skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. There is no way a significantly smaller connector with way more pins can be as robust as a large one with less pins. It is 100% horseshit.

My anecdote to add, but this time comparing USB-c power delivery with the lowly ~8mm barrel jack. I recently got a laptop shipped to me by a remote client to use to connect to their network. I pull it out of the box set it up and I notice the usb c power cable has the slightest of kinks...

Of course it wouldn't charge. I managed to manipulate the cable, holding it, pressing at various angles long enough to use the device until a replacement PSU was delivered. A barrel jack wouldn't care in the slightest about such kink. And if it didn't work I could get another barrel jack from an electronic parts store the same day, chop off the old one and solder the new one on. Good luck doing that with usb-c.

BTW, let me also rant here on the (lack of) usb-c PD compatibility even between devices made by the same manufacturer at the same time.

As the above was happening I happened to have another Dell xps laptop sitting on my desk with another usb-C power supply. I thought to myself, I'll just use one PSU for both, right? But before I tried my inate cynism made me think "surely they would not make it so convenient for us" so I googled if this is a good idea. Turns out no. The PSU I had was 90W while the other laptop required 120W. I read stories of it simply not working, but also of broken PSUs. I decided to try anyway and the laptop that needs 120W psu wouldn't even boot with the 90w PSU. I thought maybe it would throttle down the components. Nope, a bios message said, unplug it or else.

So yes, I agree the magnificent claims of usb c resolving all sorts of problems are all horseshit. The only real problem they really resolved is that it is reversible. Also the ideas of PD and sending eDP over it were good, just implemented poorly.
I've implemented USB-C with PD and SS speeds before, so I know. I've even used if not that exact same connector, but at least a functionally same one from LCSC.

It's just that these reasons seem so inconsequential to me. There's stuff like type C needing two extra resistors even for USB 2.0. Being able to adapt between connectors is also BS in my opinion because you can convert anything between anything if you really wanted to. And if you only use USB HS speeds, you'll just waste connect lifetime of your expensive higher-specced cable. Sure, you can get 2.0 only type C cables, but why? I think there's no good reason to use USB-C besides high bandwidth purposes. Barrel jacks or supply power better. All our normal peripheral devices aren't consuming exponentially more bandwidth anytime soon.
As I mentioned earlier, one approach is a natural experiment following an accident. You could compare recovery outcomes between two groups that received different treatments (e.g., immediate vs. delayed medical care) due to circumstances beyond the researchers' control. You would observe and measure recovery over time and analyze differences to assess the treatment's impact.

Alternatively, compare the sickness rates in a population near a new factory emitting microplastics with a similar population elsewhere. With many potential sites, extensive on-site research could yield valuable insights beyond what is available from desk-based studies.

Or, consider an experiment where you add plastic to one fish-filled pool and use another pool as a control, monitoring the ecosystems over a year or two. This could provide more robust data than some commonly seen studies.
You know those signs with the city map with an arrow saying "you are here"? Most of those are drawings, not photographs. So what?

Just because we can't take a picture with a camera, shouldn't we build a model of something?
No surprise that Republicans distrust so-called science (and rightfully so, imo)

> a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1." [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_...

Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth and support curbing free speech if it's "harmful", acadamics who stray from the orthodoxy are silenced and lose their jobs. The fact that sociology, anthropology (especially things like Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory) are considered to be scientific [1] and that studies that go counter to any common sense are spread by the media as fact add to that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Any reasonable person can see that many academics in the humanities have the goal of bringing about social change and not actually finding the truth and that muddies the waters, so it's not surprising that people start doubting science as a whole, including STEM.
I will have a look at it, thanks.
Line 44 is like a chronology of spam terms: starting at porn, then viagra, now bitcoin and online gambling.
yeah, I had to replace the front ports on my current PC case because the center part of the plugs came out...
Did you not notice the submission title: "YouTube banned adblockers so I built ..."
I agree with you to some extent, but if you go with this line of thinking consequently then things of no apparent "User Value" (say, a code base not riddled with technical debt) never gets any budget or attention in favor of shoehorning in more shiny stuff of obvious value.

What this then leads to is borderline unmaintainable code because the project managers, software architects, etc. rarely touch the IDE anymore and the more junior people can't or won't articulate the issues they are having. (i.e. a feature made tests 10x slower, a hastily added API times out often locally, etc.)

This then leads to people jumping ship every 1-2 years, low productivity and bad implementations. All in the name of precious User Value!
The only gripe that I have with HandbrakeCLI is that it cannot encode input piped into stdin. FFmpeg supports this and I was under the impression that handbrake uses FFmpeg under the hood.
The chances are, if you live somewhere like that, somewhere that actually has a low noise floor for RF, then you likely also have a lot of space to cover with your wifi - and that means sacrificing range (via additional access points) for the second network..

