MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lerno | 2025-04-04 15:49:43+00:00
There is an overlap between module and class namespacing through static members and functions. Zig sees this and says "let's only have the latter" (on structs), which means among other things that in Zig a file is a structure. Most other languages says "let's have both".

In C3 it goes the other way despite having methods, and says "let's not allow static variables or methods".

This also goes hand in hand in the language approaches between open/close. Zig is very strongly "closed" and C3 is very much "open" (adding methods to types anywhere, appending to modules anywhere etc)

It's an interesting contrast that leads to very different code layouts.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-04 15:49:50+00:00
It's also a totally off-base response when we were talking in this thread about a vehicle (the Volt, or even the Prius) that doesn't need that infrastructure anyways.

Like, let's just be fine with the "half-measure." If all drivers switched to a (strong) plugin hybrid tomorrow, emissions would be down significantly without any real need for this supposedly-blocking-progress infrastructure.

That we couldn't even get there underscores my point above. There are forces working against that. We should identify what they are and fight them.

Unless we're just still being climate change deniers. I guess we are.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-04 15:49:56+00:00
I've always thought it was exceptionally clear that Microsoft emphatically does not want you to dualboot.

That's why we got secure boot and why windows absolutely clobbers any other bootloaders during install, updates, and random points in between. It's why we have WSL.

I'll bet good money that Microsoft never even considers what you propose. It's antithetical to the mission of "lock all possible users into ad revinue streams". Microsoft won't get their windows ad impressions if they allow you to use a different OS on the hardware you own.
by philipallstar | 2025-04-04 15:50:04+00:00
> I know in the UK people have to pay for it, so they just dump it in nature instead. Collect it from people's doorsteps for free and fly tipping wouldn't be nearly as big an issue anymore.

This just isn't true. The council takes taxes at pain of going to jail to eventually pay for this service. Saying "make it free and the behaviour will change" is just nonsense. Things can't all be free. People need to make an effort to keep their neighbourhoods nice.

If they don't feel that a neighbourhood is "theirs" - that's more likely to be a problem.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-04 15:50:06+00:00
>you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with.

Most of the time the doctor doesn't know the exact pathogen you are infected with. He'll suspect a bacterian infection of some kind and prescribe a wide range antibiotic.

Doing what you suggest will require changing the way we do medicine. Which might not be a bad thing but requires some determination.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-04 15:50:28+00:00
No, stuff he had to go to the shop for.

At one point, they had to replace the brakes, then the whole chassis suspension (or something like that, I'm not sure if I understood exactly what he said), then one of the cameras didn't work anymore, and then the windshield wipers didn't come on automatically. Something breaks or needs to be replaced due to a recall at oddly regular intervals.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-04-04 15:51:10+00:00
So why not change the subsidy structure and require measurable innovation and growth, and actually back it up by reevaluating funding on a regular basis and dropping all funding if metrics are not met. And not continuing just based on promises. If metrics are not met, you lose funding. Period.

Seems more like a problem of US companies being allowed to continue to stall for too long, often due to lobbying and political points, without measurable improvement than the subsidies.

Meanwhile China subsidizes much of their R&D and everyone is astounded at how fast they've improved. Sounds like they're just better at doing it.
by airstrike | 2025-04-04 15:51:40+00:00
I used it to train my own mini-GPT and I liked it quite a bit. I tend to favor a different style of Rust with fewer generics but maybe that just can't be avoided given the goals of that project.

The crate seems to have a lot of momentum, with many new features, releases, active communities on GH and Discord. I expect it to continue to get better.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-04 15:51:47+00:00
I briefly owned a Smart EV, a decade ago or so, and handily recharged it from 110 overnight. But obviously with a larger vehicle, longer range, larger battery capacity, charging it from low to full must be quite the consumption of energy.

It would be nice if somehow we could move to lighter cars where the same range would require half the battery capacity, therefore half the charging resources to go from low to full.
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-04 15:51:48+00:00
> There is something unique about the color purple: Our brain makes it up. So you might just call purple a pigment of our imagination.

You know, in the past, my curmudgeonly self would have rankled at a pun like this in a science article, but I don't think AI slop could come up with this, it's pretty good.
by turnsout | 2025-04-04 15:51:53+00:00
I mean, all colors exist only in our brains. "Color" is a perceptual experience that may start as spectral power and cone excitation, but is then mapped to color sensation through a fantastically complex visual system in the brain. That's why color-based optical illusions work. That's why "The Dress" was controversial.

There's nothing that special about purple. The article makes a big deal about purple "connecting" two opposite ends of the spectrum, but this is just an artifact of humans seeing rainbows and realizing that pink-purple would connect the two ends, even if they're not present in the rainbow. It's just a human framework, not some kind of physical truth.

