MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-07 00:23:11+00:00
I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m saying that you aren’t saying anything to agree or disagree with from the standpoint of physics. Your position offers no predictions, offers no implications, and offers no way to be measured in any way. From the standpoint of physics it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t make it wrong or right nor does it make anyone replying you wrong or right about any of it. You simply have not crossed the threshold for physics to have a say. You are free to believe all of this. If you want physics to care you need to demonstrate how your beliefs predict system dynamics. How can your beliefs explain observations and do those explanations make sense in the context of everything else we know? All of the people you cite who were “free thinkers” expressed their ideas in the context of the current understanding of physics whether they were special relativity or information theory. They did this by offering predictions such as how general relativity predicts you can see a star that is currently behind the sun during an eclipse if you draw a line from the earth observer to the star or how quantum mechanics predicted the existence of semiconductors or how chaos theory explains why two systems with similar initial conditions could exponentially grow apart from each other. If you could offer such predictions from your ideas than they would “stimulate” physicists to think about them. But without such predictions your ideas simply are just your thoughts about how things work. They may be interesting to some people, but if you want to think about them as physics, you need to provide a prediction.
by whateveracct | 2025-04-07 00:24:25+00:00
> Trump has called for a universal baseline tariff[31] of 10% to 20% on all imports,[176][177] with increased penalties if trade partners manipulate their currency or engage in unfair trade practices.[26] Trump has also called for 100% tariffs on cars made outside the U.S. and a minimum 60% tariff on Chinese goods.[176]

Per Wikipedia for his campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2024_presidenti...

Doesn't sound much different than what's happening
by sgustard | 2025-04-07 00:24:49+00:00
Steinbeck was the first name I searched for, so this was great to see even if his major works won't be available for some time. I do wonder how badly the Steinbeck or Faulkner estates are hurt by the sudden loss of royalties? Imagine working hard to write a book to make a living and then just under a hundred years it's taken away from you. Also, AI.
by thangalin | 2025-04-07 00:25:55+00:00
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

> Of all these projects, the most amenable to automatic typesetting are those produced by Standard Ebooks and HTML Writers Guild. The benefit of using HTML Writers Guild is their semantic markup and simple document type definition (DTD) file. Standard Ebooks, as the name suggests, are brilliantly standardized and have an excellent Manual of Style that describes what to expect from the XHTML.
by mindslight | 2025-04-07 00:26:03+00:00
The "surprise" is that people expect the President to use those powers to work in the best interests of the country, rather than focusing on enriching themselves by stealing everything they can for themselves and for those who bribe them. The executive is not supposed to be an adversarial position that the rest of the country needs to defend against. And if the President does abuse their letter-of-the-law powers, then we expect Congress to impeach and convict rather than enabling the behavior out of some sense of partisan grievances.
by saul_goodman | 2025-04-07 00:27:58+00:00
We describe "consuming" information and media just like food. I would settle for all media and advertisements having a required Nutrition Facts label:

Serving size: 1200 words / 60 seconds

Total commercial advertisement content: 600 words

Total US Government sponsored content: 300 words

Total foreign government sponsored content: 100 words

Total NGO sponsored content: 200 words

% of daily content of society shaping propaganda: 30%

% of daily content of subliminal content: 15%

% of daily content of emotional manipulation: %40

% of daily content of Gen5 warfare: 20%
by emmelaich | 2025-04-07 00:30:01+00:00
For a while, (up to including Sequioa 15.3) both rsync_samba and rsync_openrsync were available, via /var/select/rsync or the env variable CHOSEN_RSYNC.

One particular annoyance of openrsync is that it claimed to support the /./ magic path element for --relative. I sent a bug report to Apple for this about a month ago.

rsync_samba is gone as of Sequoia 15.4.

I've installed rsync from homebrew.
by modeless | 2025-04-07 00:32:02+00:00
The problem is not the kernel. It's the anti-user hostility to open source (GPL3 utilities e.g. modern Bash and rsync etc) and open standards (e.g. OpenGL and Vulkan) that stem from an over-active legal department. And the GUI that's stuck in the past. The top menu hasn't made sense since screens got bigger than the original Macintosh. The Dock has always sucked. Window management is primitive and saddled with interminable animations. And then there are the random unconfigurable things like the stupid camera gesture recognition popup or the inability to use natural scrolling on touchpads without reversing the mouse wheel too. MacOS needs an overhaul.
by VincentEvans | 2025-04-07 00:32:10+00:00
IMO broad categories of government employees should be restricted to owning broad index funds. But at least as far as upper echelons of political power - house, senate, supreme court, president and his cabinet - there should scarcely be any debate at all.

