MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-04-04 19:23:43+00:00
I don't think she broke up the Beatles, I think there was a clash of personalities there that wasn't tied to a specific relationship. She did, however, ruin what was to be a legendary collaboration between Lennon and Chuck Berry.

She and Lennon may have been right for each other. I think they both reached a point of arrogance and self-indulgence that made them complement each other well. The difference was that Lennon was absurdly talented and Yoko, not so much.

And that's the problem with contemporary art in her style: a dearth of talent and a need for attention create an urge to do something, anything, to stand out in some way. Great art by a talented artist can take you into the artist's imagination, expanding your perspective. Mediocre art often comes off as a form of trolling because the point is not to show you a rich new point of view but merely to challenge you, to piss you off. Hence the urinal exhibited as a sculpture; the banana taped to a wall; the scrawled instructions on how to create the piece exhibited instead of the piece itself, there being often no piece at all, just a bit of manic-pixie-dream-girl vagueness. ("Hide until everyone goes home. Hide until everyone forgets you. Hide until everyone dies.") And curators and collectors all standing around telling the emperor what a lovely outfit he has on.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-04-04 19:23:50+00:00
Even better, I can tell you one I experienced literally today.

I was at a barbeque, and the people hosting put out one bowl of diced red onion, which despite the name was purple, as it tends to be, and a bowl of crispy fried onion, which was brown. I reached for the fried onion, and avoided the red(purple) onion, because I always hated red onion.

Now, if you want to be annoying, you could make all sorts of red(heh) herring arguments about the cause of me avoiding the red onions being their flavour and aroma in the past having caused me not to like onions, and that's all true. But effects can have multiple causes, and it's also true that the distribution of pigments in the onion leading to an emergent property we dub "purple" did in fact convey information to me that caused me to decide not to eat them. I didn't smell them or taste them. Information was transmitted from onion to mind, via the electromagnetic field. Clearly the emergent property of purple colour has a causal effect here.

As for other examples in the natural world of non-human plants an animals, I don't know, but feel free to use a search engine. But since the colour purple is found in all sorts of life forms(including humans, and all sorts of life forms(including) are able to perceive and discriminate it from other colours, it's fair to assume that the colour purple is out there having all sorts of causal effects.
by sofixa | 2025-04-04 19:25:05+00:00
> the client/server model and its knock on effects (IIRC, needing to upload changes with knife?) was annoying

It also has tons of advantages, notably around scale (Ansible id very slow when working with thousands of machines) and ensuring that there is no drift. Also e.g. SaltStack (RIP) has cool features such as reactor to react to events on the machine which are only possible because there's an agent
by nickff | 2025-04-04 19:25:47+00:00
Everyone that I’ve ever heard mention ‘induced demand’ with respect to roads does so while advocating against the construction of additional infrastructure capacity for passenger vehicles (cars). This correlation is consistent enough that it does indicate some sort of ‘induced demand paradigm’.

I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
by KentGeek | 2025-04-04 19:25:57+00:00
Get this: China sends us all this great stuff, and the only thing they get is OUR FIAT CURRENCY, which is essentially worthless. And then, what do they do with that currency? They buy our treasury bonds, which pay them interest in our own fiat currency. Not only that, but every bond they buy is more encouragement to help us keep the US economy strong and stable. The trade deficit thing looks like a great deal for us when viewed from some angles.
by tracker1 | 2025-04-04 19:26:19+00:00
JS runtimes are probably the most advanced, powerful and optimized for any dynamically processed language. The amount of things that both can and are done with JS today is really impressive. Some might say horrible, how dare people do productive things in JS...

It's also that computing capability is that much more powerful today than it was in the 80's and 90's. I mean, up until 2002 or so, processing power close to doubled every other year, and since 2002 it slowed down a bit, but still went from 64mb ram in my computer around 1998 to 64gb in my computer from 6 years ago. Processing capability has gone up just as much. Of course a lot of it went into parallization this past decade and a half, since squeezing more out of each node/generation has been decreasingly fruitful.
by tuhins | 2025-04-04 19:26:26+00:00
I was one of them! Joined on August 5, 2012, got 0.5% of equity (I think?), it all went to more-or-less zero monetarily. I don't think most of us really hold any grudges against Sahil here. It was a very fun place to work, and I met some of my closest friends and made some of my strongest professional connections there. It was net-very-positive to my life and career, and I think we were all adults when we were opting-in to the experience.

