MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jgyter | 2025-04-07 09:25:44+00:00
Your example is far more complex. The scenario he provided is easier to grapple with.

The patient (or whoever is paying the bill) and the provider determines the "worth". If they can't agree on a price, then it's not worthwhile.

In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.

Putting a monetary price on it in order to quantify the cost doesn't fundamentally change the equation. In the communist utopia I imagine it would be more like forcing x architects, engineers and builders to construct the facilities for the testing, x researchers and scientists to develop and conduct the test, x caregivers, plumbers, cleaners, drivers, baristas, chefs, etc for x weeks to provide this "free" test for one individual. Is that "worth" it?
by sunshowers | 2025-04-07 09:26:10+00:00
No, I wouldn't call him an expert. I'd call him deeply incompetent and missing basic skills.

Simply having a credential is not enough. You need actual training and expertise — to be good at what you do. I'm thinking of all the scientists and bureaucrats who run things like the NIH, vaccine programs, and air quality/pollution control. Many people do not perceive those programs to be in their self-interest. But in reality they are, regardless of someone's personal opinion.
by rvba | 2025-04-07 09:27:10+00:00
Windows "streamlined" the taskbar so much that it allows for exactly 11 icons.

In my experience tons of office jobz require you to have 20-30 windows open. And you switch through them constantly.

So this streamlining murders productivity.

You can try to change it withan external program, ut good luck doing that on a corporate computer.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-04-07 09:28:14+00:00
Yeah, turns out you need to provide value in exchange for your salary. So since there is 0 physical strain, you get mental strain.

This is like writing an article about "The Insanity of Being an Adult in Modern Society" because you have to think about insurance, dishwashing, clothes, food, taking car of your car, your hair, your health, your finances, etc... Yeah. No shit.
by superfist | 2025-04-07 09:29:10+00:00
Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:

'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as electrical engineering.' [2]

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774 [2] Christopher Board, "Cartographic Communication", Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 1981
by wodenokoto | 2025-04-07 09:29:14+00:00
Pol Pot, Genghis Khan.

I really fail to see how converting OpenAI to what it de facto is - a for profit company - places Altman in this group of people.

I do agree that they need to pay taxes, equivalent of what they'd paid had they been a regular corporation all the time, but at worst this amounts to a bit of tax fraud, not genocide.
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-07 09:29:26+00:00
Also the other thing that I realised after working with a bunch of VCs is that they are all incredibly dumb. Few VCs are founders themselves and you will have better luck with them but the majority of VCs have simply no idea about product and technology and they are simply pattern matching. What that means is that they will cargo cult everything and if your startup doesn't fit the mold they will not respond to you favorably and the sad part is that the actual 10x, 100x returns that their VC firm needs comes from those type of investments but they simply cannot see them.
by XCSme | 2025-04-07 09:29:28+00:00
> I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it

Why are people so afraid to self-host? It's usually cheaper and runs better than the hosted services. Get a cheap dedicated server from Hetzner, and you can run all your services there. Servers tend to keep working (usually longer than those cloud services do).
by vladimir-y | 2025-04-07 09:30:49+00:00
> They are all crying for the audience, the losers.

There is an opinion that making them (a big business, and overseas players too), crying for audience is a way to make them loyal to a regime. So they come to the audience, they kiss the ring, they get some preference, and the regime becomes even stronger. I'd not name Trump crazy as some do, but simply a person presenting and promoting the interests of a certain entity. I won't name my guesses about the possible entity.
by kpcyrd | 2025-04-07 09:31:30+00:00
> We count about 40% of our security vulnerabilities to date to have been the direct result of us using C instead of a memory-safe language alternative. This is however a much lower number than the 60-70% that are commonly repeated, originating from a few big companies and projects.

There has been discussion in an Arch Linux internal channel about the accuracy of these classifications. We noticed many advisories contain a "This bug is not considered a C mistake. It is not likely to have been avoided had we not been using C."-disclaimer, but was unclear what the agenda was and how "C mistake" is defined.

It was brought up because this disclaimer was also present in the CVE-2025-0665 advisory[0], which is essentially a double-free but on file descriptor level. The impact is extremely low (it's more "libcurl causing unsoundness in your process rather than can-be-exploited-into-RCE"), but it's a direct result of how C manages resources. This kind of bug can also occur in Python, but you're unlikely to find this kind of bug in Rust.

