skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Practical AI: 2025 7.1 Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake predicted with Large Seismic Model

Here’s the flim-flam I had ChatGPT generate for blog #78:

So, it turns out AI might be better at predicting earthquakes than we thought. A group of us have been working on a project using a massive AI model to analyze seismic data from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. And here’s the wild part: the model is saying there’s going to be a 7.1 magnitude quake in 2025. We didn’t believe it at first either, but after triple-checking everything and running more data, it keeps spitting out the same prediction. Only time can tell, so by all means check back here next year to see if we got pie on our faces. And maybe consider insurance. You know we wre.

ASIDE BOX:
Read “10 Best Earthquake Policies You Can’t Afford to Ignore (take it from a data scientist)”

small text: the lawyers say we must disclose that we are not insurance agents, but we may from time to time receive commissions from insurance agents.)

The model itself is built on a mix of historical seismic data and live feeds from monitoring stations scattered across the Pacific Northwest. It's not just looking at standard quake indicators, though—it's picking up on micro-signals, plate movements, and some weird patterns in ocean temperature shifts that we hadn’t considered before. It’s not perfect (nothing ever is), but this is the first time any of us have seen a prediction this specific and confident.

The prediction, released in a public report last week, has sent shockwaves—pun intended—through both the scientific community and public safety organizations. The AI's model incorporates everything from tectonic stress accumulation, plate motion, and fault line behavior to oceanic temperature variations, allowing it to anticipate tremors with remarkable precision. According to the developers, the LSM's ability to map out micro-movements in the Earth's crust is at least five times more sensitive than existing seismic monitoring systems, marking this prediction as a potential game-changer for earthquake preparedness across the Pacific coast.
Eh. if you set out to chart and the system rasterises or dithers, its a line.

If you set out to divide your data into buckets and hand-select the elements to represent the slope of the trend from a set of 8.. It's ..
> Your quality of life being dependent on the whims of politicians and budgets outside-your-control seems awful...

More or less awful than being dependent on the whims of rich rentiers and impersonal market forces? At least politicians have some accountability to the poor who can vote them out.
Thanks for the useful feedback!
All good points, will probably fix these soon.
False, you are wrong.

Corporate landlords use RealPage in Austin, Minneapolis yet rents fall there because of supply of new housing.

RealPage does impact rental prices, but only marginally, and the real impact to prices is from supply constraint + demand.

If there is enough supply, any realpage algorithm wont matter much because of market forces. Market forces trump everything
If you look at the stats for how disproportionately higher the murder rate is inside black communities in the U.S, this isn't as surprising.
What's New on CPAN: July 2024
time for Axim buy back edx for 5 cent on the dollar
Of course I understand the impulse, but translating Finnegans Wake strikes me as nearly impossible and worth only questionable effort. Even beyond the fact that it's often expressing non-analytic semantics that are extremely difficult to pin down, it's not even entirely English and there's a lot of cross-language wordplay.
> the AI algorithm correctly predicted 70% of earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China.

Very very impressive. The impact of this is enormous.
In this case it is portable, because the Zig compiler source tree includes an interpreter for the blob (WASM) in portable C.

It's not objectionable to have non-portable source code anyway. I think it's fine having architecture-specific assembly code, just as long as it's hand-written.

The problems arise when you're storing generated content in the source repository, because it becomes unclear how you're meant to understand and fix the generated content. In this case it seems like the way to fix it is by rerunning the compiler, but if running the compiler involves running this incorrect blob, it's not clear that running the compiler again will produce a correct blob.

I wonder if anyone is monitoring these commits in Zig to ensure that the blobs are actually generated genuinely, since if not it seems like an easy way for someone to inject a KTH (Ken Thompson Hack): https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commits/master/stage1/zig1.wa...
Lol that article says

>We believe that Tor may be the wrong solution for some users for one of the reasons: much higher latency, error rate and resource usage.

Yet you provide no options for Tor, as in https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html your idea for anonymizing users is... For the user to hop through roughly 20 page document of dozens of commands to create the equivalent of personal VPN server, and amidst it, to connect anonymously to contacts' servers, you need to install... Tor https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html#tor-installation-and-c...

So if you don't have any options for Tor, maybe you should just default to Tor.

As for the hoops, you know, you can just write an install script for the user to auto-configure this stuff correctly. In its current state it's definitely something an average Joe is going to do. If this is there just to shut down criticism, maybe you should instead address the criticism, and make it metadata-private by default, without these insane hoops.

If it doesn't get to the point of anonymity by copying a one-liner that runs an install script, i.e. if it's not on par with

sudo apt install simplex,

it's not going to catch on.