As for Sahil/Gumroad making money and growing. Meh. He's worked on it for 13 years and showing dedication beyond what I would have for most things. It's fine.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-04 19:26:36+00:00
> In general I think these tariffs are terrible but taking the side of fast fashion is pretty much always morally wrong.

I'm not taking the side of fast fashion: I'm saying that US people would potentially spend less in aggregate when all items are suddenly more expensive, which can have domestic economic effects. Especially with the suddenness of all this (the day after which Trump went golfing).

If you want to deal with the specific issue of working conditions, then (e.g.) a treaty mandating working conditions (with international monitoring?) could be a better idea, with violations imposing tariffs for violations after a transition period so changes have time to be implemented.
by dangjc | 2025-04-04 19:26:59+00:00
I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.
by benlivengood | 2025-04-04 19:27:07+00:00
> I think there is a qualitative difference between tasks that take weeks or months and tasks that take minutes or hours, a difference that is not reflected by simple quantity.

I'd label that difference as long-term planning plus executive function, and wherever that overlaps with or includes delegation.

Most long-term projects are not done by a single human and so delegation almost always plays a big part. To delegate, tasks must be broken down in useful ways. To break down tasks a holistic model of the goal is needed where compartmentalization of components can be identified.

I think a lot of those individual elements are within reach of current model architectures but they are likely out of distribution. How many gantt charts and project plans and project manager meetings are in the pretraining datasets? My guess is few; rarely published internal artifacts. Books and articles touch on the concepts but I think the models learn best from the raw data; they can probably tell you very well all of the steps of good project management because the descriptions are all over the place. The actual doing of it is farther toward the tail of the distribution.
by taeric | 2025-04-04 19:27:41+00:00
To an extent, I suppose. There is also something to be said for just wanting to get outside. Summers in the pacific northwest are also a lot of really long days.

Just writing that, though, makes me realize that most of the northern sections of the US are inline with what we call western Europe? Would be neat to see this broken down by latitude as a crude cohort check.
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-04 19:27:42+00:00
> Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."

There's an irony in here, since this is more of less a summary of the ideology that wants "safe spaces" in schools.

Just, you know, with an entirely different set of things that proponents want to shield children/young adults from.
by Animats | 2025-04-04 19:27:45+00:00
Here's NSA's own history of the confirmation process.[1] NSA director is a Senate-confirmed position. Trump can't just put someone into the job.

This document is from 2022, so it goes up to the NSA director appointed during Trump's first term, and discusses the politics. So far, the NSA director has always been a military general officer, but that's not a legal requirement.

The way it has worked in the past is that the uniformed services have recommended candidates for the job, and the Secretary of Defense and the President picked one. There's no history of anyone unqualified going into that job.

Worth reading.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Dec/01/2003123773/-1/-1/0/NSA...
by ramses0 | 2025-04-04 19:27:51+00:00
This is kindof how golang works by default. `import foo/bar/baz` then "foo" and "bar" effectively don't exist, you only refer to "baz" in the end.

`import github.com/blah/baz`, `megacorp.com/finance/baz`, ...

It all resolves to `baz.Something()`
by 827a | 2025-04-04 19:28:10+00:00
o1 fails at this, likely because it does not seem to have access to search, so it is operating on outdated information. It recommends the usage of methods that have been removed by Google in later versions of the library. This is also, to be fair, a mistake gpt-4o can make if you don't explicitly tell it to search.

o3-mini-high's output might work, but it isn't ideal: It immediately jumps to recommending avoiding all google cloud libraries and directly issuing a request to their API with fetch.
by danaris | 2025-04-04 19:28:18+00:00
Consider the situation where Trump is President, and someone is running against him.

He gets the police to arrest this opposition candidate, let's say for marijuana possession with the intent to sell (a felony), and with procedural chicanery ensures that the court trying the case is run by a Trump-appointed judge.

The opposition candidate is convicted of this charge.

Under your suggestion, they would then become ineligible to be elected.

It gets even worse if the corrupt President has a compliant Congress (which it seemed like he did for a little while, but that's less sure now). If he can ram through a new law making "criticizing the sitting President" a felony, then basically anyone who would oppose him and his regime would clearly be guilty.

In general, the sitting government decides what is a crime and what is not. If you make a law that says that those convicted of crimes cannot run for public office—either "any public office" or "only this specific public office"—then the sitting government, if it is seeking to act in its own interests rather than those of the people, has a perverse incentive to preferentially criminalize things that those who disagree with them are more likely to do, and to encourage (or coerce) bias in policing and trials to ensure conviction.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 19:28:31+00:00
Software development is continually emotionally stunted by a lack of people with expertise in multiple other fields.

