MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2025-04-11 00:54:01+00:00
I'm the person who asked about the definition of a chair up thread.

Just to make a very obvious point: Nobody thinks of the definition for a chair as a particularly controversial idea. But clearly:

- We don't all agree on what a chair is (is a stump a chair or not?).

- Nobody in this thread has been able to give a widely accepted definition of the word "chair"

- It seems like we can't even agree on what criteria are admissible in the definition. (Eg, does it matter that I can sit on it? Does it matter that I can intend to sit on it? Does it matter that my dog can sit on it?)

If even defining what the word "chair" means is beyond us, I hold little hope that we can ever manually explain the concept to a computer. Returning to my original point above, this is why I think expert systems style approaches are a dead end. Likewise, I think any AI system that uses formal or symbolic logic in its internal definitions will always be limited in its capacity.

And yet, I suspect chatgpt will understand all of the nuance in this conversation just fine. Like everyone else, I'm surprised how "smart" transformer based neural nets have become. But if anything has a hope of achieving AGI, I'm not surprised that:

- Its something that uses a fuzzy, non-symbolic logic internally.

- The "internal language" for its own thoughts is an emergent result of the training process rather than being explicitly and manually programmed in.

- That it translates its internal language of thought into words at the end of the thinking / inference process. Because - as this "chair" example shows - our internal definition for what a chair is is seems clear to us. But it doesn't necessarily mean we can translate that internal definition into a symbolic definition (ie with words).

I'm not convinced that current transformer architectures will get us all the way to AGI / ASI. But I think that to have a hope of achieving human level AI, you'll always want to build a system which has those elements of thought. Cyc, as far as I can tell, does not. So of course, I'm not at all surprised its being dumped.
by chrisweekly | 2025-04-11 00:54:41+00:00
Do you have a system or tool for finding card offers with signup bonuses?

Also (this is possibly common knowledge but) your credit score is negatively impacted not just by % of available credit utilized, but also by average age of credit accounts. If you're going to want a significant loan (eg a mortgage) in the forseeable future, something to keep in mind.
Show HN: godns A DNS forwarder similar to dnsmasq
by nodesocket | 2025-04-11 00:56:07+00:00
godns is a super basic DNS server in go (mostly fun and go practice) which allows you to specify hosts and ips in a json config file. This eliminates the need for editing your local /etc/hosts file. If it matches a host in the json config file it returns that ip, else uses Cloudflare public DNS resolver as a fallback.

Please; easy on my go code :-). I am a total beginner with go. PRs welcome.
by its-summertime | 2025-04-11 00:56:15+00:00
that gets solved by using a different quoting character for template literals.

https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-750-tag-strings-for-writing...

> Backticks are traditionally banned from use in future language features, due to the small symbol. No reader should need to distinguish ` from ' at a glance. It’s entirely possible that the prevailing opinion on this has changed, but it’s certainly going to be easier to stick to the letter prefixes and regular quotes.

and earlier in the thread the difficulty in typing it for some is cited as another reason
by FloatArtifact | 2025-04-11 00:56:24+00:00
Let's try to generate some data to back up your experience.

So, let's test the quality of your internet connection with a long test. Run the following. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ it'll graph the speed and quality of the connection of the internet and wait till it settles. ( Wi-Fi is going to inconsistent compared to a wired Ethernet connection.)

Once the connection looks reasonably stable, then try calling and seeing if the graph changes significantly! Obviously, you can rerun it multiple times to experiment.
by _el1s7 | 2025-04-11 00:57:35+00:00
I guess this could be useful in SQL for escaping values, I saw a project on the comments here.

With templates:

mysql.execute(t"DELETE FROM table WHERE id={id} AND param1={param1}")

Without templates:

mysql.execute("DELETE FROM table WHERE id=%s AND param1=%s", [id, param1])

So one less argument to pass if we use templates.

But yeah it does seem a bit confusing, and maybe kinda not pythonic? Not sure.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-11 00:58:57+00:00
>and reap the rewards

Hmm. To chart the risk for individuals a bit better, maybe that "hardwork" ought to be replaced by "shlep-blindness"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521

(From top comment)

>one persons schlepp is another mans passion.

>You'd have to make deals with banks.

E.g. one can argue that Russia is full of passions (but not banks)
by surge | 2025-04-11 00:59:19+00:00
Marx is like a doctor who diagnoses a disease then offers a cure that is worse than the disease itself. It's a bit like removing a leg to fix a broken toe. I figured this out in college thinking about it for 10 minutes, I don't get anyone whose observed human nature for 25 years not to see the obvious flaws in it and why it always breaks down.

He also fundamentally misunderstands human nature and our ability to care about anything outside a "tribe" or rather put aside our own desires for those not in our immediate tribe. It simply breaks down at scale.