For me: Wifi is great! But, whenever it's practical, I avoid it... Everything with it is a tradeoff!
what purpose does a LLM serve on a killing drone, exactly?
Merriam-Webster, OED, Wiktionary. (If you have a preferred dictionary not on the list, I’m sure you can look there yourself.) All of them have some variant of “to pass through” as the primary meaning of to transit and “to change from one state, place, etc. to another” as the meaning of to transition.

And I didn’t claim that quest and question had a similar relation as transit and transition in meaning, only that in both cases, the two words have the same etymological root. I mentioned this in reference to your claim that my opinion was not supported by etymology. It doesn’t have to be, because etymology doesn’t dictate the current meaning of a word, it can just try to explain it.
I once worked in an office where virtually everyone (30ish people) had failed USB-C ports on their MacBooks. This was around 2017. I don’t know if Apple fixed this, out of fear I baby the ports on my 2018 MBP, and they still click like brand new. So I do know that when treated with extreme care they will last. Just feels silly though.

I’m definitely one of the few people lamenting Apple’s forced hand in moving to C on the iPhone. Lightning is incredible. It takes so much abuse and yet still fits like the day I bought the phone. Not looking forward to having to baby my phone’s port as well when I upgrade.
> For example, your internal spatial model is limited to some degree of accuracy and does not include the entire surface of Mars, but that doesn't mean that your model does not exist at all.

You're using "your model" as a metaphorical term here, but if you came up with any precise definition of the term here, it'd turn out to be wrong; people have tried this since the 50s and never gotten it correct. (For instance, is it actually a singular "a model" or is it different disconnected things you're using a single name for?)

See Phil Agre (1997) on exactly this idea: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html

David Chapman (more general and current): https://metarationality.com/rationalism

and this guy was saying it in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus#Dreyfus'_critic...

> limited to some degree of accuracy

This isn't the only issue:

- You may not have observed something in the room in the right way for the action you need to do later.

- You might have observed it in a way you don't need later, which is a waste of time and energy.

- It might change while you're not looking.

- You might just forget it. (Since people do this, this must be an adaptive behavior - "natural selection" - but it's not a good thing in a model.)

> Why would you think any model has to be a perfect exact 1:1 representation of the entire universe?

What principle can you use to decide how precise it should be? (You can't do this; there isn't one.)

> The model of reality in your head is a simplification that serves a purpose.

Not only does it serve a purpose, your observations largely don't exist until you have a purpose for them.

RL agents tend to get stuck investigating irrelevant things when they try to maintain models; humans are built to actively avoid this with attention and boredom. Robot cameras take in their entire visual field and try to interpret it; humans both consciously and unconsciously actively investigate the environment as needed alongside deciding what to do. (Your vision is mostly fake; your eyes are rapidly moving around to update it only after you unconsciously pay attention to something.)

> Natural selection weeds out that kind of behaviour.

Not that well since something like half of Americans are myopic…
Named pipes don't work?

Or some bash magic: `handbrake-cli -i <(cat video-file.mp4)`?

I never used handbrake-cli, only used the gui before, so I have no idea.
In order to affirm something is true, you don't just need to know it, you need to know that you know it. LLMs fundamentally have no self-knowledge.
He hit a minivan, not pedestrians. I don't have the stats handy, but I would be surprised if 70% of car vs car crashes at 35mph have severe injuries.
Hello! I wrote this article.

I want to say something about the pop-ups, which to have been much more discussed than what I wrote. (UX disaster as engagement bait?)

My desire in showing was to make the site feel more “alive” and to make the reader aware that other people had been there. I was trying to build a vibe of website as public space. Clearly this was not an approach that handles hacker news traffic and attitudes very well.

Secondly, I wanted to make readers aware of how much data is visible about them just from visiting a website.

I wanted it to feel like when you land on a drop shipping site that occasionaly tells you “Alice in Norwich just bought a widget. They're selling fast!”. You slowly realise that the data is real, and that the site actually can see where you live, who provides your internet. Etc. It was meant to be creepy.

Anyway, I've removed the feature now. It was clearly causing usability issues for some people, which was not what I intended. I'll think about other, better ways to get the effect that I had hoped for.