Put another way, there are a ton of colors that are not in the rainbow, because it's a 1D simplification of our color perception, which is 3D (three cones). Would you say brown "exists only in our brains?"
by damhsa | 2025-04-04 15:52:18+00:00
extraction by whom? i dont buy that. i have "downloaded my data" before and it never includes any kind of analytic marketing inferences they have made about me, only what i have done on the site, and they know i dont live in the EU. i assume pretend GDPR compliance is just a handy excuse thought up by marketing, killing two birds with one stone. im sure i heard at least one absurd marketing claim that it was to "let you take control of your data."
by TremendousJudge | 2025-04-04 15:52:38+00:00
>because what that really means is a whole collection of real people doing real things

She doesn't just mention real people, she also says "and families" in the same breath, which is the part I always found most strange of the whole argument. So "society" doesn't exist but "families" do? Why stop there, specifically? Aren't families just "individual men an women" as well?
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-04 15:52:42+00:00
IIRC, of works that bring in any money to their creators, the vast majority is returned, for almost all works, in the first handful of years after creation. Sure. the big names you know have value longer, but those are a miniscule fraction of works.

Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.

Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.
by nikisil80 | 2025-04-04 15:54:22+00:00
Best reply in this entire thread, and I align with your thinking entirely. I also absolutely hate this idea amongst tech-oriented communities that because an AI can do some algebra and program an 8-bit video game quickly and without any mistakes, it's already overtaking humanity. Extrapolating from that idea to some future version of these models, they may be capable of solving grad school level physics problems and programming entire AAA video games, but again - that's not what _humanity_ is about. There is so much more to being human than fucking programming and science (and I'm saying this as an actual nuclear physicist). And so, just like you said, the AI arm's race is about getting it good at _known_ science/engineering, fields in which 'correctness' is very easy to validate. But most of human interaction exists in a grey zone.

Thanks for this.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-04 15:54:26+00:00
The tariffs are going to be used as leverage in negotiations in the following months. If countries sign on to trump's new trade agreements, it likely won't make sense to rescind them.

Stephan Miran, Trumps top economic advisor, laid out exactly what they are doing in an essay he wrote back in November[1]. For better or worse, this is what they seem to be moving forward with, and the document spells out things like unilateral tariffs and expecting a lot of potential market volatility, before offering trade terms that seek to devalue the USD in return for protection and favorable trade agreements.

In short, they are trying to force a global trade restructuring that will increase US manufacturing strength and weaken US financial strength - all while trying to keep reserve currency status.

[1]https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
by gradientsrneat | 2025-04-04 15:54:27+00:00
YouTube is the original TikTok. Back in the day, there used to be a limited video length. The recommendation algorithm has always been very good, but for privacy perception reasons Google added a configurable limited time window for history used for recommendations. With shorts, that time window might as well be infinite in comparison, and Google can ramp up the algorithmic exploitation to the max.

Fortunately YouTube does have various means to control your experience like subscriptions and RSS feeds, and videos of greater substance do exist. I use a Desktop Firefox addon that blocks shorts, as I generally perceive them to be low quality.
by merrywhether | 2025-04-04 15:54:36+00:00
I think there’s a difference in that this is about as good as LLM code is going to get in terms of code quality (as opposed to capability a la agentic functionality). LLM output can only be as good as its training data, and the proliferation of public LLM-generated code will only serve as a further anchor in future training. Humans on the other hand ideally will learn and improve with each code review and if they don’t want to you can replace them (to put it harshly).
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-04 15:54:42+00:00
The people that scream the most about needing guns to protect them from a tyrannical government are the same that scream about backing the blue.

Those positions are diametrically opposed.

The 3rd Amendment exists for a reason. The police of colonial times _were_ the Redcoats. They _were_ soldiers working for the king. Modern police serve the same function and have basically the same powers. They are not peace officers - they are soldiers, and I hope one day the people living in this country wake up and say "no more".
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-04 15:54:51+00:00
Mine got totaled in an accident, and I was going to replace it with a new used one, only to find GM is not selling replacement parts for key things that are starting to go wrong on them. And being dicks about warranties.

