MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jbeninger | 2025-04-06 13:49:48+00:00
Money for advertising is already a super sized network effect, making it difficult to challenge incumbents unless you're already rich,

Look, it's a radical idea and on its face, all at once, is impractical at the moment. So I suggest rather than pointing out the myriad of holes like shooting fish in a barrel, you give it the benefit of the doubt and roll around the ways it could work in your head. And what your online/offline experience would be if it were even 10% effective.

It already is that effective in a lot of the world with stricter advertising laws, and as a Canadian I do find the levels of advertising in the us landscape to be jarring. So there are examples
by xrortrad | 2025-04-06 13:50:52+00:00
I personally have no good reason why I don't always ask Claude and DeepSeek the same prompt.

Thinking about it more, I think a big part of it is that correct answers are not a limiting factor for me it feels like. Claude is good enough and it is more what to do with all these correct answers is my problem. I am also naturally biased to a model if paying for it.
by iamkonstantin | 2025-04-06 13:51:58+00:00
It's now almost a full year since Swift 6 (concurrency) was introduced, and I've spent a lot of time rewriting, debugging and generally tweaking things to make the compiler happy... The promise of "strict concurrency" is yet to yield any meaningful benefit, despite the huge cost of having it.

I think the pursuit of some kind of semantic purity in the Swift language overshadows more practical needs and concerns. Making Swift too different from its neighbours like Kotlin and Rust also makes it harder to context switch. It now takes a lot more time and effort to get into the flow of developing native things for iOS...
by uecker | 2025-04-06 13:52:06+00:00
"unfairly"? A lot of issues are obvious deficiencies of Rust, including immaturity of the ecosystem, integration issues, complexity, monomorphization bloat, supply chain issues. Now, all languages have issues, and Rust is certainly a nice language overall. The main issue with Rust is that is has been oversold as a panacea for safety using exaggerated arguments. So a bit of cynicism seems entirely fair.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-04-06 13:52:07+00:00
Ah, got it. Yea, then I'd focus on learning how RoPE works first. That will at least help you understand how the retrieval in current long context implementations is so limited.

A colleague from a discord I spend time in threw together this video a year or so ago, might be helpful as a first watch before a deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZYx2YFzVNc

Covers positional encoding as a general concept first, then goes into rotary embeddings.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-06 13:52:33+00:00
It's not ideal, but what's the alternative if nowhere else has a decent setup for producing boardgame components?

I don't know how boardgaming compares to other past-times in terms of CO2, but my hunch is that it would be a lot better than some other hobbies. Once the boardgame is purchased, it can be replayed many times without further CO2 emissions (ignoring snacks/drinks that may be consumed whilst playing).
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-06 13:53:09+00:00
> Unit tests let you change code fearlessly with instant feedback.

Sure they can add confidence in making changes. But I've seen they can also give you false confidence.

As I said, I can still assemble your perfect Lego bricks together wrong. And you can still change the public behavior while keeping your unit tests passing fine. I've seen both happen in practice.

That's why I think integration tests (or whatever you want to call them) give you more bang for your buck. They give you even greater confidence that your stuff works, and generally you can cover a lot more with far fewer tests so improves ROI.

The tradeoff is that it can take a bit longer to run.

> If you’re doing a lot of mocking then your design is not good.

If my app needs to talk to a database, store things in object store, send some messages in a message queue and so on, I can't not mock those things away if I'm to write unit tests.
by Hizonner | 2025-04-06 13:53:15+00:00
The usual reflexive secrecy. Nobody gives out any information about what's in any product if they can avoid it. This has really bad economic and environmental effects.

I don't know that this particular retardant is a big deal, but the rule really ought to be that the maker of every product must disclose to the public (not just actual buyers) (a) what they put into it, (b) where they got it, (c) how they assured that it was what they thought it was, (e) how they processed it, (e) exactly what analyses or characterizations they've ever done on the product or anything that went into it, and (f) the complete results of those.

Trade secrets not only shouldn't get any legal protection, but in many cases they should be illegal.
by mproud | 2025-04-06 13:53:37+00:00
This would be an insanely cool premise for a short story!

We’d probably have more underground free papers with clever writing, littered with tons ads in them, circulating around in the black market.