Also, your technical documentation how this stuff actually works has 404 issues https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/rfcs/2...
What, exactly, did they do to further their evil plans?

Did they inject Biden with a dementia drug to force a withdrawal and engineer the timing such that the current Vice President was pretty much the only viable option for the US Democrats to rally behind?

Seems like a tightrope feat of Rube Goldberg Heath Robinson needle threading.
The subject doesn't lack rigor, but all of the popular and quite a few of the mathematically minded introductions to it do. Bourbaki and Chevalley did a good job introducing Clifford algebras properly some 80 years ago, but even this has been forgotten by the modern bloggy expositors.

This here seems to be one of the few good modern texts that are elementary yet rigorous: https://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~lundholm/clifford.pd...
if the original eDx can take the $800M and make a new open and free ed content platform (like the original idea of MOOCs before vultures like 2U starting trying to monetize it), then I'd say its a win for Harvard and MIT. 2U going bankrupt may also be a win.
the Readme says this about the doc:

Work in progress. No docs, and everything changes every day.
Honestly this all seems like a big pain in the butt, I think it’d be easier to just wait for an earthquake and then generate the year-old blog.
In that case your precision would be 12.5%. The winners of the competition had 63% precision.
Show HN: Use GPT-4o vision to add events to your Calendar from screenshots
I see, that makes sense. Thank you!
Archeologists to delay most excavation of Gobekli Tepe by 150 years
Title is a cut down synopsis of the video.

The creator cites sources close to the excavation, stating that any substantial work should wait for her technology.
Martin Shkreli ordered to turn over all copies of unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album
EDIT:

ALSO - every one of these tools need to explicitly, in large letters state "This only works if you have a paid account on any AI you want to use"

So the prompt wrapper is "free" - but you cant do much with free these days, and you cant seem to use these wrappers without a paid API token to an AI.

---

Make it natively work with InstantDBs InstaML/InstaQL.

Both ChatGPT and Claude struggle with the actual correct formatting of schemas for InstantDB - but if your thingy can wrangle them to be better... And throw this guyus idea of using Github Gists as a scratchpad for AI to lean on in your workflow outside of the utterly broken Projects/Folders on Chat and Claude.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41359100

(Ill give yours a try, but Ive been heavily iterating with Claude on python, fastapi, instant, postgres, etc - and it runs out of context so damn fast (pro acccount, even) and the memory in project files, and artifacts is useless.

So on your free account, 10 prompts a day is not enough... though Ill give it a real try before I judge :-)
"The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division — for the third time in the span of a year — recently failed to convince a jury that alleged agreements to fix or stabilize labor markets should be punished criminally."

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2023/04/quarte...
It is a 2024 model, for comparison https://github.com/danielgatis/rembg/ uses U2-Net which is open source from 2022. There is also https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/BiRefNet (another 2024 model, also open source), it's not too late to switch.
So in your view it's perfectly ok to run an internet service where you don't check for CSAM? You're entitled to that view I suppose but it's a minority view and allowing CSAM on your platform is illegal in most places (including the US where there's a carve out for that sort of stuff in the law that protects Google, Facebook et al) and in all of those jurisdictions the public is not going to be able to see the CSAM or be able to examine the substance of the allegations either before or during trial.

Every social network or file sharing site that I've been aware of has a Trust and Safety department for just this reason even X. The executives don't want to go to jail.
Slop Is Good
The link is just an image of the article’s first page.

The entire article is available on Anna’s Archive, which I do not condone using. Under no circumstances should you download it from this link:

https://wbsg8v.xyz/d3/x/1724737279/100/i/scimag/09800000/098...
Yes, also RAID5 has been in use at least since the 1980’s
I don’t really track historical prices, so I can’t say what’s a “good value” in that sense. I just send an email whenever I spot a lower price for a flight. That way, you get the heads-up on any deals as soon as they show up!
> Other than a few actual schools like Georgia Tech with OMSCS which actually seems to be trying to innovate to give degrees online at a fraction of the on-campus cost, they also don't seem to be trying to actually give degrees.

that's because selective universities don't _want_ to give degrees through MOOCs at a lower cost as it 1) reduces the value of their degrees, and 2) reduces their reputation.

Top universities could easily increase their student body 2x or 3x, bringing acceptance rate back up to 15%-20%. But they don't want to. Because what they're selling is not just an education (you can get that at (fill in blank) State), they're selling prestige and future opportunities, and the value of that lies in its _scarcity_.
FreeBSD-rustdate, a reimplementation of FreeBSD-update
A $557B Drop in Office Values Eclipses a Revival of Cities
I know enough Elisp to assign a key combo to a kbd-macro fwiw
>Did they inject Biden with a dementia drug to force a withdrawal and engineer the timing such that the current Vice President was pretty much the only viable option for the US Democrats to rally behind?