So I'm driving a Polestar2 now. Which is fine, it's fun. But road trips suck.
by acc_297 | 2025-04-04 15:54:51+00:00
Others are pointing this out but for anyone curious Tesla has received a tonne of indirect subsidy via electric vehicle sales incentives on the consumer side of the equation which absolutely translates into increased corporate profits. Across the globe EV sales in developed nations are very boosted via government programs ((which is a good thing imo)). I'll just link a wikipedia page[1] since I don't want to find a solid source but this isn't really debated it's the real world effect of laws and bills passed by the US gov and dozens of other countries around the world and has been extensively studied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_incentives_for_plug...
by toyg | 2025-04-04 15:55:14+00:00
> Apple needs tariff relief

Tim Cook is going to find out very soon what happens to anyone who makes a deal with Donald Trump: he gets what he wants, and they don't get paid.

> I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin

Why, are you a personal friend of his?

The billionaries are the only people who can actually apply a meaningful level of practical opposition to autocratic rulers. Instead they chose to bend the knee, because they think it better fits their self-interest. Which is what their Russian counterparts did with Putin 20 years ago, and where are they now? Either confined inside a pariah state, or dead.
by watwut | 2025-04-04 15:55:19+00:00
I had interest in programming and never tried to exploit someone elses systems. What stopped me was knowing that it would "wrong thing to do", that it would be unethical. People here will pontificate for hours over kids reading less or whatever and then turn around and treat activities like this as a proof of something positive.

There are plenty of kids who are not acting like, well, entitled assholes. They have interest in programing, gaming, computers and enough impulse control to not do these. It is not something positive - even if you grow out of it.
by loganmhb | 2025-04-04 15:55:20+00:00
I respect the forecasting abilities of the people involved, but I have seen that report described as "astonishingly accurate" a few times and I'm not sure that's true. The narrative format lends itself somewhat to generous interpretation and it's directionally correct in a way that is reasonably impressive from 2021 (e.g. the diplomacy prediction, the prediction that compute costs could be dramatically reduced, some things gesturing towards reasoning/chain of thought) but many of the concrete predictions don't seem correct to me at all, and in general I'm not sure it captured the spiky nature of LLM competence.

I'm also struck by the extent to which the first series from 2021-2026 feels like a linear extrapolation while the second one feels like an exponential one, and I don't see an obvious justification for this.
by jerlam | 2025-04-04 15:56:01+00:00
Doesn't even need to be a new administration.

Many people online are saying (or trying to convince themselves) that the tariffs are part of some smart negotiating strategy, and that they will be rescinded once other countries feel the pain (or when citizens revolt). So large companies will hold out on doing any major investment, lest they be holding the bag.

The administration's general instability and flip-floppiness makes it impossible to make any long-term business decisions. Having a leader who can't be trusted to change their mind on a moment's notice does damage regardless of the policies.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-04 15:56:04+00:00
It is an indication of US mismanagement that concentrated people can't be served with recharging infrastructure while distributed suburbanites in mcmansions can easily be served.

Like apartment buildings with parking. Why the hell aren't there funding projects to provide recharging for these highly concentrated housing where electrifying/reducing emissions has compounded benefits, where you need far less wiring to provide recharging for a far larger number of cars than an equivalent amount of suburban housing?

It speaks to how money is directed for infrastructure and utilities by the government.

It's basically madness.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-04 15:56:12+00:00
Musk's case is at least somewhat understandable. The critics who call him the "ultimate government welfare queen" are not wrong; practically every dime he has earned has either come from government contracts or subsidies, or depends on maintaining a good working relationship with agencies ranging from NASA to the Department of Transportation.

Following his takeover of Twitter in 2022, he would have been among the first to understand what was about to happen in 2024. Pivoting to the right -- not just pivoting to the right, but actively embracing it -- is something he had no choice in, if he wanted to keep his companies healthy. They were built atop a government that was about to disappear, so the only logical thing to do was to signal loyalty by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Trump campaign.

Of course, his Nazi salutes made no sense in any context, but then neither did cheating at video games or calling Unsworth a pedophile for dissing his submarine idea. I'd chalk his erratic behavior up to drugs or ongoing mental challenges that ultimately don't have much to do with politics.

Zuckerberg and Bezos were slower to catch on but they did catch on in the end. They understood that they had an enormous amount to lose by alienating Trump. If the wires of democracy, from Section 230 to the US Postal Service, were about to be ripped from the wall by Trumpers, they had to get in position to influence those events. See also Sam Altman.

I don't blame any of these people for acting rationally. The question I have is, when are all these big billionaire alpha moguls going to stop reacting to a chaos monkey and start pushing back, if only behind the scenes? Who has more to lose from tearing down the established world order than the people who succeeded so massively under that very system? Don't they understand that while they will continue to be players, their playground will become a much smaller, weaker kingdom, one surrounded by rivals who now have an incentivize to organize against us?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-04 15:56:14+00:00
If weird means out of norm, that's not the case. Every language either has a linter or would benefit from a linter because all languages have warts or idiosyncratic behavior.