Could this bug have occurred with a programming language that isn't C? Yes. Could this bug have been avoided by using a programming language that isn't C? Also yes.

[0]: https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2025-0665.html
by Squossifrage | 2025-04-07 09:31:31+00:00
Info-Zip Unzip 6.00 was released in 2009 and has not been updated since. Most Linux distros (and Apple) just ship that 15-plus-year-old code with their own patches on top to fix bugs and improve compatibility with still-maintained but non-free (or less-free) competing implementations. Unfortunately, while the Info-Zip license is pretty liberal when it comes to redistribution and patching, it makes it hard to fork the project; furthermore, anyone who wanted to do so would face the difficult decision of either dropping or trying to continue to support dozens of legacy platforms. Therefore, nobody has stepped up to take charge and unify the many wildly disparate mini-forks.
by kkfx | 2025-04-07 09:33:11+00:00
Not too related but... Did you ever tried to imaging a world where computing is back to interconnected desktops/homeservers? Well, if you see trends like {fog,edge}-computing or recent ideas to distributed LLM computing (BrianknowsAI DCI Network for instance) it's clear that giants well known they can't keep up the modern mainframe model preferring to makes users paying the iron and bandwidth while they handle the software stack.

Now it's clear the new deal could be implemented only in homes/sheds with domestic p.v. and storage, smart cities keeps to fail since the ancient Fordlandia, see Neom, Songdo, Masdar, PlanIT Valley, Lavasa, Ordos, Santander city, Toronto Quayside (Google Sidewalk Labs), Amazon HQ2, Egypt new Cairo still nameless, Modi's Indian 100-smart city program, Arkadag, Innopolis, Nusantara, Proton City, ... and can't be powered with a smart-grid at such scale.

So well, new well insulated buildings, with ventilation of course, with p.v. and storage, with room for a domestic rack(s), with FTTH. Anyone with such settlements could have his/her own "datacenter" at home, following the same trend for medical devices more and more cheaper and smaller. A LOM? Well a NanoKVM PCIe or an external JetKVM cost MUCH less than classic LOM and do much more. We have all the gear to makes such "datacenter at home" assemblies, anyone holding preferred crap and participating in distributed computing networks to pay at least a bit gear and bandwidth.

It's not for all of course, some will be trapped in dense cities while some large owner dream an obviously not possible conversion from offices to apartments and datacenters like https://finance.yahoo.com/news/southern-californias-hottest-... or https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/29/madrid-to-convert-u... and https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/05/office-to-ho... or https://czechdaily.cz/half-of-pragues-office-buildings-are-a... etc for all over the developed world. That's while we admit https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2304099120 we need a full-remote DISTRIBUTED shift.

Food, meds, general retail distributed by a single integrated logistic platform for maximum efficiency in a spread society, the IT evolution makes Distributism possible.

Doing so erase the big amount of concentrated energy, dense network, heat handling and water problem of datacenter and also reduce much the crap, because anyone keep it's own personal and being not free keeping it they'll learn to be storage continuous.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-07 09:33:25+00:00
That's an interesting benchmark. It feels like it tests skills that are very relevant to digital assistants, story writing and role play.

Some thoughts about the setup:

- the setup seems to give reasoning models an inherent advantage because only they have a private plan and a public text in the same output. I feel like giving all models the option to formulate plans and keep track of other players inside <think> or <secret> tags would level the playing field more.

- from personal experience with social tasks for LLMs it helps both reasoning and non-reasoning LLMs to explicitly ask them to plan their next steps, in a way they are assured is kept hidden from all other players. That might be a good addition here either before or after the public subround

- the individual rounds are pretty short. Humans would struggle to coordinate in so few exchanges with so few words. If this was done for context limitations, asking models to summarize the game state from their perspective, then giving them only the current round, the previous round and their own summary of the game before that might be a good strategy.