Just because someone can adequately critique and point out the flaws in a system does not make them qualified to architect a working solution. Especially first draft. The problem with communism is will always devolve into authoritarianism, because its the only way to enforce people putting the needs of others over their own, not to mention those in charge will do whats best to serve their own ruling tribe.

It's how we evolved, its human psychology, and at mass population scale you can't escape it. Capitalism or trade at least to some extent incentivizes mutual benefits on a basic level, but Marx tosses out the one thing about it that works, otherwise the same problems that occur in capitalism as it devolves come about the same way they do in every other form of human governance, with groups/organizations with a shared purpose or identity (tribes) jockeying for authority and power to serve their own interests.
by duxup | 2025-04-11 01:00:05+00:00
I agree in the sense that Black Mirror seems almost required to be extra pessimistic when... there's a better and far more complex story available with a different approach or ending.

Granted I'm also WAY burnt out on pessimistic Si-Fi, it's the default now, and it's predicable and far too easy.

That's not to say it can't be mostly dark, but for many movies and shows, that's most of the meat...
by gerdesj | 2025-04-11 01:01:57+00:00
Its a meme and not "truth". "Everyone" knows that our plugs have three large prongs and if you step on one then it will hurt. However, incidents of actual treading are very rare.

Our plugs do have a shape that means they can lie with prongs up due to the flat shape of the plug. Other plugs tend to be cylindrical and hence will always lie horizontally out of habit.

However, look at the size of the things! A US (for example) plug has two thin prongs. A UK plug has three thick prongs with one (earth) longer than the other two. If you actually leave one lying on the floor and it happens to be facing upwards and you step on it then what happens.

Our feet are phenomenally sensitive. We are easily capable of stepping on something nasty and detecting it and reacting by lifting up before any damage is done. That assumes normal walking and not say jumping onto an upturned plug, or being pissed or whatever might impair your senses.

Funny you should use an idiom like "a bunch" and describe yourself as a 40 years old Brit and have a new account. Your accent implies Casterbridge.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-11 01:03:54+00:00
>> many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future

You live in exactly that future.

The screens that you watch, watch you. You can't escape them in your own home, let alone in public.

Words are redefined by the elite at their whim, as they were in the novel.

Very few would dare to publicly align themselves with the nation which we have always been at war with.

You live in that world now.
by amy214 | 2025-04-11 01:06:04+00:00
As a card-carrying Whig party member I take offense to this. US has had periods of 3 parties, where the 3rd party ousts the 1st or 2nd eventually and we're back to two party, though that's more 1800s.

This is a product of duopolistic parties AND social media algorithms. Outrage. Outrage gets clicks, gets money, gets votes.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-11 01:06:06+00:00
>> no plotting library available in python even comes close to ggplot2.

I so disagree. I've used R for plotting and a bit of data handling since 2014, I believe, to prove to a colleague I could do it (we were young). After all this time I still can't say I know how to do anything beyond plotting a simple function in R without looking up the syntax.

Last week I needed to create two figures, each with 16 subplots, and make sure all the subplot axis labels and titles are readable when the main text is readable (with the figure not more than half a page tall). On a whim I tried matplotlib, which I'd never tried before and... I got it to work.

I mean I had to make an effort and read the dox (OMG) and not just rummage around SO posts, but in like 60% of the time I could just use basic Python hacking skillz to intuit the right syntax. That is something that is completely impossible (for me anyway) to do in R, which just has no rhyme or reason, like someone came up with an ad-hoc new bit of syntax to do every different thing.

With Matplotlib I even managed to get a legend floating on the side of my plot. Each of my plots has lines connecting points in slightly different but overlapping scales (e.g. one plot has a scale 10, 20, 30,another 10, 20, 30, 40, 50) but they share some of the lines and markers automatically, so for the legend to make sense I had to create it manually. I also had to adjust some of the plot axis ticks manually.

No sweat. Not a problem! By that point I was getting the hang of it so it felt like a piece of cake.

And that's what kills me with R. No matter how long I use it, it never gets easier. Never.

I don't know what's wrong with that poor language and why it's such an arcane, indecipherable mess. But it's an arcane and indecipherable mess and I'm afraid to say I don't know if I'll ever go back to it again.

... gonna miss it a little though.

Edit: actually, I won't. Half of my repos are half R :|
by surge | 2025-04-11 01:06:42+00:00
>Authoritarianism is fundamentally right wing.

Go look at a political compass. Authoritarianism is when you use force to push your ideals, whether they be radical/liberal (left) or orthodox/conservative)(right) ideals on a populace with extreme authority. Communism is considered left/radical, if you use government force to make people adopt it, that's using authority, hence authoritarianism. Please learn definitions and political axis before making silly arguments.

China isn't really communist because they tried it and people starved, then they had to go back to capitalism or some degree of it, but kept the authoritarianism, and effectively became some hybrid version that leans fascist.

