MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by will-cook-25 | 2025-04-15 21:09:03+00:00
Okay, so I've been stuck on this for about a month and it's driving me mad. Everyone keeps talking about KL divergence (comparing two probability distributions P and Q), but it's always just one number—no explanation, no breakdown, nothing. Yeah, they're different, great—but where? Marginals wrong? Interactions wrong? What?

I tried to see if you could split KL exactly into two clean parts, no approximations or dodgy assumptions:

KL(P || Q) = sum of marginal divergences + total correlation

So one part is just how much each variable individually differs (the marginals), and the other part is all the dependencies—pairwise, three-way, higher-order, everything. And so I found you can further split this dependency bit hierarchically if you want (using Möbius inversion—sounds complex, but it's algebra on subsets).

I checked it numerically like 5 times, it’s exact to machine precision. Put it on arXiv and everything, but it’s crickets so far. Anyone want to sanity-check me or tell me if I’m going mad?

Colab notebook of it working end to end:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1Ua5LlqelOcrVuCgdexz...

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09029
by caconym_ | 2025-04-15 21:09:15+00:00
If you don't actually think IP law should be outright abolished, your viewpoint is of a totally different species than that of the person I originally replied to, and we probably agree on more than we disagree on---in particular that the system is arguably biased toward, and certainly heavily abused by, moneyed actors.

Believe it or not, there really are people who think literally deleting all of IP law is the right thing to do, and it is my honest belief that my first comment in this topic is in reply to one of those people. I appreciate your clarification of your viewpoint (and the appeal of a fantasy in which we Stick It To The Man by cutting off the hand that grips Mickey Mouse and other beloved IPs by the throat), but I hope you can see why I read your comment as I did, especially in the context of what I was replying to.

> The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.

I am 100% in favor of reducing copyright terms. I'm not sure I've ever talked to somebody who isn't—I suspect I'd have to talk to a corporation-as-person to find that viewpoint in the wild.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-15 21:09:22+00:00
That's because on Linux systems it's typical for domain name resolution to be provided by glibc. As a result, people ended up depending on glibc. They were writing GNU/Linux software, not Linux software.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Domain_name_resolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_Service_Switch

https://man.archlinux.org/man/getaddrinfo.3

This is user space stuff. You can trash all of this and roll your own mechanism to resolve the names however you want. Go probably did so. Linux will not complain in any way whatsoever.

Linux is the only kernel that lets you do this. Other kernels will break your software if you bypass their system libraries.
by amdivia | 2025-04-15 21:09:43+00:00
What are you talking about?

He's still a Palestine. Palestinians can be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics, etc..

I believe your comment on "getting killed as an apostate" is highly uneducated. I'm a Palestinian, my family is Muslim, one of my uncles is agnostic. He's alive, he's still part of the family. The case is the same with many families, whether Christian's becoming Muslim, or Muslims becoming agnostic.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-15 21:10:13+00:00
I gave up on the visual accessibility demands. Someone wants to make a website that I can't easily use? I avoid it. If it bothers me enough because it contains information I want, I will write them directly and kindly ask for an accessibility option.

Demanding everything be 100% accessible to everyone at all times is something that I feel is not necessary. It also feels like I am imposing my demands on someone, limiting their artistic creativity to suite my disability - I don't feel comfortable with that idea. If someone enjoys all the animation and blinding colors then let them. I'm actually happy for them that they can.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-04-15 21:10:27+00:00
> McAfee

I wouldn't call that a roaring success. Funnily enough, Intel played a major role in running McAfee into the ground.

With proper leadership, McAfee could've ended up in the position CrowdStrike is now.

Trying not to piss off the Chinese government, and in particular its intelligence services (in order to sell chips) is unfortunately not a good model for an antimalware business.
by henrikf | 2025-04-15 21:10:49+00:00
There's not much software. PC calculates PLL register values for correct LO and source output frequencies, and transfers them to the FPGA which writes them to the hardware. FPGA accumulates the downconverted samples from the receiver ADCs. Samples are transferred to PC which calculates ratios of the receiver outputs to get uncorrected S-parameters. scikit-rf Python library is used for calibration and plotting.
by dimal | 2025-04-15 21:11:02+00:00
Looks interesting. I’m a bit confused about how it knows the codebase and the custom rules interface. I generally have coding standards docs in the repo. Can it simply be made aware of those docs instead of requiring me to maintain two sets of instructions (one written one for humans, and one in the mrge interface for AI)? I could imagine that without being highly aware of a team’s standards, the usefulness of its review would be pretty poor. Getting general “best practices” type stuff wouldn’t be helpful.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-15 21:12:04+00:00
> Do you really believe that most of the people being deported or imprisoned by ICE this year are truly supporters of terrorism?