Finally, I'll say that it was at least interesting for me to see things like

“Someone else just connected to Johncom. They're in Kansas City, US, 64121 and are connecting with Spectrum”

“Someone else just connected to Johncom. They're in Cape Town, ZA, 8001 and are connecting with airmobile.co.za”

I got to learn about some new places, postcode formats, and ISPs.
> a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests

This is an oxymoron. A scientist who is purportedly acting in the public's best interests is not a scientist—cannot be a scientist. A scientist must follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if that means contradicting their own policy preferences.
So extended lockdowns were the right chocie?
Yea. This should be the job of scientists and regulators.

Scientists probably need to be government employed since free market capitalism has zero incentive to keep consumers safe from things that kill slowly over time.

Private companies can fix product-health problems quickly when it's killing their customers and therefore revenue stream, but if the killing is so slow that the effects don't arise for years later, there's not much of incentive to do anything about it.
I wouldn't consider multinational corporations defrauding me into thinking I'm dealing with my fellow countrymen as positive. In fact, it's literally the plot of the movie They Live.

Imagine if Chinese companies masqueraded as American when they sell you phones and gadgets, or American companies masqueraded as Indonesian as they buy up their farmland.
You could also just have a system that predicts which videos you are going to watch next / soon, and preloads them in the background, so that the minimum-ad time will have already passed by the time you are giving them any attention?

That seems a lot simpler to do?
That last paragraph is an opinion you seem to have just formed as you typed it stated as a fact that doesn’t seem to hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.
It’s also incredibly stupid, like that US city that sold its parking meters to a private company and lost billions with a B.

Here in Australia, the speeding problem is essentially solved with speed cameras and the like; which makes the government So Much Money. Not that I like this; it’s too much and is clearly revenue raising. Still, the point is that if you are a government, this is the way. It’s worked here anyway.
BMI is very accurate for population level studies like this. People like you are outliers who don't significant affect the results. Just look around at people on the street. How many muscular athletes do you see?

For individuals then sure, ignore BMI and get an annual DXA scan.
For many sites, turning off JS is not an option. IMO, it's wasteful to ignore all that compute power in the browser. It's better to run code in thousands of browsers than do it all on the server.
That's probably a bad idea from a legal point of view.
Watch it there, you’re breaking from the HN hive mind and they don’t take kindly to having opinions that aren’t the meta.
Not obvious how to make a file smaller with handbrake without a lot of trial and error
Time management - I allocate some time to work, some time to research, and the remainder to my hobbies and pleasures i.e working on my Rust side project or going out for biking. You need "fun times" to recharge from the "boring" times.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style? You've done it multiple times in this thread, it's not what we want here (and destroys what we do want), and you can make your substantive points without it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
There are some options where you can buy DRM free ebooks listed at https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
We used to watch movies for fun like this 20 years ago over SSH. It was stupid but technically interesting because we were discovering the internet.

As for OP, he should try one of the libcaca wrapper for Rust, or make one as an exercise.
For those who are on Safari (macOS and iOS), I highly recommend using Vinegar [0].

But that being said, recently even Vinegar is struggling a lot when I open a YouTube video (although the developer is promptly fixing issues). The video starts playing in the background, but I can't see it, then it pauses for a few seconds and restarts.

It's crazy how terrible YouTube is making the experience on their site!

[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
You said in your post that mass nouns are “inherently plural”, which grammatically they are not. I suppose you were referring to the meanings of those words, though.
Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.
I was gonna reply with red wine, better to just hop in on this thread.
I was inspired by the teachings of a reclusive Korean stock guru encountered in 2007, I came up with an idea of Mr.10%, an automated stock recommendation service for iPhone and iPad platforms that applies a 10% stock price increase probability calculation algorithm, which was perfected over 15 years through countless trial and error. (The final version will incorporate artificial intelligence reinforcement learning and [AI Analyst]).

If you wanna know if stock prediction is really possible, come on and try out this app.
never had a broken USB-A, but definitely owned one and seen another USB C in which the tiny board in the middle of the socket broke off
Maybe they were the right choice with the info available at the time?
The insertion cycles are only for proper insertion. Like when you are looking at it and doing it at a correct angle.

Also, rated lifetime does not take into account things like tugging the cable to the side of your PC because your foot got tangled in it.

USB C is extremely fragile due to its size and not much can be done to help it.

USB C might be created to withstand more insertion cycles. After all it is meant to be used for devices like phones that are plugged in and out constantly. Part of this improvement is just more experience creating connectors (yes, connectors got much better in the past decades).

A cable connected to a back of PC is not being constantly plugged in and out. Nobody I know is plugging in their keyboard or mouse multiple times a day.

--

When I design my boards, I put connectors that match the size of the board. I don't put extremely tiny connectors on a very large and massive project. I want a connector that isn't too fragile for the project and this means matching it with the forces that you can expect.