Personally I would prefer restricting them to SNP500. US does well - they’ll do well.
by hash872 | 2025-04-07 00:32:57+00:00
Congressional (or executive branch.....) stock trading is completely unacceptable and should be totally banned. Full stop.

With that being said- the idea that they're outperforming the market I think has been debunked several times. I'm sure that they're acting in bad faith and believe that they have some kind of precious inside information. But a few different studies have shown that they basically do the same as any group of a few hundred people that pick individual stocks- some outperform, some underperform, and in general their returns are a random walk. See

https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/20.500.12932/47... "no significant abnormal returns" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4954641 "significantly underperform" https://andy.egge.rs/papers/EggMueller_capitol_losses_jop_20... "between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund"

Stick to index funds folks
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-07 00:33:14+00:00
> I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.

They're quite literally being sold as a replacement for human intellectual labor by people that have received uncountable sums of investment money towards that goal.

The author of the post even says this:

"These machines will soon become the beating hearts of the society in which we live. The social and political structures they create as they compose and interact with each other will define everything we see around us."

Can't blame people "fact checking" something that's supposed to fill these shoes.

People should be (far) more critical of LLMs given all of these style of bold claims, not less.

Also, telling people they're "holding it wrong" when they interact with alleged "Ay Gee Eye" "superintelligence" really is a poor selling point, and no way to increase confidence in these offerings.

These people and these companies don't get to make these claims that threaten the livelihood of millions of people, inflate a massive bubble, impact hiring decisions and everything else we've seen and then get excused cause "whoops you're not supposed to use it like that, dummy."

Nah.
by csense | 2025-04-07 00:33:33+00:00
One important cause of comparative advantage is cheap labor.

Or perhaps I should say comparative "advantage" because cheap labor is actually bad from society's point of view!

It used to be that a person in the US could graduate from high school and get a factory job that provided enough income to have a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, and children.

Then the factories moved overseas to exploit the comparative advantage of cheap labor.

If you have a tariff, it undoes the advantage that cheap labor used to provide.

Operating in a society that pays its workers well is ultimately to business's advantage. Workers who have more money spend more money, they generally buy more products at higher prices and higher margins. Social and political stability happens when most people feel the system is working for them, they have a stake in the status quo, and they have something to lose.

I don't dispute the OP article's thesis, that tariffs cause some loss of economic inefficiency. The question is whether the gain is worth the cost.
by instagib | 2025-04-07 00:33:34+00:00
Richard Burr may have been convinced to not seek reelection to avoid prosecution.

“a 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, bars members of Congress and their aides from making investment decisions based on inside information they have access to as part of their Senate work, including both criminal and civil penalties for violations. Legal experts say that determining what information is “nonpublic” can be exceedingly difficult; no one has been successfully prosecuted under the law.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-wont-charge-sen-richa...
by wyldfire | 2025-04-07 00:34:17+00:00
> The only plausible way out I see in the near term is a bunch of carve outs and one-off deals that allows the U.S. government to say, "our bluff worked."

It's not a bluff. This is Idiocracy in action. They have no idea how to fix "the starving bullshit, dust storms, French fries and burrito coverings." It turns out governance requires collaboration and compromise, and some measure of trust. Without that, the executive can only press the buttons given by the legislature.
by watersb | 2025-04-07 00:34:33+00:00
Patches to mainline rsync added support for extended attributes, particularly for supporting macOS metadata.

Bombich "Carbon Copy Cloner" is a GUI app that wraps it.

https://support.bombich.com/hc/en-us/articles/20686446501143...

I started following Mike Bombich from his posts on macOS Server sysadmin boards; see

https://web.archive.org/web/20140707182312/http://static.afp...

Nathaniel Gray created a testing tool to verify the fidelity of backups; files with multiple streams, extended attributes and ACLs, all the good stuff... Backup Bouncer:

https://github.com/n8gray/Backup-Bouncer

See also this SwiftUI app that wraps rsync, RsyncX.

https://github.com/rsyncOSX/RsyncOSX

We used to really care about this stuff, back when we were still running software from "Classic" macOS on top of our new UNIX systems.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161022012615/http://blog.plast...
by spwa4 | 2025-04-07 00:35:41+00:00
What Trump and GOP said they'd do closely followed "project 2025" and the top level of tariffs proposed in that text was 10% ... and that was on China.

Trump is levying a 35% tariff on the penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands. No humans present, and also no clarification by the administration on who exactly is being taxed here ...