I don't think that's what's at stake here. I would assume the vast, vast majority of deportations are some version of "You're here illegally because you snuck in / overstayed your visa / lied on some form. Here's a ride back to $COUNTRY"

I think what is at stake is the small, small % of deportations that are because of particular speech or actions that aren't transparently crime (e.g., stealing a car is transparently crime).

And to answer your question, I don't know. While it doesn't appear to me that the Americans are reaching the highest possible standards of due process, "no" due process is pretty obviously false. And I don't think it's an issue of the accusations being true or false, either--my impression is the facts aren't in dispute, it's what happens based on the facts that is.

OK, all of that said: my guess is the people being deported for supporting HAMAS aren't HAMAS supporters in some sort of deep, true, essential way. They're kids or young people who are swept up in a fad.
by bluGill | 2025-04-15 21:12:52+00:00
Here is a what: there are a lot of Americans (and similar for Europe) who did not go to college, and their kids are not going to college. Of they went to college but got a degree that doesn't have good job prospects. These people would be better off with manufacturing jobs than what they can find. This is probably a minority, but it is a large enough minority to swing elections and thus important.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-15 21:13:49+00:00
This quote (from Lord of War) really encapsulates a lot of what you say:

> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-15 21:13:55+00:00
Yes, discontinuation of DEI is one thing they are asking for. But they aren't (yet) the calling for banning "hispanic homosexuals" or any other DEI group on campus. They aren't asking for discussions about them to be banned. That would be a little awkward, as I'm sure they warn to encourage discussions disparaging them. Nowhere in the section on dismantling DEI do they use the term activists.

Kicking out activists is another thing they are asking for, in a different section. They list the sorts of activists they want kicked out. Right now it's a short list that boils down to protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza. DEI is not mentioned anywhere in the section, nor are any of the groups DEI typically encompasses. I have no doubt that if Harvard did acquiesce the list will be expanded to everything the administration disagrees with - for example protesting about abolishing DEI. But that's for the future.

It's clear from the letter of demand "activists" and DEI are separate issues they want dealt with in different ways. One is a policy they want dropped, the other is a group they want shut down. What is not so clear is why you are so keen to conflate the two issues. Are you keen to get "hispanic homosexuals", and any other sub-group you don't like banned from campuses?
by jay_kyburz | 2025-04-15 21:13:58+00:00
> I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to government too.

I disagree, I think it is useful, and in fact important for young people to carefully consider the size of their mortgage and the interest they have to pay.

A persons long term financial health can be greatly impacted by the size of their mortgage, and I would always recommend taking the smallest possible loan. Taking a mortgage only makes sense if you would otherwise have to pay rent.

Same applies to governments.

In fact, I go one step further and think its shocking that one generation of people would leave behind a massive debt for their children and grandchildren have to service.

I don't agree with how DOGE is going about things, and I'm not a US citizen, but I strongly believe governments should be generating surpluses for their children to enjoy, not deficits for their children to pay off.
by ForHackernews | 2025-04-15 21:14:12+00:00
> Not everyone agrees. “Code is not law. Law is law,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote in a lengthy thread to Mr. Medjedovic on X in late October, 2021. “And what you did was not a ‘clever trade.’ It was market manipulation. It’s illegal. And people go to prison for it.

Boy the crypto industry better pray that market manipulation isn't illegal in DeFi-world or they're all going to prison.
by kebokyo | 2025-04-15 21:14:15+00:00
i am grateful that at least one person other than me got the memo on my bit lmao

you're right, it might not be intentionally malicious, but it still comes off as wrong due to the visual and mechanical design of the service. if you want to support smallweb, it's better to host a VPS service than a shittier linktree.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 21:14:18+00:00
>Vietnam is making moves in directions I want to encourage.