But there would likely also be a lot of bad “telephone,” literal word of mouth, but the message might get lost, turning into disinformation.

On the other hand, there could be organized, sanctioned markets where you’re allowed to hock wares and show off product catalogs.
by graemep | 2025-04-06 13:54:59+00:00
You are more positive than me about it.

You do have some different definitions attitudes to mine which may account for part of it. For example:

> It took me a while to realize the point of the whole exercise of the Mensa list. It’s not to become well-read. That’s a side effect. The point is to lose your smugness. To get knocked off balance by something older, stranger, smarter than you. To stop assuming you know it all.

I would say those are not two different things. If you have not been affected by things that are "older, stranger, smarter than you" you are not well read!
by testing22321 | 2025-04-06 13:55:54+00:00
> This American Life is a treasure

In the running for best podcast of all time.

As Canadians though, we just can’t listen anymore, it is too depressing and dystopian.

There was the episode about the nice folks who got new neighbours who started some nut job paramilitary thing with automatic weapons. The nice folks live everyday in fear.

There are the episodes of regular women unable to get basic medical treatment because Roe v Wade.

The list is endless, sadly.

We don’t want to live in that world, and we don’t want it taking over our thoughts either.
by atombender | 2025-04-06 13:56:16+00:00
Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this author.

Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim. It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture. There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans — the set pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all there in later novels.

He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie" book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix — which explains what happened to the characters afterwards — that none of it actually mattered in the end. This poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel set about 800 years later that examines the long-term consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of the Culture books are about the consequences of war and the desire to avoid it at all costs.

Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-tag population has descended into a medieval class inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks' most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-like simpleton who writes phonetically á la Riddley Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between the warring classes. Shades of China Miéville and William Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of the dead.

I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars. Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...
by ajross | 2025-04-06 13:56:27+00:00
OK, but now that's a performance regression. The assumption upthread was that the whole file needed to be parsed into an in-memory representation. If you don't do that, sure, you can implement precedence either way. But parsing all the way to the end for every read is ridiculous. The choice is between "parse all at once", which allows for arbitrary precedence rules but involves more code, and "parse at attribute read time", which involves less code but naturally wants to be a "first match" precedence.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-06 13:56:58+00:00
Right, right. As if your framing is completely objective. Give me a fucking break.

I refer you to this answer I gave the sibling comment because your framing of facts is just as incredibly biased as his was.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601426

> whatever causes you to so willingly believe everything that known grifters and con artists are selling you

I literally question everything and base my opinion on facts. I think for example that regardless of basis, the optics on this one are bad. What do you do? Refer to whatever Daily Kos and Occupy Democrats says is the truest depiction of facts? LOL

> You view everyone as being incapable of comprehending

You literally are saying this in a conversation where I've tried to use evidence-based reasoning, citing what I can, and you literally lead with ad hominem, ridiculous hyperbole and slander. That's fucking rich. You must constantly confuse "looks like the authorities might be right on this one" with "bootlicking". Which is just intellectually lazy. Sorry I pissed facts into your "fascist" Cheerios.
by kragen | 2025-04-06 13:57:38+00:00
I agree that the current system is harmful in exactly the ways you describe, but I don't see you contributing anything towards solving those problems or even understanding what a solution would consist of. Instead you are criticizing policymakers for failing to satisfy your preferences even though you can't articulate them coherently yourself.

This:

> It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens.

is not a description of the relationship between citizens and a democracy. It's a description of the relationship between subjects and a monarch or dictator—a relationship which invariably results in serious abuses of those subjects.

If you don't have a coherent idea of what you want, nobody can give it to you.
by Aardwolf | 2025-04-06 13:58:18+00:00
What if I don't want push notifications and want laptop closed to mean to not do anything? Does this new mode still support that, or is the notifications and heat-up-in-your-backpack thing there on purpose and not disablable? In other words, is this new thing forcing this new behavior only, or does it also support the same things as S3 if you choose to want that?

Note that I use Linux and a less-than-a-year-old thinkpad that has traditional standby, but I'd like to know what the inevitable that's coming is
by jalapenos | 2025-04-06 13:58:56+00:00
IP is kind of one of those things, like the drug war, where anyone with common sense and no vested interest can say "yeah, that's obviously incredibly fucking stupid".