English absolutely has namespaces. Every in-group has shibboleths and/or jargon, words that mark membership in the group that have connotations beyond the many dictionary definitions of that word (in fact I wonder how many words with more than three definitions started out as jargon/slang words that achieved general acceptance).

You cannot correctly parse a sentence without the context in which it was written. It’s a literary device some authors use. By letting the reader assume one interpretation of a prophetic sentence early on, the surprise the reader experiences when they discover a different interpretation at the end intensifies the effect.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-04 19:28:33+00:00
Congestion pricing isn't sufficient for the majority of American cities. If you have a major city with few to no inter-city transit options except cars, all the congestion pricing in the world won't shift transit modalities in the short to medium term because alternatives simply don't exist, at least until you price out the lower wage earners entirely and drop aggregate demand. You need to build out public transit options first to provide alternatives that people can take to mitigate the pressures of congestion pricing, but that takes us back to the original point.
by arcticbull | 2025-04-04 19:28:45+00:00
Hyperinflation is not 6% inflation, it's not even "inflation but bigger."

Hyperinflation is better thought of as the rejection of a currency by the people, and it has historically always been associated with extreme exogenous factors like foreign-currency denominated debt, with war, civil war or rampant corruption.

The Weimar Republic had foreign-currency denominated debt, which famously you cannot satisfy with printing more domestic currency.

[edit] Here's a good write-up that aligns with my take.

[1] https://www.pragcap.com/hyperinflation-its-more-than-just-a-...
by amavect | 2025-04-04 19:28:51+00:00
I think that you can omit the call to malloc, as realloc(NULL, size) does the same thing as malloc(size), and free(NULL) does nothing.

void *sane_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size) { if (size == 0) { free(ptr); return 0; } else { return realloc(ptr, size); } }

Unfortunately, when shrinking an array down to 0, you run into a complication. Detecting allocation failure now requires checking both size > 0 and sane_realloc returning 0. To simplify this further, just always allocate a non-zero size.

void *saner_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size) { if (size == 0) { size = 1; } return realloc(ptr, size); }
by loganfrederick | 2025-04-04 19:29:08+00:00
A great book on this subject but I didn't see cited in the article is "When Money Dies": https://www.amazon.com/When-Money-Dies-Devaluation-Hyperinfl...

Uses a mix of old economic stats paired with German citizens journals and public newspapers to tell the story of how hyperinflation in Germany started and then ended, but not before creating so much distrust in society that the seeds were sewn for the country to take a militaristic stance to fixing its problems. Highly recommend the book above.
by panstromek | 2025-04-04 19:29:09+00:00
Yes, pretty often. Like I said, Alcatel 1 can't even handle it's own native UI. Just opening the search/url input has like 2 second latency. On a fresh start, it's like 20s. Typing on a native keyboard is super laggy and slows down the whole phone.

Sites like Hacker News and textual blogs work pretty fine if you get lucky and nothing is running in the background, but you have to wait for a while for the phone to stop crunching stuff. The scrolling has noticable latency and random hiccups. If you scroll too fast, the content will show up delayed.

Once you add some images or a bit of javascript, you start to feel a lot more jank. You often get a perf hit when you recieve push notifications or when you re-connect to wifi, or open a native keyboard accidentaly, same with triggering browser UI or tapping the back button. Also, the browser sometimes just crashes (I guess out of memory?).

It certainly is usable, but the latency variance of various actions is wild. Sometimes it feels ok to use, but other times the whole session is like 1 fps for 5 minutes.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 19:29:13+00:00
We could live in a world where there was no injustice visited on Native Americans and Ayn Rand still either was or was not a hypocrite about Social Security. But I think Rand neutralized that by putting it in the context of losing money via taxation and recovering it as a benefit.

What's essential to that argument is what's contained in Rand's philosophy about taxation and her personal actions in electing to receive the benefit. Broadening the scope of the argument to include Native Americans in order to sustain the charge of hypocrisy is an indicator that the Social Security argument is not able to stand on its own.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-04 19:29:34+00:00
> I wasn’t talking about LLMs

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of LLMs mostly.