Just like China did? They had a whole phase of economic liberalization and opening trade.

>Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad.

Vietnam is literally another communist pseudo-dictatorship. Their place in the world is obviously far more ambiguous than that of e.g. England. The idea of shifting manufacturing to Vietnam because you do not like the positions of China is just absurd.

>All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better.

Why should the US not focus on supporting long term allies who aren't communist single party states?
by MisterTea | 2025-04-15 21:14:21+00:00
> I hopped in the car to get to the one nearest me and loaded up two shopping bags of electronics components, switches, banana jacks, oddball high-wattage resistors, etc.

The real bargains were the component cabinets themselves. Those big commercial chest of drawers retail for thousands of dollars. My co-worker bought the entire aisle of drawers after they were empty of components for I think a hundred bucks. Organized his entire basement shop into them.
by bobthepanda | 2025-04-15 21:14:27+00:00
At least for me (I am red green colorblind), I have the mental model to help me know culturally what is "red" (an apple) and what is "green" (a pine tree) but I start having issues the moment red and green start appearing next to each other in which case they just look like muddy different shades if I squint very hard.

It is hard to explain because much of our modern signage and whatnot has been designed with colorblindness in mind; most "green" traffic lights, for example, are green-whitish specifically to address colorblindness. But not all of it; when I used to work in IT (as in literal computer diagnostics) it was pretty impossible for me to ascertain any particular diagnostic light.
by jasonhong | 2025-04-15 21:14:32+00:00
They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of compliance about how you can spend the money. For example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it and then they had to make a rule about it), you have to fly US carriers where possible, etc.

There are also reports you submit showing your progress and how you spent the money, to check that you are spending it on things you said you would.

This thread (not just the person I'm replying to) demonstrates a lot of misconceptions about why we have research funding, how it works, and what the results have been in practice. Please, everyone, don't rely on stereotypes of how you think research funding works.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-15 21:14:42+00:00
I would guess it's been around 1-2 years since you last tried seriously using a language model for any practical use cases, right? It makes sense to not use them if that is your experience, but it's hard to imagine anyone saying this who has actually been following along for the last few years to now. SOTA from 2 years ago now comfortably runs on a single GPU. A high end GPU can easily out perform SOTA from then both in (general!) knowledge reproduction, and capabilities (including saying things like "I don't know" when you ask beyond the encoded knowledge).
by busterarm | 2025-04-15 21:15:21+00:00
the fash trend on /pol/ died somewhere around 2018 and has shifted significantly radleft in the years since. This is misunderstood by outsiders largely because /pol/ users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.

And despite things like shooting pharma executives in broad daylight being mainstream now, /pol/lacks rightly recognize that this is still edgy upon edgy upon edgy. And thus they meme the shit out of it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-15 21:16:30+00:00
> And as far as I can tell, that 'grey area' of how the 14th amendment is read

You seem to be radically misreading a condition on conditions at birth that applies to birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment as a modifier on conditions at the time of government action against them that applies to the due process clause of the same amendment, but also, the 14th Amendment has no bearing on whether people have due process rights against the federal government, in the first place, as the due process clause of the 14th applies to the states.

Due process against the federal government is provided by the 5th Amendment, so even if the misreading of the 14th was right and applicable to due process rights, it would limit only the due process applicable to certain people for actions by state governments.

> Lets also not forget how much legal precedent Guantanamo provides when dealing with non-citizen (or even US Citizen!) "terrorists".

Well, yeah, but most of that legal precedent was negative for unchecked executive power (and even restrictive of legislative abuses), see Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsefeld, and Boumediene v. Bush, most notably.
by int_19h | 2025-04-15 21:16:56+00:00
I'm genuinely curious if you've actually read the article you linked to, given that the line literally above the numbers you quoted says, in large font and bold caps: "Employees don’t get more time off (and may actually get fewer days away from work)". Did it not make you wonder why?

Now if you look at where those numbers come from, this article quotes another article from WSJ (https://archive.is/MVRur) which is also titled "Why You Should Be Wary of the Unlimited Vacation Perk". Hmm...

