skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an ML researcher, but I do work in the field.

My mental model of AI advancements is that of a step function with s-curves in each step [1]. Each time there is an algorithmic advancement, people quickly rush to apply it to both existing and new problems, demonstrating quick advancements. Then we tend to hit a kind of plateau for a number of years until the next algorithmic solution is found. Examples of steps include, AlexNet demonstrating superior image labeling, LeCun demonstrating DeepLearning, and now OpenAI demonstrating large transformer models.

I think in the past, at each stage, people tend to think that the recent progress is a linear or exponential process that will continue forward. This lead to people thinking self driving cars were right around the corner after the introduction of DL in the 2010s, and super-intelligence is right around the corner now. I think at each stage, the cusp of the S-curve comes as we find where the model is good enough to be deployed, and where it isn't. Then companies tend to enter a holding pattern for a number of years getting diminishing returns from small improvements on their models, until the next algorithmic breakthrough is made.

Right now I would guess that we are around 0.9 on the S curve, we can still improve the LLMs (as DeepSeek has shown wide MoE and o1/o3 have shown CoT), and it will take a few years for the best uses to be brought to market and popularized. As you mentioned, LeCun points out that LLMs have a hallucination problem built into their architecture, others have pointed out that LLMs have had shockingly few revelations and breakthroughs for something that has ingested more knowledge than any living human. I think future work on LLMs are likely to make some improvement on these things, but not much.

I don't know what it will be, but a new algorithm will be needed to induce the next step on the curve of AI advancement.

[1]: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/organisati...
> US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US

BYD makes electric buses in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series
I was looking to see if they sold only the motherboard just last night and failed. Thanks!!

$1,299 (64GB) and $1,599 USD (128GB) for the motherboards. Yikes, but I get why.
Friedmanite economists lauding the "productivity increases" of restaurants, meanwhile I have stopped eating anywhere except food trucks because mid-tier dining is so bad now due to cost-cutting and loss of expertise.

Yeah that tracks for Chicago School economics.
Interesting technology. Similar to Citus but not built as an extension. The Citus coordinator, which is a Postgres database with the Citus extension, is replaced by a proxy layer written in Rust. That might provide more flexibility and velocity implementing distributed planning and execution than being tied to the extension ecosystem. It would indeed be a journey to catch up with Postgres on compatibility, but it's a good start.
Mayhap part of it is the "modern smoke break" - the people picking up like to have an excuse to take a break from work in the early afternoon.
You're not thinking like a true capitalist.

Sure, you got your $2,000 out of the customer. But what about the money you could be making between now and the next time the customer buys something?

You're giving up on tens of dollars a year by not tormenting the people who gave you money already and might do so again.
I think what youd ultimately agree with is that it's healthy to be aligned with your emotional, instinctual reactions.

Though I am not totally sure one cannot fully accept snd fully align their being with the absurdity of life - celebrating their life/death rather than wallowing in it.
Like many societal issues, support for bike transport would be one way to address this.

To help support that, it should be expected that on the first day of school, police officers will ride bikes along all the routes students are expected to cover --- to help support that, bring back truant officers and put them on bicycles.
Yet that are kids that walk at most schools because they live across the street. Or at least there used to be. And how does that work for a high school that has the same ridiculous lines? 15 year olds know which car takes them home, and sometimes they're riding with peers?
I swear AirPods in general are just less reliable than they used to be too. I feel like I need to be doing incantations for them to work sometimes, whereas I recall them feeling like magic compared to BT headphones I've used in the past, the way they would seamlessly pair, start/stop music when you pull one out, etc.

It reminds me of some discussion I was seeing the other day about how the dynamic island on the newer iPhones is way buggier than it was at launch. Someone suggested that this happens because the S-tier engineers are tasked with building these things to blow everyone out of the water at launch, and then B-tier developers are tasked with maintaining them for the following years, at which point stuff starts regressing.
It seems to me the mentality has become that since end users tend to be bad at system administration, they shouldn't be allowed to do it, for their own good.

I reject this mentality. I don't think it's necessary or desirable to make it impossible for people to do things that have negative consequences for themselves. Put a "here there be dragons" warning on the firmware rollback, bootloader unlock, or similar dangerous operation and let people take responsibility for the outcome.

