mjn
mjn on Hacker News
Posted by
mjn on Saturday January 24, 2026 @11:29PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.kmjn.org/snow/
Client-side app that pulls NWS data to attempt to show progression when you're in the middle of a major snowfall event.
I've also started doing this, and it's surprisingly enjoyable to both do and even to read. The end result is often more readable to me than using a 3rd-party JS visualization library, because I only need to know standard HTML/CSS concepts to understand what's going on. And a side benefit is smaller pages with less bitrot due to being able to skip the dependencies.
Posted by
mjn on Thursday January 01, 2026 @07:02PM
from the kmjn.org dept.
Besides growth, Nvidia also has much higher profit margins. In Q1 2024, Apple's margins were 42% gross, 26% net, versus Nvidia's 78% gross, 57% net. May or may not be sustainable, but for now Nvidia's basically printing money.
In practice, wrong findings that aren't due to misconduct and aren't very recent are usually not retracted though. It's just considered part of the history of science that some old papers have proofs or results now known to be false. It is pretty common in mathematics, for example, for people to discover (and publish) errors they found in old proofs, without the journal going back and retracting the old proof. A famous example is Hilbert's (incorrect) sketch of a proof for the continuum hypothesis [1].
[1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-p...
I think the flags have more been because of the poor sourcing of the actual death. It seems various people and groups heard that he died and are posting their obituaries and remembrances, but there's no real factual confirmation or details (e.g. one thing that was briefly on the front page here [1] was a link to an unsourced tweet from Momentum UK).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721271
Yes, this article doesn't appear to have any independent sourcing, it just cites the Jacobin one that you link: "de acordo com a revista norte-americana Jacobin" ("according to the North American magazine Jacobin").
Posted by
mjn on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @08:01PM
from the kmjn.org dept.
"Unfit for deployment" or "not intended for deployment" is semi-standard wording for research models that are just raw language models with none of the safety/bias/offensiveness filtering that is usually desired for product applications. For example, if you deploy it as a customer-service chatbot, it might tell your customers to kill themselves, or call them racial slurs.
It doesn't mean that there's anything technically wrong with the language model per se as a model of language, just that there has been no effort made to ensure it's fit to be deployed as-is for any given generative-AI use case, and the model authors would prefer you didn't do that.
Posted by
mjn on Saturday October 21, 2023 @07:15PM
from the reuters.com dept.
Posted by
mjn on Saturday October 07, 2023 @07:40PM
from the thestar.com dept.
Posted by
mjn on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @05:19PM
from the wilsoncenter.org dept.
> DeepL and Google Translate definitely also make things up
I think what they make up is different, but this is a good point. They have a particularly odd tendency to either do something like autocorrect where it wasn't appropriate (translate a different word that is similar in spelling to the requested word), or to make up false friends, doing something like transliterate + then autocorrect in the target language.
One example, which I blogged about 5 years ago but is still mistranslated, is the word "ribbit" (what a frog does): https://www.kmjn.org/notes/google_translates_ribbit.html
In 2018, if you translated it to Greek with Google Translate, it gave you κουνέλι (kouneli), which is Greek for rabbit. A word that is one letter away from ribbit but not close to a similar meaning. When I tried it just now, it translates it to ραβδί (rabdi), which means stick and is completely unrelated to the correct answer, but I guess starts with similar letters as ribbit?
Same situation in Greece. Formal documents like identity cards, university diplomas, and even mailboxes, generally put the surname first, while in running text, like a news article, the given name is first. Some formal documents also list the patronymic, in the order: Surname Given Patronymic.
In some situations it is less clear which convention applies. For example most of my older relatives use surname-first for their Facebook account name, which is less common with younger people. I have also seen both orders on business cards. I think most Greeks would not expect foreigners to be familiar with or follow these conventions though.
Posted by
mjn on Monday September 18, 2023 @06:19PM
from the lrb.co.uk dept.
Posted by
mjn on Saturday September 16, 2023 @05:32PM
from the americanaffairsjournal.org dept.
Posted by
mjn on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @06:40PM
from the wired.com dept.
Posted by
mjn on Saturday August 26, 2023 @01:53PM
from the americanaffairsjournal.org dept.
Retirement savings are in fact excluded from parents' assets for the purposes of FAFSA, at least if they are in some kind of account legally recognized as a retirement account (401k, 403b, IRA, traditional pension, annuity, etc.). Details of what is included and excluded from parental assets:
https://studentaid.gov/2324/help/parent-investments
There are a few others as well. As of the 2023-2024 cycle, there are 13 ways to be considered independent (any one of them suffices), according to the official list [1]. To summarize them here:
1. Born before Jan 1, 2000; 2. Married; 3. Will be attending grad school [2]; 4. Active-duty U.S. military; 5. U.S. military veteran; 6. Have dependent children; 7. Have live-in dependents other than children; 8. Both parents deceased and/or were a foster child or a ward of the court after age 13; 9. Current or former emancipated minor; 10. Legal guardian is someone other than parent or stepparent; 11,12,13. Homeless or at-risk-of-homelessness within the past year (three different routes of determination).
[1] https://studentaid.gov/2324/help/need-parent-info
[2] Graduate students in the U.S. generally don't get the kind of need-based financial aid that undergrads do, though, so this one is often not very helpful.
That matches my experience. Of places I've spent significant time in the past year, the one with the most reasonably priced food for eating out is NYC, of all places. It has very expensive places too, of course, but a lot more sub-$10 options than anywhere else I've been recently. There are even a few 99-cent pizza slice places still in business (not as many as 10 years ago, but they exist, and $2-3/slice places are abundant).
That's a good point. I wonder how many of those '70s theorists of technology would have predicted that, 50 years later, UPS driver would be a (seemingly) harder to automate occupation than writer.
Posted by
mjn on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @05:10PM
from the latimes.com dept.
Posted by
mjn on Saturday August 05, 2023 @06:02PM
from the ft.com dept.
Posted by
mjn on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:47AM
from the tedunderwood.com dept.
Some of the alliances are more surprising to me than others. I'm not surprised that religious social conservatives eventually discovered that they have things in common with other religious social conservatives, even from other traditions. If your main issue is that you like the traditional patriarchal family and don't like homosexuality, it's not a huge stretch to find others who agree.
I'm more surprised by the movement in this direction of people like Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League (discussed in the article intro). I thought of this kind of far-right as more of a "clash of civilizations" type of cultural and/or racialist right-wing, defending "the West" against foreigners and immigration. They did not historically have much of a religious angle to them, nor particularly care about social conservatism (other than opposing immigration). It feels like a genuine change that people in that camp now find common cause with Islamism against a shared enemy of Western liberals.
Posted by
mjn on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @11:32PM
from the newlinesmag.com dept.
It's a bit more than six courses a year at community colleges and teaching-oriented 4-year colleges (though you're still right that adjuncts are much cheaper). In California, most full-time faculty at community colleges have a 15 credit per semester teaching obligation, which works out to ten 3-credit courses a year. Some do get credit in lieu of a course for taking on other responsibilities (dept chair, director of a program, etc.), but that's the baseline workload. Even the Cal State system, which is made up of 4-year schools, has a baseline teaching load of eight classes a year ("4/4").