It's not a one-way relation to power. Intelligence agencies are nothing if not opportunistic, they can influence elections but if one of the candidates is clearly incompetent there isn't much they can do unless he drops out. You're forgetting that Jill Stein would've never been endorsed by Biden; what appears to be chaotic and contingent actually has a strong set of boundary conditions of possibility that all the contingency is contained within, and intelligence agencies, including even the state department for foreign affairs, try to control that. Not individual actions, but the ability to perform them, the rationality of it. The fact that you can't even imagine a candidate besides Donald Trump who poses a serious threat to the state intelligence apparatus shows you that they've already won, or at least nearly so.
Thanks for owning up :)
Not necessarily luddites, but lack having a development team available for potential streamlining. Also the Government Department not setting the industry up to allow such streamlining (with a strong asterisk noting that such streamlining may actually be worse for learning outcomes, no matter how much better it would be for freeing up a teacher's time).

This person actually uses ChatGPT to generate report comments "around" the core themes that need to be pointed out in the report. She's said that it's saved a lot of time that would be spent on the "fluff" that wraps around the central message. I think this is one of the perfect use cases for an LLM; "fluff" generation, not the crucial message.

"Machine grading" would be something that the "machine" would have to be tuned for, which is Government Department level jurisdiction, and pretty well outside the skill set of teachers in general (I would think).
My point is that small living spaces aren't the reason Europeans aren't having kids. Middle-class Americans aren't having kids either, even though they live in suburbs with oversized houses that they're spending all their income on.
Same here. Actually I regularly revisit threads about Dokku, Coolify and CapRover because I know that there are references to other projects that I might have missed.
So, fun fact from calculus (though you can easily prove this with basic algebra as I do below):

- You want to compare two products: in this case 6x9 and 7x8.

- And in each product, if you add the two numbers together, you get the same result. In this case, 6+9 = 7+8.

Then the product will be larger for the pair of numbers that are closer together. So 7x8 > 6x9. That might help you remember which is 56 and which is 54.

You typically see this in a word problem where you are given a fixed amount of fence and you have to enclose the largest rectangular area. The answer is to use a square area (two sides being equal). If the problem has constraints that prevent the sides from being equal, then you pick the length and width to be as close to each other as possible.

In case you want to transfer the geometric intuition to an algebraic proof: If the sum of the two side lengths is 2m, then the two side lengths can be written as (m+n) and (m-n) for some positive n. If you multiply the two, you get (m+n)(m-n) = m²-n². To maximize the product, you need n to be as close to 0 as possible - i.e. for both sides to be as close to each other as possible.
Also I’ve found that while most people (non-tech) don’t have a concept of XOR, they probably took basic algebra and understand 1+?=3

Arithmetic wouldn’t be a good implementation due to integer overflow (a problem XOR doesn’t have) but it’s helpful if you ever have to explain it to the less technical business person who you need to sign off on the purchasing decision.
unfortunately modern cpus are still pretty sparse on tools to make erasure codes extremely fast. E.g. no vector clmuls.
Yeah that hourly packet rate is called traffic masking or traffic flow confidentiality. It's offered in some instances of IPSec, but given that it's not exactly a common protocol in end-user products you don't really see it. I did implement it for my messaging system however https://github.com/maqp/tfc/wiki/Commands#14-traffic-masking
> Being able to bring the whole application up locally should be an absolute non-negotiable.

This usually doesn't work that well for larger systems with services split between multiple teams. And it's not typically the RAM/CPU limitations that are the problem, but the amount of configuration that needs to be customized (and, in some cases, data).

Sooner or later, you just start testing with the other teams' production/staging environments rather than deal with local incompatibilities.
Coding with Cursor [video]
I actually think it's both.

She would spend that amount of time anyway, because "it's what she does".

It would be possible to achieve 90% of her results with maybe 70% of the time and effort that she puts in. But even at 70% it still would run into non-trivial "enforced overtime".
I'm sure Clojure is a great language for some tasks...

But, looking at the examples (picked the Wordle one since I know that game): https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/blob/main/dev/examples/...

I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color", "merge-colors" and "colors"... then the "field" one lines 76 to 117 is even harder.

is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)

I wonder what the same Wordle example would look like in, say pure Flutter.

Also wonder how would that code look with external dependencies (say hitting a server to get the word of the day), and navigation (with maintaining state in between those pages)
I feel like the answer, at least for the current generation of models, is the user is liable.