Trouble is, Trump is still popular. This pain will filter through the economy, but one would expect, it will filter through slowly. It may take 6 months, even 12 before it will really turn republican voters against Trump due to personal hardship.
by dangus | 2025-04-07 00:35:54+00:00
I truly wonder if there is a phenomenon where companies turning everything into an advertisment eventually backfires due to the pure saturation. It must dilute the effectiveness of ad spend and videos like this. I as a consumer on a commercial flight now expect my display to be full of junk like credit card ads before the flight gets underway so I try to tune it out.

I also wonder if the flight attendants in aisles physically demonstrating and making eye contact with passengers has something of an effect of guilting you into paying attention. There's no guilt in ignoring a screen talking at you in an obnoxious way.

Probably my biggest dislike about these safety videos is when they demonstrate safety features with fake props and "clever" representations of aircraft. If they are going to use visual aids they should try to match your environment so that you know what to look for in a real emergency.

My second biggest dislike about these videos is the cognitive overload. Sure, there's an argument that something catchy will help grab your attention so that you aren't just tuning out the safety information, but on the other hand so many of these videos turn into an incredibly high-stimulation affair. There's more of a focus on jokes and visual gags that it's hard to stay focused on the actual safety instructions on offer.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-07 00:36:18+00:00
The better way is what Clinton did throughout his terms as President - cut government waste and run budget surpluses. It doesn't have to hurt if you do it gradually enough. Some commentators will argue that the U.S. enjoys some sort of unique exceptionalism due to the dollar being a "reserve currency" and whatnot, such that they should not attempt to do this. These commentators are wrong.
by genrilz | 2025-04-07 00:36:23+00:00
EDIT: A summary of this is that it is impossible to write a sound std::Vec implementation if NonZero::new_unchecked is a safe function. This is specifically because creating a value of NonZero which is 0 is undefined behavior which is exploited by niche optimization. If you created your own `struct MyNonZero(u8)`, then you wouldn't need to mark MyNonZero::new_unchecked as unsafe because creating MyNonZero(0) is a "valid" value which doesn't trigger undefined behavior.

The issue is that this could potentially allow creating a struct whose invariants are broken in safe rust. This breaks encapsulation, which means modules which use unsafe code (like `std::vec`) have no way to stop safe code from calling them with the invariants they rely on for safety broken. Let me give an example starting with an enum definition:

// Assume std::vec has this definition struct Vec<T> { capacity: usize, length: usize, arena: * T } enum Example { First { capacity: usize, length: usize, arena: usize, discriminator: NonZero<u8> }, Second { vec: Vec<u8> } }

Now assume the compiler has used niche optimization so that if the byte corresponding to `discriminator` is 0, then the enum is `Example::Second`, while if the byte corresponding to `discriminator` is not 0, then the enum is `Example::First` with discriminator being equal to its given non-zero value. Furthermore, assume that `Example::First`'s `capacity`, `length`, and `arena` fields are in the in the same position as the fields of the same name for `Example::Second.vec`. If we allow `fn NonZero::new_unchecked(u8) -> NonZero<u8>` to be a safe function, we can create an invalid Vec:

fn main() { let evil = NonZero::new_unchecked(0); // We write as an Example::First, // but this is read as an Example::Second // because discriminator == 0 and niche optimization let first = Example::First { capacity: 9001, length: 9001, arena: 0x20202020, discriminator: evil } if let Example::Second{ vec: bad_vec } = first { // If the layout of Example is as I described, // and no optimizations occur, we should end up in here. // This writes 255 to address 0x20202020 bad_vec[0] = 255; } }

So if we allowed new_unchecked to be safe, then it would be impossible to write a sound definition of Vec.
by nameless912 | 2025-04-07 00:37:41+00:00
There's another dimension to this, that storage is so cheap that being wasteful with it isn't really disincentivized. I know for example at work of a portal that accepts uploads of large files from external clients that stores both the initial upload and every subsequent transformation of the file (of which there are 4-6) permanently. It's extremely useful for debugging, as one of the bits of metadata we shove on the zip archive is the git hash of the code that was running, so it's trivial to pull down any failed step and diagnose what happened.

We are using 4-6 times as much storage as we need to, and these are often not small files (on the order of 100 MB - 5 GB, several dozen times a day) but fixing this overuse is so far down the priority list that I don't think it survived the great Jira purge of mid-2024.
by manyturtles | 2025-04-07 00:38:41+00:00
About a decade and a half ago I worked on a large data migration project at a FAANG. Multi-exabyte scale, many clusters across many countries. Once everyone was moved the old storage platform wasn't completely empty, because the number of migrations was large and users were (naturally) more focused on ensuring their data was in place and available on the target platform rather than ensuring every last thing was deleted on the legacy platform. We weren't initially concerned about it because it would all get deleted when we turned down the old setup.