And the WSJ article, in turn, takes its number from this report: https://www.empower.com/the-currency/work/pursuit-of-pto-res...

Now when you look at the survey, the problem with comparing those numbers is that they are averages for all workers. That is, 14 days without PTO is the average across all companies, not just those that had adopted UPTO. And the 16 days with UPTO is, of course, only for those companies. So the numbers don't actually tell you anything about the effect of "unlimited" PTO adoption in a given company. Those companies where 14 days is the norm are generally not the ones that decide to switch to UPTO because, well, there's no actual benefit in it for them. Companies that do adopt it, like many Big Tech firms in the past few years, are also the ones that had much more generous paid PTO to begin with - at Microsoft, for example, as a senior engineer, I had four weeks of PTO before the switch.

So, you need to look at comparisons before and after UPTO adoption for the same company to see the trend. Conveniently, that very article you linked to has some sources for that, e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220520-the-smoke-and-...

There are other negative aspects to it, too. For example, when you have guaranteed vacation PTO, it is wholly separate from other things like paid medical leave. But with UPTO, it's that much harder to argue for it to your manager if you have already taken medical leave that year.
by discreteevent | 2025-04-15 21:17:24+00:00
The original bug that prevented login was no doubt generated by AI. They probably ran it through an AI code review tool like the one posted here recently.

The world is drowning in bullshit and delusion. Programming was one of the few remaining places where you had to be precise, where it was harder to fool yourself. Where you had to understand it to program it. That's being taken away and it looks like a lot of people are embracing what is coming. It's hardly surprising - we just love our delusions too much.
by msabalau | 2025-04-15 21:17:35+00:00
Kitsune is great!

I've been a VideoFX tester, and have made a couple of five minute shorts. You end up having to generate a lot of shots that you throw away. This is a lot easier to bear if you are tester without really strict monthly limits, or having to pay to get past them.

Also, there are all sorts of things you have to juggle or sidestep related to character consistency and sound synchronization. They'll be also sorts of improvements there, but I suspect getting to 90 minutes isn't really a question of spending more time and generations. Right now I think a strong option for solo aspiring AI film makers is to work on a number of small projects, to master the art, and tackle longer projects when the tooling is better.
by jampekka | 2025-04-15 21:17:46+00:00
The paper you linked is topically - and perhaps a bit ironically - co-authored with an Israel funded thinktank.

I'd think it's safe to say there's a lot more pro-zionist than anti-zionist funding in US academia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_Glo...
by loves_mangoes | 2025-04-15 21:17:47+00:00
That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post.

4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.

Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.

So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.

And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)

My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
by motohagiography | 2025-04-15 21:18:17+00:00
I often ask, "what new fact could change my opinion about this?" it isn't a simple question. it requires you go upstream of your opinion and consider why or what caused you to think it, and then ask -even upstream of that- if there is some principle or axiom that is yielding an interpretation of that cause.

questions like: would I still think this if I were happier; do I have a belief about my status that the circumstances do not reflect; do I share an ontology with this being at all; do I fear other consequences of agreeing with them?

the irony of authority is it usually means dealing with someone who doesn't have the authority to compromise, and if you don't humiliate them for this fact that hangs over everything they do, they will often at least use their discretion.
by greazy | 2025-04-15 21:19:02+00:00
I should have used a better example to support my point.

I was referring to the website it self allowing gay and trans content, and even other non mainstream content (furry, MLP). The content is not just porn related (though a big chunk of it is).

On the porn front, I don't agree with liking 'lady dick' twink lovers only. There's 'normal' gay content (male on male).

On the non porn content, lots of posts will begin with 'Im a gayfag' (fag here I used as a catch all self deprecating term, some users will say I'm a oldfag, even seen ladyfag). Never seen any outright harassment of gay people when they post.

Having said that, there is straight gay, trans, minority hating posts and content.

4chan is a wild jungle. Or was.
by Klonoar | 2025-04-15 21:19:09+00:00
This is the dumbest nitpick, but:

> 4chan's design is early web 2.0

Web 2.0 (even early) was very JS heavy, coming down from the advent of Mootools/Prototype/etc and had a very specific visual design sense.

4chan is easily the last of the Web 1.0 sites, probably up there with Craigslist. They very much "just fucking work".