Who is held liable if I use broken code from stack overflow, or don't investigate the accuracy of some solution I find, or otherwise misuse information? Pretty sure it's me.
Unfortunately the archive link also lacks the full article. I guess the wsj found a way to detect it. Bypass paywalls clean also failed. Same with archive.org
Law or otherwise, I don't see how this would have a big impact on rents. The landlords can't declare themselves immune to supply and demand - there is a market price and if their rents are too high the housing will be empty. They can't form a big monopoly by talking to each other, because the cost of having empty properties will fall on specific landlords who then have incentive to defect and go towards the market price.

I'm sure the scheme is helpful to landlords at some level, but it'd be a bit weird if it was more than a marginal difference in rents.
What a genius the original maintainer of this software is
NSA Releases Internal 1982 Lecture by Computer Pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper [video]
Then there are no morals at all with that particular take on how laws, morals, and the rest are formed. Equality, personal sovereignty, etc mean nothing because they are just constructs of some human’s mind that somehow got mindshare; all meaningless under your guidelines.
I remember when IBM wrote "IBM" using single atoms. It took quite a while to get to this planar blanket and is great progress.
That sort of place is totally abhorrent - not something I would ever use.

However, I have a friend who is wondering if there is a better way to access content on AA than having to futz around with Onion, MySQL and ratarmount? He’d prefer not to code something up himself for what is presumably a fairly common use-case.
Oh interesting, thanks for letting me know!
> the AI successfully predicted 14 earthquakes within about 200 miles of where it estimated they would happen and at almost exactly the calculated strength. It missed one earthquake and gave eight false warnings.

It gave slightly more than 1 in 3 false alarms unfortunately.
The only labor-saving advantage to these sorts of machines comes from them using other people's labor: my own work is not going to help me produce more work. And other people might know better than me about something, but not being able to trace the source of any output makes it impossible to analyze the chain of reasoning that led to it. It doesn't have use either as a creative tool, as a research assistant, nor as a mechanical part. Its almost a toy, except it steals everything you give to it.
Was it AI or ML?
Can you quote the statistics you are referencing and the implication you are making with them?
Those 800,000 jobs never existed, so there aren't any fewer. There are just fewer than people thought. The correction to that statistic doesn't affect how easy or hard it is to get a job.
Me too (though it was 20 years ago). I think Sibelius and a few others were alternatives installed on the machines but I didn't use any of them in depth.
Nvidia employees work 7 days a week until 2am
As a fellow game dev this article should be targeted at readers like me. But my eyes can't help but *immediately* glaze over as soon as I read all the math notation.

I'm pretty ok at 3d video game math. I do lots of work with matrices, quaternions, vectors, and friends. It's not particularly difficult.

I can't for the life of me read mathy math. Wikipedia Math is inscrutable hieroglyphics. It's quite frustrating.

I wish someone would write a "foundations" article or book that spoke in language understandable by normal humans. Or at minimum had a bloody legend that explained what all the %&(#%& symbols meant.
I really appreciate hearing the story that weaves all these computing choices together! Somehow that human element contains more actionable information than a dense data sheet, and I now I know I'll give Gnome and some of the apps mentioned a try!

Perhaps I'll try it in a VM on a M1 MacBook Pro, with Nix, to really have fun! I think personal computer software can be improved a lot with lessons from the Infrastructure as Code world, notably the ability to create reproducible, version controlled computing environments!
I think the "Aero" UI in Windows Vista was the high point for Windows UI. The OS ran poorly and its fundamentals (like all Windows versions) was junk, but the UI looked really nice. This modern flat stuff is crap.
There is much that isn't indexed here. "718" yields less than 4,000 hits, which seems very low. There are many old buildings in Brooklyn that still sport "fallout shelter" signs, but ATiB returns only 13 results for that term, with many duplicate images. Here's an example of a missing result, probably one of thousands: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AdsYFzf7MAZoo4Vc8
> It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

This is quite an appropriate way of putting it. It is like that, but there's no real specification as to the quality and length of said text book.

Some teachers create a textbook of stick figure drawings. Others create a textbook of coherent progressive storylines that build on each other using a logical set of figures and well-labelled diagrams that explain the concepts and outcomes that cater to different learning styles.

Now I'm getting out of my depth a bit, as I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the detail of her work, but I believe there is (much?) more opportunity for re-use of materials from one year to the next, thus minimising custom work. But I also believe that she prefers to do it all "custom" for her own (perfectionist? obsessive?) reasons.
While ago I couldn't get LetsEncrypt working properly, was very frustrating. I think I just gave up at some point