But nevertheless it continues because the vested interests gain their power from it, and use that power to maintain it.

The only legitimate "IP" is keeping it secret. Plenty of other industries already live by this. SaaS solved software piracy, hedge funds can't or don't bother regarding their algorithms.

It's great that AI is one more brick stacked on the chest of the fundamentally stupid and twisted concept of "IP".
by dtgm92 | 2025-04-06 13:59:04+00:00
Not even porn algos, regular algos provide a feast for those people. Tiktok, previously musically, youtube, it is all filled with questionable underage content. The worst part though is that if you are into such things, it recommends more to you, and other similar users history and activity gets recommended to you, thus distributing the content. It is no different from how these algos learn you like mountain biking or gardening.
by fortran77 | 2025-04-06 14:00:10+00:00
They said Waltz had been "cleared of wrongdoing" and yet

> Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz included a journalist in the Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen after he mistakenly saved his number months before under the contact of someone else he intended to add, according to three people briefed on the matter.

That clears him? That should implicate him!
by sargstuff | 2025-04-06 14:00:21+00:00
{comment : "your comments here!"}

{copyright comment : "JSON doesn't require/enforce specific comments is a good thing" }

{comments : "JSON parser is not an 'comment' editor! }

Don't know whtat the google plus article covered, but Crockfor's comments : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/douglas-crockford-724600109_j...
by deinonychus | 2025-04-06 14:00:32+00:00
I haven't thought hard about this, but I think the solution relies on some definition of a 'platform' or a similar idea. I think most people could see a difference between the carsigns and the websongs, where the latter look like ads because they're on someone else's platform.

I think we can narrow down on weird cases in between the carsigns and the websongs. Maybe the line gets muddier if the employees aren't driving their own cars with signs, or if those employees are hired to do nothing but drive, or if they're not even employees and they're Uber drivers but for driving signs... To me, that last one sounds like a platform which exists for nothing but advertising.
by laweijfmvo | 2025-04-06 14:01:04+00:00
Do you read a lot of short works? Fast reader? or just constantly reading at every opportunity? That’s a huge amount of reading — I was able to hit 20 books last year but that included a re-read of all 7 Harry Potters, so quite light reading.

Do you feel like you retain things from all 100 books?
by polygamous_bat | 2025-04-06 14:01:07+00:00
> If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.

Sometimes (often?) people with a lot of money may not believe in speech but in suppressing speech. However, money should not allow for suppressing speech, for example by buying a giant megaphone and speaking over people.

By your logic paying people $500 to heckle at your political opponents rally is fine. It may be legally okay, but it is a moral hazard, and for a better society we should try to better distinguish between “free” speech and “bought and paid for” speech.
by panick21_ | 2025-04-06 14:01:34+00:00
> Yet its prohibitively expensive here

If it was 'prohibitively expensive' then why do so many people use and why is usage increasing?

Unless you buy individual tickets all the time its really not that expensive.

And depending on how you organize and finance it you can make it really cheap, see Belgium.

Its a hell of a lot cheaper then driving.

For a whole society, to primarly use trains, instead of primarily using cars is WAY, WAY CHEAPER!

> Case point Switzerland, the train country of this world.

This might be the case but Switzerland still spends decades and decades under investing in trains. The Bahn 2000 project was a huge success, but it was a success driven by minimal investment.

If a country like Switzerland had contentiously invested in high quality rail since WW2, we would be in a completely, competently different situation.

> For weekend trip ie to mountains they (+ post buses where trains don't go) are very restrictive which is understandable, but car becomes a must anyway.

And yet I have lived my whole live without a car and only rarely drive in the car with somebody else.

Yes, only trains as the only thing isn't a solution. That clear to anybody, but you can decently do a hell of a lot. And you can do much, much more then Switzerland is currently doing.

For example, we are 'the train country' but we don't even have a high speed rail line.

That somebody can say 'the train country' with a serious face about Switzerland only shows how utterly under-invested rail was since the 1930 in most countries.
Cofounder Explosion
by treehouse83 | 2025-04-06 14:01:57+00:00
Our startup 3 years in is growing, building products, finding better fit, and winning contracts. I lead technical direction and product development. My cofounder is the face getting money and promoting the business while I focus more internally. I still meet with customers and businesses to form partnerships. Some of which are our largest source of revenue. This has worked. Until it hasn't as more money has been coming in.