It would be cool to have some code to play around with to test how changes in the setup change the results. I guess it isn't that difficult to write, but it's peculiar to have the benchmark but no code to run it yourself
by autoexec | 2025-04-07 09:34:17+00:00
Because most companies don't care about their employees. Many of America's largest private employers like Amazon and Walmart have extremely high turnover, so it's no wonder people are looking for a more stable employer. Government workers are far more likely to be unionized which means they can get better working conditions and actual pensions. Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.

Any company could have a reputation for treating employees so well that people want to work there and stick around until they retire, but they usually don't because screwing over their employees makes them more money. Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else.
by defrost | 2025-04-07 09:34:59+00:00
> But even as a tech professional, I would expect at least one dedicated official to be watching the channel for compliance.

The group already had the supposed who's who of dedicated security professionals .. as appointed by Trump admin, of course.

Vice President JD Vance, senior White House staff, three Cabinet secretaries, and the directors of two Intelligence Community agencies.

Oh, and Marco Rubio .. the actual "acting archivist of the United States" responsible for ensuring that such conversation chains are preserved for posterity and not auto discarded on Signal.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...

Speaking from an allied five eyes perspective .. it was an amateur hour clown show of epic proportions.

Followed up by Trump trashing America’s intelligence capability on the say so of a far-right conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-07 09:35:35+00:00
Yes, Apple themselves, apparently folks wanting Apple to use Rust don't read Apple's documentation or watch talks done by Apple compiler developers.

> Swift was designed from the outset to be safer than C-based languages, and eliminates entire classes of unsafe code.

-- https://www.swift.org/about/

> Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics.

-- https://developer.apple.com/swift/

"Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases"

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

"So we feel pretty strongly, obviously at Apple our sucessor language is Swift and I am here to talk about features of Swift, both to try to sell you on to it, but also to talk about the things we think are pretty necessary and the ways in which a programming language can support, you know, clear code, safer and more correct code."

"Like I said before, Apple has always intended for Swift to be a sucessor language for all of our predecessors, from the top to the bottom of our stack, accessible to novices, powerful enough for experts, it is real a tall order.

From https://youtu.be/lgivCGdmFrw?t=1996 to https://youtu.be/lgivCGdmFrw?t=2042

"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQc9-seU-5k
by hansmayer | 2025-04-07 09:35:37+00:00
I get your point at the basic level, but as engineers and managers, we need to stop this nonsense. Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies ? Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work. What's the value such busywork managers are adding, besides the anti-value of layers of explanatory communication and wasted time? The busywork folks should be working to understand where their salaries are coming from, not the engineers. Note that I am not saying all managers are useless (its also a part of my job), it's the people-and-ideas-managers who are useless in the technical setting. The point about technical debt should be a non-issue, why the hell would you have to explain that the technical debt is a bad thing? Did we not clear this issue many times over and establish zero technical debt as an engineering ideal a long time ago? Well it is because some person with 1/4 of your experience and competence somehow got lucky and talked themselves into one or two hierarchical positions above you. We need to start a pushback across the industry and stop allowing former accountants and humanist science graduates into "leadership" roles in IT.
by wg0 | 2025-04-07 09:37:11+00:00
Unlike many - I find author's complaints on the dot.

Once all the AI batch startups have sold subscriptions to the cohort and there's no more further market growth because businesses outside don't want to roll the dice on a probabilistic model that doesn't have an understanding of pretty much anything rather is a clever imitation machine on the content it has seen, the AI bubble will burst when more statups would start packing up by end of 2026 or max 2027.
by thebigjewbowski | 2025-04-07 09:37:27+00:00
> the list of US trading partners is dominated by less than a dozen trading blocks: EU, Mexico, Canada, ASEAN, China. That's it.

ASEAN countries are eager to make a deal. The USMCA deal is still in tact with Mexico and Canada.

> The EU, which thanks to the Trump administration is already scrambling to prepare for a war with Russia, is excluding the US from supplying them arms. This is the extent to which these trading blocks are going to shed ties with the US.