Some languages are so error-prone and hard to use they even ship with static analysis and type-checking built in, like Rust and C! (And they still have linters on top of that!)

Perhaps post a language you think is exceptional to this?
by globnomulous | 2025-04-04 15:56:20+00:00
This is how kleptocratic regimes work: in order to steal more effectively, you need to stuff the state full of personnel who ensure theft won't come under scrutiny (or under disapproving scrutiny -- bonus if the the people you hire actually enable it). Even better, hire people who would themselves face prosecution in a normal country, because they'll be beholden to you and too scared to have principles.

Edit: once your regime has achieved a certain level of internal cohesiveness and stability, you can begin the next step, which is to turn lower-level state actors against the population. You can do this partly by ordering them to perpetrate violence and outrage. This has a numerous benefits: first, it makes the state actors themselves afraid of the population, partly because they fear accountability, which makes them more inclined to violence and more protective of the regime; second, it stokes anger against them, which validates all the fears I listed under the first point; third, it distracts from the less shocking crimes of the regime (mere theft as opposed to bodily harm or murder -- but eventually that too!); fourth, as the regime gradually ratchets up the violence, the population becomes increasingly fearful and willing to collaborate and thus decreasingly capable of organizing and resisting.

Edit 2: I've noticed in my two or three decades of intellectual and political awareness that the right frequently seems to benefit from this kind of compounding effect and stacked benefit. No matter what happens, good or bad, it seems to redound to their benefit. I can't think of any cases where I've felt that the left enjoyed similar structural or inherent political advantages.
by gen220 | 2025-04-04 15:56:23+00:00
It's ironic that we're re-discovering this in 2025, it was pretty transparent in the late 1960s and early 70s, to students protesting their govt-funded universities' involvements in supporting the Vietnam War. The demands of students back then involved withdrawing from govt-funded grants and programs.

If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.
by Nicholas_C | 2025-04-04 15:56:32+00:00
Not surprising given our diet and car-dependent culture.

From the article:

>While less access to health care and weaker social structures can explain the gap between the wealthy and poor in the US, it doesn't explain the differences between the wealthy in the US and the wealthy in Europe, the researchers note. There may be other systemic factors at play that make Americans uniquely short-lived, such as diet, environment, behaviors, and cultural and social differences.
by nthingtohide | 2025-04-04 15:56:42+00:00
Meaning is a matter of context. Most of the context resides in the past and future. Ludwig's claim that word's meaning is dependent on how it is used. This applies generally.

Daniel Dennett - Information & Artificial Intelligence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arEvPIhOLyQ

Daniel Dennett bridges the gap between everyday information and Shannon-Weaver information theory by rejecting propositions as idealized meaning units. This fixation on propositions has trapped philosophers in unresolved debates for decades. Instead, Dennett proposes starting with simple biological cases—bacteria responding to gradients—and recognizing that meaning emerges from differences that affect well-being. Human linguistic meaning, while powerful, is merely a specialized case. Neural states can have elaborate meanings without being expressible in sentences. This connects to AI evolution: "good old-fashioned AI" relied on propositional logic but hit limitations, while newer approaches like deep learning extract patterns without explicit meaning representation. Information exists as "differences that make a difference"—physical variations that create correlations and further differences. This framework unifies information from biological responses to human consciousness without requiring translation into canonical propositions.
by philipkglass | 2025-04-04 15:56:43+00:00
A copyright holder may file a takedown notice [1] against a platform that hosts a link to copyright-infringing material like a book from Library Genesis or an article from sci-hub. Failure to act upon a legitimate takedown notice opens the platform operator up to a civil law suit. The platform does not have to take proactive measures to prevent infringing links from being posted by users. Some platforms like YouTube take more aggressive measures to proactively guard against infringement, but they are not required by the provisions of the DMCA.

[1] https://guides.dml.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=904530&p=6510951 (See "Notifications of Claimed Infringement")
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-04 15:56:45+00:00
> it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same

Is it? One side has a vocal minority who took defense of minorities to the point of harassment and was ultimately rebuffed. The other side controls the government and is enthusiastically renditioning legal residents to prisons and defying the constitution and courts to keep doing it.

To be more upset about both sides being imperfect than the injustice of irreversible deportations to foreign prison seems ... absurd.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-04 15:56:56+00:00
This just makes it much, much easier for people to build numeric stuff on GPU, which is great.

I'm totally with you that it's better that this took so long, so we have things like PyTorch abstracting most of this away, but I'm looking forward to (in my non-existent free time :/ ) playing with this.