They tried to hire their spouse and I requested a proper process or documentation so it was defensible to the board. I intentionally did not go to the other board members so there was no perception of discord. Ultimately, the cofounder agreed and their spouse then decided to drop out and not join the company. My cofounder even agreed their spouse joining would have ruined the company. Since then, things have been strained.

The CEO is also committing to some fairly high CAPEX in things we don't own without any formal board approval. I have raised concerns only for my cofounder to get angry and dismiss me telling me to "stay in my lane." These CAPEX items have caused us to move multiple times and create a lot of chaos and questions from the staff which go unaddressed. Or, worse -- we are unable to acquire the things we need to be successful with those purchases being blocked for more "vanity" purchases like repainting the outside of our building multiple times. Additionally, we have another executive that is ineffective (my observation, and their subordinates) but is loyal to my cofounder. However they were loyal to me when their job was threatened by the spouse.

Recently I was hit by a surprise meeting including one board member and placed on paid leave with no contact to employees. They also requested I relocate back to the state I came from prior to relocating for the business. I stated this wasn't anything I wanted, which surprised the board member. I have been complying as I figure out next steps. Employees are confused and I have been reassuring them. I am contemplating a letter or discussion with the other board members to get some truth/other perspective out and hopefully work through this with some legal guidance.

Any advice? I am leaning towards an approach where I exit and advise because I don't think I can recover the business long term from the chaos unless I get a new leadership team with me.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 14:02:31+00:00
Here's a challenge: sketch a better design, that:

1. Is properly secure, to whatever standards will stop people writing "S Stands for Security" articles, and

2. Allows programs implementing it to provide the same set of features the most useful MCPs do now, without turning automatic functionality into one requiring manual user confirmations, and generally without defeating the purpose of the entire idea, and

3. Doesn't involve locking everything down in a proprietary Marketplace with a corporate Gatekeeper.

I'd be interested to see a proposal, because so far all I've seen is "MCP is not sekhure!!!111" in general and non-specific sense. I guess it's not that easy, especially when people forget that security and usefulness are opposing forces.

(Also, AFAIK, MCP was not intended for its implementations to be hosted by third parties and provided "as a Service". If that cannot be secure, then don't do it. Find some other business to be in, instead of trying to nerf MCP through "solving" something that isn't a problem with the protocol.)
by jfengel | 2025-04-06 14:02:49+00:00
I wonder what their source is for that.

An alternative interpretation is simply "I don't care": So top secret info leaked; don't do it again. You're doin' a heck of a job.

If it does happen again... honestly, would the rationale be different?

Sure, they'd have a conniption if it had happened under Biden. But that would be purely about harassing Biden rather than a serious consideration of national security.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-06 14:03:49+00:00
> What I am getting at here is that the fact that a bunch of people feel strongly that they are a particular and distinct people is not particularly interesting or significant, because this sense of identity is extremely malleable.

Ah, the classic "you do not exist" argument. Your group identity and belonging, language and culture, are not eternal, immutable facts of nature, therefore you must not object to their destruction.
by nsagent | 2025-04-06 14:03:59+00:00
> According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

It's interesting that this was the cause. I'm sure we all have our own stories of how UI/UX niggles (regardless of platform or app) have led to unintended behavior.

While I understand automatic suggestions can be helpful at times, when the UX doesn't clearly identify the cues that lead to the suggestion, with a way for a human to confirm it, this type of error is a likely result.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-06 14:04:18+00:00
IMO people are overthinking it: murders, eugenics, racism, genocides, cannibalism are bad because we almost subconsciously know that it threatens our own survival. Butchering and devouring non-primate animals, even sentient, are totally okay and good because that's how we are built to live and it's good for our stable long term prosperity.

I wouldn't be sure if it really matter whether embryos can suffer or if they deserve full human rights with right to a legal representative. To me the photos of them look like cells under microscopes, frankly. But our instincts do alert us that doing this could kill us all somehow, and for that reasons we hallucinate such moral arguments. Isn't that so?