Germany is in an energy crisis and a few other members are close to a sovereign debt crisis. Domestic production of weapons will be tough and expensive. The EU’s plan to sell bonds to pursue war with Russia looks horrid. They’re in no position to be in a trade war. In a few months time when this reality sinks in, they will have to make a trade deal and remove US tariffs.
by SpaceNugget | 2025-04-07 09:37:30+00:00
(Atomic) Reference Counted structs. They count their own references, there is no external mechanism tracking all of the reference counts at runtime. Modern rust does not include a garbage collector. You might be confusing a garbage collector with the general concept of memory management, which is a feature of (AFAIK) every high level language. Many C projects also have reference counted structs, but a reference count and a call to malloc/free doesn't quite qualify as garbage collection to most developers.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-07 09:37:49+00:00
Currently we're observing a "normal" panic sell-off. This has nothing to do with what's happened in 2008, at this point it is more similar to the dotcom bubble burst or 2020 (market sell-off).

One might go even further and say that this crash is over-due and somewhat preditable. This doesn't put banks in immediate danger.
by volleyball | 2025-04-07 09:39:15+00:00
>Herzl’s zionism is simply a belief that Jewish people should buy land and live in their ancestral homeland.

Right...

"We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country ... The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." - diaryentry from Herzl's diary 1895

> He wasn’t orthodox, didn’t believe God promised anything to anyone

Back then, most of the Orthodox were anti-zionists.

I dont know why you brought up Herzl anyway, since he died in 1905 and was not as representative of the modern state of Israel as compared to its other founders like David Ben-Gurion, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Shamir.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/03/israel1
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-07 09:39:23+00:00
I've had similar training back in the day. This was when my employer (Nokia) was making Linux based phones and they needed to educate their engineers on what was and wasn't legally dodgy to stay out of trouble. Gplv2 was OK with permission (with appropriate measures to limit its effect). Particularly with Java, you had to be aware of the so-called classpath exception Sun added to make sure things like dynamic linking of jar files would not get you into trouble. Permissive licenses like Apache 2.0, MIT, and BSD were not considered a problem. GPLv3 was simply a hard no. You'd get no permission to use it, contribute to it, etc.

Apple, Nokia, and many other large companies, employ lawyers that advice them to steer clear of things like GPLv3. The history of that particular license is that it tried to make a few things stricter relative to GPLv2 which unintentionally allowed for things like commercial Linux distributions mixing closed and open source. That's why Android exists and is Linux based, for example. That could not have happened without the loopholes in GPLv2. In a way that was a happy accident and definitely not what the authors of that license had in mind when they wrote the GPL.

It's this intention that is the problem. GPLv3 might fail to live up to its intentions in some respects because of untested (in court), ambiguous clauses, etc. like its predecessor. But the intention is clearly against the notion of mixing proprietary and OSS code. Which, like it or not, is what a lot of big companies do for a living. So, Apple is respecting licenses like this by keeping anything tainted by it at arms length and just not dealing with it.
by dcminter | 2025-04-07 09:39:41+00:00
> "Wider code is harder to read. Period. "

That's stated as if it were proven, and I can believe that it has enough basis in fact that one might choose to enforce it, but I don't believe it's universally true.

I do often see code subject to a line-length linting enforcement that I think would have been clearer not broken up across multiple lines.

Personally I prefer a linter with escape hatches so that you can declare "this line exempt from such and such a rule" if you have enough reason for it and are willing to take the fight to the pull request :D
by vintermann | 2025-04-07 09:42:26+00:00
Ideologies, in the usual sense, are just thinking systematically and critically about what you want and why.

Some people don't like to look to closely at that. This is understandable. I think it relates to what Popper called "the strain of civilization". Knowing that here are countless people out there who don't know you, don't care about you, and worst of all, don't care about the things that are most deeply meaningful to you.

Everyone who's not completely oblivious, feels that strain. And rejecting "ideologies" is one way to cope. One of the three basic ways.
by rikroots | 2025-04-07 09:43:21+00:00
You can achieve a gaussian blur effect using an infinite impulse response thing[1]. Some very clever people at IBM came up with the idea, and some other very clever people translated that code to Javascript and stuck it on GitHub for the rest of the world to use[2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_impulse_response

[2] - https://github.com/nodeca/glur
by Grazester | 2025-04-07 09:44:35+00:00
I have nothing to add but this commercial from 1997/1998 that played very often when watching CNET on tv(Sci-fi channel)

I loved the commercial and get nostalgic watching it now.

https://youtu.be/rRAhCCGb7BY?si=UtRbsD6Pnwpb2Kpo