Communism simply never works at scale, socialism can to an extent, assuming its not abused and there's a homogeneous society with shared cultural values and purpose that includes to contribute and to not abuse it. Hence Nordic socialism, which of course breaks down when you bring in those that don't share those values as its doing now. I've heard enough Swedes bitch about Eastern European migrants abusing their social welfare to say nothing of now to see the idealism fall apart when self interested parties without the same cultural values enter en masse.

Human psychology being about protecting and serving the interests of your tribe and things like "Dunbar's number" and the limit of the number of people you can literally care about and prioritize makes it impossible at scale. Families can be communist, even a small group of 10-50 people (more or less a cult or small tribe), massive populations can not. They simply are not going to work for the benefit of others without receiving something in exchange, unless you use a gun to their head, which is why all communist regimes start out authoritarian, but holding a gun to someone's head for 10-50 years won't change 200k years of evolutionary programming. Hence why Marx is good at pointing out capitalism's flaws, but he's naive and even more fundamentally flawed when it comes to prescribing a solution that does way more harm in the end.

Truth is most successful societies adopt a hybrid solution, socialism at the community or local level where everyone works for a shared purpose and contributes to the local community, whether that be through a church, small local government, etc. with capitalism that allows trade and mutually beneficial deals to happen with those outside of that community.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-11 01:06:58+00:00
Yea, I do the same, I try to surround myself with positive people. Friends I choose, local businesses I frequent. But there are some forced interactions (like kid's school friends' parents for example) where you have no choice to have to interact with terrible people.

My recollection is that niceness used to be the default in random people you might meet. But that's not been true for about the last ten years or so. You actively have to seek out nice people now. Something happened back in 2015-2016, where "casual meanness" became suddenly OK, and people went mask off and it was cool to be an insufferable jerk.
by spudlyo | 2025-04-11 01:08:13+00:00
I really like picking up arcane UNIX/Linux knowledge. In the 90s, I was asked in an interview by a wizened old UNIX greybeard what the brk system call did, and what I would think if I saw it pop up frequently in the strace output of a program I was trying to diagnose. I did not then know the answer to that question, and I subsequently bombed the rest of that interview. If I would have read this article I could have told him stood for "program break" and mentioned that it was an end-of-heap marker, and that I should expect that the program was calling malloc (which was then implemented with brk) a lot. I probably would have still bombed the other interviews, but I could have at least momentarily impressed the crusty old sysadmin.

Nowadays however, interviewers are rarely impressed with what arcane knowledge you may or may not have, regardless of how hard won the experiences were that taught it to you.

I was reminded of this when reading the "Demystifying the shebang" article today on HN when I saw it in some strace output, which along with the other similarities got me to thinking about this article.
by smnrchrds | 2025-04-11 01:08:16+00:00
Thank you for your work on this topic and for answering questions here. I have a question: is there a way to avoid the security issues with string formatting described here? It seems like all (most?) string formatting options suffer from the same issue.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/12/29/careful-with-str-format/
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-11 01:09:43+00:00
Knowing the history of GCC (more focused on C) and Clang (more focused on C++), it makes sense to me that GCC has better ISO C compliance.

Clang has a very nice specific page for ISO C version compliance: https://clang.llvm.org/c_status.html#c2x

I could not find the same for GCC, but I found an old one for C99: https://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

CppRef has a joint page, but honestly, I am more likely to believe a page directly owned/controlled/authored by the project itself: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/compiler_support/23

Finally, is there a specific feature of C23 that you need that Clang does not support?
by jltsiren | 2025-04-11 01:09:55+00:00
Columbia's endowment is ~$20 billion. A sustainable spending level would be 3-4% of that, assuming no further donations, or 4-5%, if donations continue as usual. In any case, it would be at most $1 billion/year, and that money is already spent on current activities.

Last year, Columbia received over $1.3 billion as government grants and contracts. Even if they stopped everything that currently depends on the endowment and redirected the money to replace federal funding, it would not be enough.
by tomhow | 2025-04-11 01:10:02+00:00
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: In many other threads on HN, people lament and protest the difficulty of getting paid well as a freelancer or small business in the technology industry. Let’s not trash someone for charging a handsome price for a product that’s had a lot of time, thought and design talent invested into it. Everybody knows that other clocks ant timers exist. Nobody is forced to buy this one. But we can still appreciate the effort and talent that someone has put into trying to create something beautiful, and respect them for charging a premium for it. And let’s keep Hacker News from being a place for grumpiness, especially about people trying to make nice new things.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-11 01:10:12+00:00
110V is regularly used via transformers, generally for safety - 110V doesn't kick you as much as 240V. Perhaps I didn't emphasise that 110V is not grid delivered here.

I have a 110V transformer and a 110V rated SDS hammer drill. The idea is that if I manage to hit an electrical cable then I will probably not die, with luck.