In the case of consumer devices, most people won't even try those things; those who do risk further problems for the chance of a better outcome. In the case of enterprise networking equipment, there's an IT department that, in theory has the skills and resources necessary to make good decisions about technology.
Sony bricked my WF-1000XM4 by overheating its batteries. Some users reported things melting.
$250,00 of my work straight to the trash bin.
Thank you Sony...not.
Advocating for Palestinians isn’t advocating for a “terror group”. Which is itself a nebulous term that is used for political reasons.

Now, working to carry out a foreign governments interests against the best interests of the American public IS treason, but that’s okay when you’re the president I guess.
There are "better" databases but they're better given some particular definition that may not be relevant to your needs. If SQL/the relational model and ACID semantics is what you need then postgres is simply the best in class. The fact it dates back to the 80s is probably an advantage (requirement?) when it comes to solving a problem really well
Assuming English is your first language, I can probably guess which specific parts of the "channel 4" Russian pronounciation gave you trouble. I'm sure your effort was valiant, but the language is just so different compared to English
There's an entire section and even a chart in the article that explains why this is different now

In 1969 only about 30% of kids lived too far away from school for walking to be a realistic option.

In 2009 (and today) that numbers is around 80%.

Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.

Most people cannot do it.
Busses are slow as snot in many cases, because the routes are insane.

We can walk to school and see the bus when we leave the house and easily beat it by many minutes.

(Busses being slow and routes taking long is probably a design feature, allowing schools to let out at 3PM but parents to not have to be home until 5PM or later).

But the real final solution won't be robocars, it'll be robokids. Then if you lose one you can just get a replacement.
Not much to do for most of the parents, TBH, especially if you want to get into a good school.

Me? I picked the public elementary school 10 minutes of walk away instead of the private one that is 20+ minutes of driving. I don't want everyone in the household gets frustrated pretty much every Mon-Fri.

Secondary school is going to be a bit of issue. We do have one that is adjacent to the said elementary school but it is not very good. But then my son would be 11 years old by then so hopefully he can just take the bus.
Good motivation for a PSA:

This happens more and more often, and there is a fairly easy + popular workaround (which also comes with 99% ad blocking as a bonus). Just either set up pi-hole locally OR use a hosted DNS service that does essentially the same thing.

Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve these hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP.

Arguments for pi-hole or other local solution: Free. Private.

Arguments for hosted solution: No set-up headache, no local raspberry pi or other machine to maintain. Overall a bit simpler.

Guide for blocking updates after the service is set up (I just went through this a month or two ago to block updates to my LG TV):

Step 1: Search around for servers that correspond to updates for your device.

Step 2: Test these lists; realize that they are often incomplete.

Step 3: Shut your device off. Open pi-hole like service, and watch queries live. While doing so, turn on your device (and if you have the option, check for updates).

Step 4: Put all of the queried hosts you see into your block list.

Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When this happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were blocked at that moment. Remove only those from the blocklist. (And cross your fingers that the manufacturer doesn't use the same hosts for typical functionality and updates.)
To add an item, you scan a QR code. That QR code usually contains the name of the service and your username. For example, the format of Github's QR code is:

otpauth://totp/GitHub:[username]?secret=[secret]&issuer=GitHub
> The electric airplane is another myth.

Strong disagree. Short range eVTOL craft will blow open the market for all kinds of use cases.
Putting so much emphasis on cars, and being in cars is a national embarrassment
> one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.

These things are not OFFERED to men, they are available for the taking if one is so inclined. Your options do not depend on your gender, but many will reject them as if they do. Therapy? It's not just for sissies. If men are so tough, why do they need society to OFFER solutions to their problems?
The contents of people's replies (, votes) is a measure of my effect, so post-facto, no modelling is required.

I'm clearly aware of the existence of people who want an "objective (unemotive) presentation", and clearly aware of what effect emoting has on those people. I haven't failed to model it. On many issues I'm quick to suspend this expression, and engage in a more dispassionate way with a person who wants me to, if I see some value in it. But I'm loathe to give up expressing my feelings, because that is part of the purpose of expression.

I am only doing what you are here in this comment -- you express your contempt in much more extreme terms ("disgust") than I, in order that I may take your feelings into account.

Likewise, when appraising stoicism, I think there's value in others taking my feelings on the matter into account. If only as a means of a kind of reflexive emotional equilibrium modulated by surprise: there's too little contempt towards stocisim in my view, and in its absense, has grown a cult around figures like aurelius.

I've been to the cult meetings in which he is read in a religious manner, cherrypicked and deliberately misunderstood. I'm here out in the world you see, participating -- and I wish to reflect that in my thinking and feelings on the world.
> I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door

It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.