As we were gearing up to declare victory and start turning down the several dozen legacy storage clusters someone mused that given some users were subject to litigation holds -- not allowed to delete any data -- that at least some of the leftover data on the old system might be subject to litigation hold, and we'd need to figure that out before we could delete it or incur legal risk. IIRC the leftover 'junk' data amounted to a few dozen petabytes spread across multiple clusters around the world, in different jurisdictions. We spent several months talking with the lawyers figuring that out. It was an interesting dance, because on the one hand we were quite confident that there was unlikely to be anything in the leftovers which was both meaningful and not migrated to the new platform, while on the other hand explaining that it wasn't practical to just "go and look" through a few dozen PB of data. I recall we ended up somewhere in between, coming up with ways to distinguish categories of data like caches and working data from various pipelines. It added over six months to the project, but was quite an interesting problem to work through that hadn't occurred to any of us earlier on, as we were thinking entirely in technical terms about infrastructure migration.
by roenxi | 2025-04-07 00:39:31+00:00
Why not? You need a reason. We might as well say they shouldn't be beholden to voters (which is a legit political theory, by the way, there are reasons the US is a Republic).

If we work backwards from the observation that Donald Trump just got elected from his second term and start probing into the whys and wherefores; direct lobbying seems to be the major problem. Politicians stock trading is certainly unseemly but it isn't at all clear whether it is pushing the quality of the decision making in Washington up or down.
by TaurenHunter | 2025-04-07 00:40:41+00:00
You've said "Instead we get tariffs with quick retaliation e.g. from China, and I still see no negotiation in place" and that was what I was responding to.

Regarding China's government there should be no expectation of negotiation because they have demonstrated over the years they will not play fair and shouldn't be trusted to do so now.

If you don't know that because you haven't tracked geopolitics, now you know, and can perhaps review your opinion about world trade, which is strongly related to geopolitics.

Now, regarding other countries, you can't say there is "no negotiation in place": https://www.npr.org/2025/04/06/nx-s1-5354134/vietnam-asks-tr...
by jcalvinowens | 2025-04-07 00:40:51+00:00
> Whether it "works" or not is not the issue.

Of course it is. It doesn't work on anything modern, and thus it is impossible for portable code which actually runs in the real world and has to work to have relied on it for a long time.

Your example is not code any competent C programmer would ever write, IMHO. Every proficient C programmer I've ever worked with used "const char *" for string literals, and called out anybody who didn't in review.

Old code already needs special flags to build with modern compilers: I think the benefit of doing this outweighs the cost of editing some makefiles.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-07 00:41:10+00:00
Combine this with yesterday’s article about body-doubling. What about “work from near home” - ie. desk at a nearby coworking space.

Can’t get distracted by dishes or laundry; working near others creates shared atmosphere; and your coworking-space compatriots are your lunch break & watercooler chat crew.

Anyone have reports on “work from near home”?
by ein0p | 2025-04-07 00:41:54+00:00
Actually, no. They haven't "ceded" a damn thing. If they did, the GOP would be working on Trump's legislative agenda, which is something it's been sabotaging again and again in spite of having a slim majority in both the House and the Senate. The plan seems to be: sabotage until midterms, then lose one or both majorities to dems, and raise money off "gracefully losing" for the remaining 2 years of Trump's term. That was the plan 8 years ago, too. It worked.
Show HN: Built a Python debugger that sends your execution trace to an LLM
by alvin_r_h | 2025-04-07 00:41:59+00:00
This is a command line debugger that runs your code and sends the execution trace to an LLM. I've found that copy-pasting error messages and code isn't enough to solve complex bugs, figured that this would solve that.

Note that this is a fork of PySnooper with a simple LLM layer over it, all credits to the team that built it!
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-07 00:42:04+00:00
There was a school of commentary when Trump was elected in 2016 that said he was unfit to be president because he owned active businesses instead of having the good taste to own stocks like everyone else. The idea was that this opens the door to corruption by allowing people to patronize his business(es) even if they otherwise wouldn't.

I'm intrigued at the extension to the idea that public officials shouldn't own anything at all. What do you want them to do?
by cxr | 2025-04-07 00:43:19+00:00
> Obviously paraphrasing someone else's words into ones you like better is a fine and acceptable thing to do.

Wrong. Not only is it tasteless and dishonest (not "fine"), it is against the rules of this site. But regardless of whether it's allowed elsewhere, you still shouldn't do it. (See "tasteless and dishonest".)