We, humans, use different forces when around large objects than when we are around small objects.

Large PC standing on your desk means forces used around it will be potentially larger than forces around a small appliance like a phone. If you tug on a cable that is hooked up to the phone, only small force is needed to move the phone. And we are usually more careful around a small appliance like phone. If you tug on a cable that is hooked up to a PC, much larger force will be needed before you move the PC. And people are less careful and using larger forces when doing things around a PC -- a larger object than a phone.
Working at Google doesn't mean you're intelligent, regardless of gender.
Yeah, but having Type-C ports with different capabilities is wildly confusing to users. Imagine that Apple had mixed Type-C ports. Imagine the number of support calls from people that says 'doesn't work' when they try to plug their Studio Display in an USB 2.0 Type-C port. Or when the Studio Display works because they plugged it into a port with USB3 and DP-Alt, because the downstream hub doesn't work, because you need to hook it up with Thunderbolt.

In the end the only thing that is understandable to most users is when all the ports on a system provide the same capabilities (and probably Thunderbolt 4).
I think it's even more worth noting that it wasn't always the case that Youtube started warning ad-blocking users and stopping playback!

Even if we suppose that a simple hosts file could somehow block YouTube ads today, YouTube would detect that. It would not fare any better than any other ad blocker.
Handbrake can also rip dvds, if you give it the external libraries needed to decode them. The UI is great for finding the track with the actual movie and pulling in all the audio tracks and subtitles you want.
You may not realize just how terrible much of production code actually is! ;-)

There is some source code I've looked at that I thought was clear and easy to understand (at the time at least. I also like simple C/C++ code that compiles with "make", ideally with minimal #ifdefs and without lengthy configure scripts.) This is very rare in my experience, although I really like to see it!

Seriously, building things that are fun and interesting to you and getting them to work is one of the best things you can do. Once you have something working then you can decide whether you can just clean up your existing implementation or whether you want to reorganize it or rewrite it completely, but you'll be at the point where you understand your problem and its solution.
"Science is real, study says."

At some point, people stop blindly believing in the constant click-bait headlines.
This should be qualified that trust is lost in academic paper-mills and “expert” policy advisor scientists—in other words, any scientist who attends cocktail parties—not in the fruits of science itself.
There is still all the software to control the speed. It’s pretty astonishing that people here are naive enough to think that at any organization with the level of bureaucracy of the average car company this would cost $0. This isn’t your weekend side project where you change a few lines of code and push it to GitHub and it’s done. The meetings to begin to consider the change would probably cost a million dollars.
Probably under worst terms for him, he will be "allowed" to return after relinquishing some things. This episode of Game of AI Thrones will be an interesting one.
... and if it worked, YouTube would detect that and retaliate!

Back when a hosts file was able to disable YouTube ads, YouTube didn't do that.
yep, this current meme of "AI" is stupid. it's only a statistical analysis of old data; a glorified google search; most of the time I hear "but it found stuff better than googling" it can be explained by a simple "you didn't exactly google it the right way [or generally look for info elsewhere another way]".
Looks like responsibility and ethics got in the way of profit.
Amazon Kuiper internet satellites fully successful in testing
These are nice pools, but I wonder how power efficient these old buildings are...

The Bauhaus one reminded me of the (at the time only) public swimming pool in a small town in Nort-East Poland built in a brutalist style I learned to swim in, in early 90-s. These windows, the lanes, the area surrounding the pool, the walls, were very similar, but the ceiling was concrete, and absolutely no plants of course.
I don't think there is a contradiction here like you suggest. Scientists can work towards an explicit goal, e.g. try to find a clean source of energy, which is explicitly in the public's interest, and still follow the evidence wherever it may lead.
Hopefully we don't end up in a society like that.

Where minimum-wage cashiers are pitted up against violent criminals in order to protect the theft of a company's insured products.
Cholesterol isn't a nutrient of concern. Very little of the cholesterol you eat is actually absorbed: the molecules are too big. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body is endogenously produced.

Carnivore diets seem to work quite well for some people and are a disaster for others. We don't really know why. Maybe something to do with genetics or gut microbiome. It's worth a try for people who have struggled with losing fat other ways.
Meta cannot be both referee and player on the field. Responsible schmenponsible. True oversight can only come from a an independent entity.

These internal committees are Kabuki theater.
are they an ethical company, though?
Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons.

https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt
It's always GP in this subreddit.
Some sort of checksumming to detect segments differing between users would probably be doable.
Yeah, that seems like a very normal interaction.