That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.
Yes mine was like that when not working. The fix is OTA I think, I hope you get it soon.
Be wary of judging an entire category by the Microsoft implementation of if.
I think you hit on it, but the total reason why is slightly different, and the key is in its trigger of your disgust mechanism:

Conflict does not need philosophical reinforcement because it is a major biological default. Using our higher abilities to reinforce these prerequisite (but not higher/good) positions triggers disgust because it leads to traumatic outcomes. That is why disgust exists: to cause us to avoid actions that lead to traumatic outcomes. Sometimes the arm of perception of our disgust reaction reaches further than our comprehension.
The app they make would probably be Internet enabled with electron so… prolly also won’t work
During nice weather, surely, but it might be very unpleasant when raining.

When I hear these stories about how children in USA go to school, I am always astonished.

In Europe, my parents took me to the school one single time, for the first school day, when I was 6 years old. Everyday after that I have gone there and come back alone, for a walk of about one mile and a half. Several years later, I continued my studies at a more distant school, to which I was going alone using the public transportation of the city, by bus, the same as most of my colleagues.

Even during the 1st grade (i.e. at 6 to 7 years old) any child would have considered very shameful to be brought to the school by their parents, as an indication that they would have been somehow helpless or handicapped.
Do the same people claim that arguing against Israel's interests in Gaza is treason against the US? Because I'm not sure what that makes the US government. Now imagine making this argument against a Russian immigrant criticizing Putin's regime.
Literally addressed in the article.

80% of kids live too far away for walking to be feasible.
When have corporations cared for population? They exist to make money and they will try to abuse the outdated system as much as possible.
The best thing about the arc of history so far is that by and large it decentralized power (with some horrific exceptions)

God-kings / pharaohs / caesars -> a handful of feudalists -> millions of millionaires vs voters vs large governments all competing in a much less violent and more stable balance of power
Many of them can't walk home from school. As the article says, most students now live too far away from school (greater than three miles), and many rural/suburban areas have underdeveloped sidewalks and traffic systems.

If three miles sounds like not a big deal, it certainly is when you have short legs, a backpack full of books, and uncooperative weather. I was lucky enough to walk to/from school for most of my schooling. It was only around one mile and it still took 30 minutes. As an adult I would probably balk at a 90-minute commute.
Rural property owners in the US are somewhat likely to shoot first and ask questions about trespassers only later. In some parts of the country the Road is the only obviously public land. (Even that can't be taken for granted sometimes, as private streets exist in some areas, too.)
It's not laziness, it's a tactic.

You don't want to provide more info than absolutely necessary, that could be bad from security and legal perspective.

Also, if you don't include more info, people tend to ask you less questions to clarify.
Copyright and the Demoscene (Scandal Amiga Demo)
I like so much about Nix and the Nix philosophy, but I'm a bit stuck on the perceived ugliness of the Nix language. It just feels so ... icky to me. I don't typically feel that way about languages. Even Erlang (while being bizarre) didn't/doesn't bother me that much.

Does anybody else have this problem? How do you get over it? (it seems like such a ridiculous reason to avoid picking up an otherwise good tech)
Complete tangent: "voila" is French for "here it is", but "viola" is French for "raped". Careful using foreign words if you're not sure you can spell them.
Ridiculous, you can't force user behavior like that. Have the restaurants and what not entice you to stay.
Some hybrid drivetrains have fewer moving parts than a traditional ICE and are more reliable.
If the child is not in any actual danger, then people who call emergency services or police need to be cited for wasting resources.

Busybodies seem to call because of "what if" things. That child's actual danger is the busybody.
The weirdest part of my school day was wandering out of the recess lot and trying to find Mom’s car every day. A lot of my classmates were bused in from 15 miles away and we were second-class “townies” but yet, we lived outside the parochial territory. Fifth Estate, I suppose.

Once Dad bought a new car and surprised us by not picking us up in the one we recognized?!

Around 5th grade I had some sort of trauma-drama on the soccer field, needed to call in Mom for a pickup. I didn’t know what a busy-tone sounded like despite figuring out the payphone on campus. I held the receiver to my ear for 10 minutes anxiously hoping Mom would answer.

I believe the rare school bus rides were field trips, and once my friend and I were in the rear, frantically waving and smiling at every other motorist to see how they’d respond, and we failed to cause any accidents

I feel it was a curse on Mom to put so many miles on Soccer Mom Car. Parents couldn’t hardly wait for our maturity and licensing!
> Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway?