> With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image

I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be about a character's likeness. It's not just a generic stock character, as an idea but it has enough distinctive characteristics, has a particular style hat, uses a whip. Showing that image to any jury and they'll say this is Indy. Yeah there are trademarks as well and both can apply to characters.
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 19:30:17+00:00
That's interesting to consider. Some of the GNU code is getting quite old and looking through it is a blast from the past. I'm frankly amazed that it continues to work so well. I suspect there is a relatively small group of GNU hackers out there rocking gray and white beards that are silently powering the foundations of our modern world, and I worry what's going to happen when they start retiring. Maybe we'll get rust rewrites of everything and a new generation will take over, but frankly I'm pretty worried about it.
by hannasanarion | 2025-04-04 19:30:17+00:00
Thinking Fast and Slow's biggest issues are in the middle chapters that rely heavily on priming research, which has been pretty thoroughly disproven since the book's release.

The general gist of the core idea: that there are multiple modes of thinking and some of them are more likely to produce the most rational decisions than others in a given circumstance, is pretty trivially true.

I think where Kahneman's book does harm is in the implication (intended or otherwise) that "fast thinking" is bad. It's not. Thinking is expensive in time, attention, effort, and skill. We have instincts and emotional reactions for good reasons, they help us navigate crises when there isn't time for deep thought, and they are the consequences that reverberate through the complex web of interpersonal relations that makes up society.

Your note about anger management is really interesting though. I think there may be a tendency for people to generalize emotions that they feel into flavors that are more externalizable and less actionable. Vulnerability and betrayal are things that inspire changes in behavior, like building up defenses or reorienting loyalties, but when you're angry, well then you're just angry, and the only thing that will make you stop being angry is the world being different.

I think there's another version that I experience often, where I see my partner doing cool fun things with other people, and my brain triggers jealousy, which like anger is externalized and inflictive. If I slow down and spend some time with that feeling and drill down into it, I usually conclude that what I'm actually feeling is envy, which is more actionable: i can go get/do the thing that I am envious of (like make a plan to do the cool fun thing with my partner or somebody else in the future) and then I won't be envious anymore, without having to make the world change for me.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-04-04 19:30:39+00:00
> "Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

yes, the left doing that was pretty bad and I have gotten into many arguments over my left leaning friends over it. But it was largely private companies capitulating to pressure. To compare that to people being abducted and incarcerated by the government without trial or even an actual law being broken is worse.

You do understand why thats worse right?
by richstone_io | 2025-04-04 19:31:28+00:00
You are spot on, if no one is asking for automations or API endpoints yet to make more use of your SaaS, then your business is not there yet with the amount of power users and partnership opportunities.

So, it most likely wouldn’t make sense at this point, investing your time and energy into guesses about what stuff API clients might use in the future. After all, all those integrations are dev and maintenance intensive.

I like your idea about getting feedback from customers and finding the simplest solution from there.
by jenny91 | 2025-04-04 19:32:45+00:00
Late 2025, "its PhD-level knowledge of every field". I just don't think you're going to get there. There is still a fundamental limitation that you can only be as good as the sources you train on. "PhD-level" is not included in this dataset: in other words, you don't become PhD-level by reading stuff.

Maybe in a few fields, maybe a masters level. But unless we come up with some way to have LLMs actually do original research, peer-review itself, and defend a thesis, it's not going to get to PhD-level.
by lamename | 2025-04-04 19:33:09+00:00
I watched a discussion the other day on this "NNs don't overfit point". I realize yes certain aspects are surprising, and in many cases with the right size and diversity in a dataset scaling laws prevail, but my experience with real datasets training from scratch (not fine tuning pretrained models), and impression has always been that NNs definitely can overfit if you don't have large quantities of data. My gut assumption is that original theories were not demonstrated to be true in certain circumstances (i.e. certain dataset characteristics), but that's never mentioned in shorthand these days when data sets size is often assumed to be huge.

(Before anyone laughs this off, this is still an actual problem in the real world for non-FAANG companies who have niche problems or cannot use open-but-non-commercial datasets. Not everything can be solved with foundational/frontier models.)

Please point me to these papers because I'm still learning.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-04 19:34:27+00:00
Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?
by Joker_vD | 2025-04-04 19:34:41+00:00
But shouldn't the planet start with a small, solid core (which would have always been solid due to the immense pressure), surrounded by the liquid magma, which is then in turn surrounded by the solid layer of crust (which solidified due to being exposed to the rest of the space to cool)? Then, as the Earth continues to cool down, the liquid part would also start to turn solid, starting from the near the core/crust, and therefore reduce its volume so... if the crust is sturdy enough, it will all end up as the small, solid core surrounded by the lot of empty space surrounded by the outer crust?

Like, that's also a pretty ridiculous scenario of planetogenesis, but it's at least somewhat plausible.