We also have three phase which I think is normal in the US, for example and is why ethernet over power line is a bit fraught.
by _dark_matter_ | 2025-04-11 01:10:28+00:00
I don't know if we had bad service or what, but I bought both my kids cell-connected Apple Watches and had a terrible experience. Could never get ahold of them, half the time they couldn't call us or message us, battery sometimes wouldn't last a day, and on and on. I cancelled the plan and the watches sit in a drawer now.
by addicted | 2025-04-11 01:11:09+00:00
The part you’re misunderstanding about black mirror is that it’s about how technology will strip the humanity out of people.

Also, the name of the show is BLACK mirror. Besides the iPhone symbolism by which the name is inspired, the whole point of the show is to hold up a mirror to the dark side of society.

This may lead to a show that is without nuance or is less interesting, but thats the point of the show.
by the-grump | 2025-04-11 01:11:17+00:00
What I would use is an ADT and I make a wish for that every day in every language that’s not Haskell :D

Haskell also has operator overloading on steroids so you could use the (|>) operator from Flow and write transformations the same as you would shell pipes. I’d love to whip up an example but it’s difficult on this tiny screen. Will try to remember when I’m on my computer.

Before someone chimes in with ML propaganda, I warn you that I’m going to exercise my rights under the Castle Doctorine the moment you say “of”.
by disconcision | 2025-04-11 01:11:43+00:00
i think it's both, and more. i didn't read the ending as particularly opinionated about how 'real' the depicted emulation was, though i do think it had a decidedly hopeful tinge. the idea that we might somehow, in some way get the opportunity to do it over, to do it right, even if weird/contingent/incomplete, has i think a mythic resonance that transcends strict bounds of realism. even in a fully fantastic utopian afterlife unmediated by technology there would still be the question of whether this is 'really real': ontological, psychologically, etc. nonetheless, there are levels of unreality many seem willing to accept, the ending of 'inception' being another paradigmatic film example. i guess my perspective is that many aspects of 'real life' also abut artifice and pantomime (a phenomena not unrelated to the feelings of regret inspiring desire for strictly-impossible second chances), and the decision to accept anything as 'real' is always contains an element of tenuousness, uncertainty, and faith.
by FloatArtifact | 2025-04-11 01:11:49+00:00
> same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. > > cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free.

Could you explain cloudflare tunnels are secure. I understand not punching holes through one's firewall and dealing with a residential connection that's often targeted for exploits. However, if one targets the tunnel endpoint to exploit is it more secure even though it's still exposed to the public?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-11 01:11:58+00:00
Any Julians comment?

Having seen Julia proposed as the nemesis of R (not python, that too political, non-lispy)

>the creator of the R programming language, Ross Ihaka, who provided benchmarks demonstrating that Lisp’s optional type declaration and machine-code compiler allow for code that is 380 times faster than R and 150 times faster than Python

(Would especially love an overview of the controversies in graphics/rendering)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42785785
by its-summertime | 2025-04-11 01:12:12+00:00
The first point seems just wrong. An executable bit of code vs an executable bit of code with other bits of code next to it, doesn't change the security of the overall security tooling

And you can have a container with only one file, the executable, in docker/podman easily: https://docs.docker.com/build/building/base-images/#create-a...

So this feels double wrong already.

- - -

No citations for the majority of it either.
by dajtxx | 2025-04-11 01:12:29+00:00
I am working on a system at present where the data scientist has done the calculations in an R script. We agreed upon an input data.frame and an output csv as our 'interface'.

I added the SQL query to the top of the R script to generate the input data.frame and my Python code reads the output CSV to do subsequent processing and storage into Django models.

I use a subprocess running Rscript to run the script.

It's not elegant but it is simple. This part of the system only has to run daily so efficiency isn't a big deal.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-11 01:12:31+00:00
Mahmoud Khalil hasn't been deported (yet) but he was absolutely black-bagged and sent to Lousiana pending deportation, despite being a lawful permanent resident and not being accused of any criminal conduct [1]. His crime? Involvement in pro-Palestinian protests [2].

You are correct that, to the best of our knowledge, no pro-Palestinian protestor has thus far been deported to El Salvador.

The precedent here is what's important, meaning the government is arguing that they have the right to deport anyone they want for pretty much any reason and put them in a foreign prison indefinitely.

The legal justification for all this is an over 200 year old law called the Alien and Seditions Act and a declared state of emergency and invasion/incursion by a Venezuelan gang, something which has gotten at least some support from the Supreme Court [3].

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has basically come out and said that Khalil is being deported for his views. If these people don't have rights to free speech and due process then nobody does.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-universit...

[2]: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/09/ice-arrests-palestinian-act...

[3]: https://www.livenowfox.com/news/supreme-court-lifts-order-bl...