Hacker News Reader

notjulianjayneson Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable

This is great!

I made an attempt at something similar, but putting it online was a bit beyond what I know how to do.

https://github.com/JonGerhardson/Epsteindb

notjulianjayneson Estimating AI energy use

Not OP but the EPA has a calculator for estimating emissions to energy consumption. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...

notjulianjayneson IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites

>(I wrote an extensive suite of software to track this)

Interesting. . . do you have a page for the project or anything?

notjulianjayneson BYOK – Bring Your Own Keyboard

I once wrote a ~2,000 word draft,on an alpha-smart ($6 at a goodwill) and then couldn't get the transfer to computer function to work correctly, so I had to rewrite the whole thing because I wasn't gonna sit there and manually re-type three lines at a time from the grayscale LCD. The subsequent draft was actually better though, so for this reason I would recommend such a device. It's also a fun novelty thing. Really though, if you keep getting distracted from your writing, maybe consider if it's because you don't actually have anything to say?

notjulianjayneson New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

Yeah this one is funny because it's literally the stated mission of several U.S. based Zionist/anti-antisemetic organizations.

notjulianjayneson How to Make a Living as a Writer

You are probably thinking this means life will be more like that Jack Kerouac line "the mad ones..." I am imagining how what you describe plays out is more like a billion reality TV stars all trying to one up each other.

notjulianjayneson Verizon tries to get out of merger condition requiring it to unlock phones

This applies to carrier locking, not their practice of preventing bootloader unlocking on devices sold by Verizon, correct?

notjulianjayneson Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

There's some annoying parts to using it, but the query tool for the Air Force Civil Engineering Center's CERCLA records database is otherwise good and information dense, IMO. https://ar.cce.af.mil/

notjulianjayneson The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025

> Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table

source please

notjulianjayneson The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025

Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/

notjulianjayneson Milwaukee M18 Battery Reverse Engineering

DeWalt also makes a series of batteries that will either provide ~20v (5s3p) or ~60v (15s1p) depending on the tool you plug it into. I've taken one of these apart before and how they implement this is just a mechanical switch between the cell groups, which only gets depressed when inserted into 60v tools. Not sure if thats why they put all the circuitry on the tool side, but I can't think of another good way to implement the same. (You'd need a pretty beefy boost/buck controller for the amps these tools pull )

notjulianjayneson Qwen2.5-VL-32B: Smarter and Lighter

https://www.canirunthisllm.net/

notjulianjayneson China Discloses Powerful Deep-Sea Cable Cutter

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3303246/chin...

Original article

notjulianjayneson Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger

If the bar for AGI is "as smart as a human being," and humans do not-very-smart things like invest obscene amounts of money into developing AGI then maybe it's actually not as high of a bar as we assume it is.

notjulianjayneson I Went to SQL Injection Court

Damn, this is impressive. I've been fighting with a state agency since December for 17,000 emails. I don't think I've ever tried to request emails and received zero push-back, but a $33 million estimate just, chef's kiss

notjulianjayneson WhatsApp, Signal Sign letter against UK privacy bill, say they will not comply (2023)

The Cloud Act is basically just the Stored Communications Act but for foreign countries, isn't it? Since Signal doesn't have (practically) any user data to hand over to begin with, I don't really see why this matters. Am I missing something?

notjulianjayneson DeepScaleR: Surpassing O1-Preview with a 1.5B Model by Scaling RL

I sometimes do the strawberry question immediately followed by "How many Rs in "bookkeeper?"

notjulianjayneson New Bill Aims to Block Pirate Sites in the U.S.

Are there currently any laws in the U.S. requiring blocks on specific websites for any reason (csam, terrorist recruitment etc.).

notjulianjayneson Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet

The buddy-cop television series Limitless spin off series is superior to the Bradley Cooper movie of the same name.

notjulianjayneson Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet

No. I want hundreds of people down at the docks having drug fueled orgies in broad daylight on the deck of a battleship. (Been a few years since I read it but pretty sure that's how the book ends ..) None of that real danger shit for me thanks.

notjulianjayneson Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet

Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.

notjulianjayneson Selling the Collective: On Kevin Killian's "Selected Amazon Reviews"

I interviewed Kevin Killian for a class once when I was in college, and then later met him when he was in town for a reading. At that reading -- I forget the exact context -- but either Kevin, or possibly another poet deadpanned the word "straight" in a poem, which got a few MFA students in a tussy, which was kinda funny. (For context, Killian has won awards for his gay erotic fiction.)

Super nice guy. Wished me happy birthday on Facebook every year, even though we'd only talked maybe two or three times. I was very sad to hear of his passing a few years back.

notjulianjayneson Donut Lab's next-generation in-wheel motors

If the weights are listed on the are to be believed, this shouldn't be an issue. It says 40 kg for a 21" wheel. A quick Google is telling me that a regular old steel wheel from a truck of the same size is around 50 to 80 lbs (23-36 kg).

That said, I was already thinking 630 kw per wheel was a pretty incredible claim before I realized these are apparently not much heavier than a non-mptorized wheel. These have to be some marketing department numbers or something. 630 kw is roughly 850 horsepower.

notjulianjayneson Federal Court Says Dismantling a Phone to Install Firmware Isn't a 'Search'

In the past I have considered pursuing litigation pro se because it is very difficult to find an attorney willing to take a public records case on contingency. The stereotype that anyone who represents themselves in court must be a soverign loon or think they're Will Hunting is one reason I did not do so. It is not ideal, but neither is not having access to the justice system due to not having a bunch of money to burn.

notjulianjayneson Qwen2.5 Turbo extends context length to 1M tokens

Yeah unfortunately that's the exact model I'm using (Q5 version. What I've been doing is first loading the transcript into the vector database, and then giving it a prompt thats like "summarize the transcript below: <full text of transcript>". This works surprisingly well except for one transcript I had which was of a 3 hour meeting that was per an online calculator about 38,000 tokens. Cutting the text up into 3 parts and pretending each was a seperate meeting* lead to a bunch of hallucinations for some reason.

*In theory this shouldn't matter much for my purpose of summarizing city council meetings that follow a predictable format.

notjulianjayneson Extending the context length to 1M tokens

Hi, are you able to use Qwen's 128k context length with Ollama? Using AnythingLLM + Ollamma and a GGUF version I kept getting an error message with prompts longer than 32,000 tokens. (summarizing long transcripts)

notjulianjayneson Guy makes "dodgy e-bike" from 130 used vapes to make point about e-waste

From the article I'm getting that the problem is reusable vapes are subject to different FDA regulations, and "disposable" vapes are basically a loophole, at least in the US.

notjulianjayneson U.S. Marines release report on cause of missing F-35 incident

>Are F-35 Lightnings already permitted to fly to operate within 25 miles from thunderstorm or other atmospheric electrical activity?

F-35As were just cleared for all weather flight this April. The crash occured in 2023 but was the B model. Not sure what that might mean or not mean.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-lightning-ii-fig...