No matter the device, software rots.

Not because the device changes, not because the software changes, but because the world does
No tariffs?
TFTP is probably the exception to that rule. All the other protocols started out easily enough and added more and more cruft. TFTP stayed the way it's always been - minimalist, terrifyingly awful at most things, handy for a few corner cases. If you know when to use it and when to use something like SCP, you're golden.

If TFTP had gone the way of SNMP, we'd have 'tftp <src> <dest> --proto tcp --tls --retries 8 --log-type json' or some horrendous mess like that.
Seriously - I'd love to have my kids walk but we are 22 miles away (in a rural area).
I’ve had too many experiences of starting a project at noon on one day and getting fixated on finishing it and failing, then after some sleep and reflection ripped half of it out and finishing the new idea before lunch, which isn’t even my most productive time of day.

If I’d had this perspective the day before I would have been finished before 5. But I got wrapped up in thinking I was close and I should have stopped for air.
I had cranes constructing the library at Alexandria.
Yeah, we do use Apple TV because at the very least if they are collecting our data, they're not using it to advertise directly to us on the same device. My parents have a Roku TV and the number of ads it serves up directly on the device leave me feeling nauseous.
> Likewise, a mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town.

That linked article is incredible to me (considering how much I used to walk around at that age).

If our culture becomes so backwards that you will actually be criminalized for letting your kids move around independently, then of course we'll be doomed to car pickup lines forever.
I just want to highlight this link in the article, about a mother who was arrested because her son walked less than a mile into town (population 370) on his own [0]. Arrested. For putting him in danger.

What a mess.

[0] https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...
Oh this is where I'm at now, I've been buying juice and adding a little to soda water so it comes out like a light Fresca sort of drink. It would be nice to have that option when going out though.
You are raising your kids in a neighborhood that is prone to this level of violence?
You will own nothing, you will have no privacy, and you will be happy.

(Or not, of course...)
It's kind of interesting to see P2P coming back! I'm happy to see more P2P projects popping up. When the Snowden leaks came out, there was a brief interest in P2P encrypted messaging. I wonder if the political climate now is bringing interest back.

Back in 2014 (I believe briar started in 2015) I wrote a realtime P2P application platform. Not only could you send encrypted messages between people, but you can also send files, play games, and write and share programs together, all within the application. The use case for mine is different than briar's.

https://firestr.com/

https://github.com/mempko/firestr

P2P is really fun but also important and I'm happy to see interest in P2P apps coming back!
Came here to say the same. I have seen multiple stories of parents getting arrested for letting their kids walk home long distances.
I was driven to school during preschool, kindergarten, and part of grade school, biked or walked in junior high or high school. My kid is in preschool and I drive him or walk him to school. He'll be able to walk to junior high and high school, and will probably take the bus to grade school. I don't mind the pickup line right now.
Samsung might be one of the good ones, but sadly most hardware manufacturers treat firmware and software like just another line item on the BOM. Like a screw or a silicon gasket: Source it from some "supplier," spoon it into the product somewhere on the assembly line, and then never touch it again. I've seen a hardware manufacturer that doesn't even use source control or branching. When they have a new hardware product, they take the software that is closest in functionality, hack it until it works with the new hardware, and then set the software back on the shelf until next time.
Citus works really well *if* you have your schema well defined and slightly denormalized (meaning you have the shard key materialized on every table), and you ensure you're always joining on that as part of querying. For a lot of existing applications that were not designed with this in mind if can be several months of database and application code changes to get things into shape to work with Citus.

If you're designing from scratch and make it worth with Citus then (specifically for a multi-tenant/SaaS sharded app) it can make scaling seem a bit magical.
> I understand that we live in a different world

Do we, though?

Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.

I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.
It's probably more that most Americans typically have very little for breakfast.

Around here, cornbread and sausage gravy, coffee (milk or tea for my teenager) is a not-uncommon Saturday breakfast. I think I made a variety of muffins last weekend. Or home-made corned beef hash with scrambled eggs, etc. You get the idea.

OTOH, during the week it's probably something simple like a sausage patty on a toasted English muffin, maybe with a scrambled egg (my version of a McMuffin). Or cereal if I'm not feeling it.

I have had Caesar and other salads for breakfast. Salads are really delicious when you don't want a heavy meal and they're quick and easy to make.
You also can't really choose to opt out without leaving the country because lots of places make it illegal for your under <13 kid to go anywhere on their own.