surprisingly hard to find without coming across it in literature though, the universe of image processing is huge. Joint demosaicing, for example, is a decades-old technique [0] fairly common in astrophotography. Commercial photographers simply never cared or asked for it, and so the tools intended for them didn't bother either. You'd find more of it in things like scientific ISP and robotics.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1145/2980179.2982399
by ycombiredd | 2025-12-29 02:39:13+00:00
Cool. I could have been clearer in my post; as I understand it actual NTSC circuitry used different coefficients for RGBx and RGBy values, and I didn't take time to look up the official standard. My specific pondering was based on an assumption that neither the ppm2pgm formula nor the parent's "NTSC" formula were exact equivalents to NTSC, and my "ADHD" thoughts wondered about the provenance of how each poster came to use their respective approximations. While I write this, I realize that my actual ponderings are less interesting than the responses generated because of them, so thanks everyone for your insightful responses.
by tiberriver256 | 2025-12-29 02:39:43+00:00
The full paper isn't open so I can only read the abstract, method and results.

The part I take issue with:
"lower brain-wide mGlu5 availability may represent a molecular mechanism underlying altered excitatory neurotransmission that has the potential to stratify the heterogeneous autism phenotype."

Seems like the very premise is flawed, though. Searching for a single global identifier for autism would be like if we spent research time trying to find a single global identifier for cancer. Noble effort... Way harder than spending effort on subcategorization into "lung" and "heart" cancers and working on research for detection of those subtypes.

The only good categorization we have in autism now is severity.

The anecdote I always like to share is Temple Grandin.

She was hyper-sensitive to auditory and tactile senses. The cause for this hypersensitivity was cerebellar abnormalities in her brain. Right now, someone who is hypo-sensitive to sound and touch because of different cerebellar development will also be put in the same bucket diagnostically speaking. There's not gonna be any universal way to detect that though...

To quote her directly:

"It would be my number one research priority, but one of the problems we’ve got on studying this, is that one person may have visual sensitivity, another one touch sensitivities, another one, auditory sensitivities. And when you study these, you got to separate them out. You can’t just mix them all together."
https://www.sensoryfriendly.net/podcast/understanding-my-aut...
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-29 02:41:08+00:00
I don’t understand what your actual criticism is.

Is your criticism that they are late to call out the bad stuff?

Is your criticism that they are only calling out the bad stuff because it’s now impacting them negatively?

Given either of those positions, do you prefer that people with influence not call out the bad stuff or do call out the bad stuff even if they may be late/not have skin in the game?
by userbinator | 2025-12-29 02:41:13+00:00
You have clearly made no attempts to read the original article which has a lot more evidence (or are actively avoiding it), and somehow seem to be defending Samsung voraciously but emptily, so you're not worth arguing with and I'll just leave this here:

I zoomed in on the monitor showing that image and, guess what, again you see slapped on detail, even in the parts I explicitly clipped (made completely 100% white):
by jakelazaroff | 2025-12-29 02:41:22+00:00
> E.g. density doesn't decrease housing prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

The article you cited doesn't support that assertion. Its thesis is that upzoning alone — i.e. relaxing building regulations such that it is legal to build higher-density housing, without further interventions — may not be sufficient to create enough housing to lower rents.
by tryscience | 2025-12-29 02:41:40+00:00
The metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 5 (mGlu5) is involved in the central mechanism of action of paracetamol (acetaminophen), where the bioactive metabolite AM404 activates the TRPV1 channel–mGlu5 receptor–PLC–DAGL–CB1 receptor signaling cascade in the periaqueductal grey, contributing to its analgesic effect.