MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-11 16:54:39+00:00
Is it about intelligence or just not being used to/having time for learning a different paradigm?

I personally have used LISP a lot. It was a little rough at first, but I got it. Despite having used a lot of languages, it felt like learning programming again.

I don't think there's something special about me that allowed me to grok it. And if that were the case, that's a horrible quality in a language. They're not supposed to be difficult to use.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-11 16:54:43+00:00
Sure, but in terms of absolute number of packages that are truly reproducible, they outnumber Debian because Debian only targets reproducibility for a smaller fraction of total packages & even there they're not 100%. I haven't been able to find reliable numbers for Fedora on how many packages they have & in particular how many this 99% is targeting.

By any conceivable metric Nix really is ahead of the pack.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nix, Fedora, Debian etc. I just recognize that Nix has done a lot of hard work in this space & Fedora + Debian jumping onto this is in no small part thanks to the path shown by Nix.
by notahacker | 2025-04-11 16:54:47+00:00
That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire a lot of people that way themselves...

Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big Consultancy to do better at all. (sure, if you want to spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but if you're in that position you're not really competing with expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments based on individual skillset)
by billy99k | 2025-04-11 16:54:52+00:00
This is probably better when you're young. I'm in my 40s and it takes me some time to get over being squashed in a small seat on a plane with a bunch of other people.

I won't even travel on low-cost airlines anymore because my experience has been so horrible.

However, I used to do this all the time when I was in my 20s. I lived in Asia for awhile and would frequently take cheap flights on the weekend for fun.
by raincom | 2025-04-11 16:55:43+00:00
A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such clearances? People with less history. So, young college graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting 100% on top of what these people get paid.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-11 16:56:42+00:00
Right. When I was working in China, I was only making about half as much as I do now at Google. The gap is much smaller for SWEs, even my local colleagues weren't making much less than I did. China is definitely an upper middle-income country, officially and just by looking at the numbers. They are breaking into being a lower high-income country next, and the graph really isn't slowing down.

But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
by bbor | 2025-04-11 16:56:46+00:00
I definitely think you’re touching on some exciting possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there was a foundational language model we’re involved, it might be reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they’re really there — that is what it’s designed to do, after all!

Re:”lots of work”, I think you’re misunderstanding the quotes a bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic positions for each call type—or, in other words, ran a prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. Collecting the CSV data in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that’s more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren’t known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)
by waynenilsen | 2025-04-11 16:57:01+00:00
The only reason that I'm sharing this is because there is a gem at the end. From the transcript

44:26 its responses but it's incredible it is incredible related to that and sort of last question in some sense this whole 44:33 effort which was hugely expensive in terms of people and time and dollars and everything else was an experiment to 44:41 further validate that the scaling laws keep going and why and turns out they do and they 44:48 probably keep going for a long time um I accept scaling laws like I accept quantum mechanics or something but they 44:54 still don't like I still don't know why like why should that be a property of the universe so why are scaling laws a 45:01 property of the universe

you want I can I can take a stab well the the fact that more compression will lead to more 45:07 intelligence that has this very strong philosophical grounding so the question is why does training bigger models for 45:15 longer give you more compression and there are a lot of theories here 45:20 there's the one I like is that the the relevant concepts are sort of uh sparse 45:27 in the in the the data of the world and in particularly it's is a power law so 45:34 that the like the hundth uh most important concept appears in one out of 45:39 a hundred of the documents or or whatever so there's long tales does that mean that

if we make a perfect data set 45:44 and figure out very data efficient algorithms i mean can go home it it means that there's potentially 45:50 exponential compute wins on the table to be very s sophisticated about your choice of data but but basically when 45:59 you just scoop up data passively you're going to require 10xing your compute and your 46:07 data to to get the next constant number of things in that tail and there's just that tail keeps 46:14 going it's long you keep you can keep uh mining it although as you alluded to you 46:22 can probably do a lot better

i think that's a good place to leave it 46:28 thank you guys very much that was fun yeah thank you
by rdtsc | 2025-04-11 16:57:30+00:00
> I'd note that these are the same folks asserting people with no criminal records are convicted criminals.

Oh of course, 100%

However when it comes to visa cancellations, from what I understand one is at the mercy of the port of entry officials. Any re-entry with that kind of a visa can trigger a review and the visa may be cancelled for a variety of reasons, not all criminal or proven criminal. I am not saying that's bad or good, it's just how the system works.

The next step is the person usually has to exit the US and re-apply for a visa. So procedurally she should have been put on a plane to Russia. But knowing what Russia looks like they asked her if she should be threatened there so she ended up in a detention center instead.

Like I mentioned in another comment, this was huge mistake from her employee to 1) send her any where, re-entries with these visas should be minimized, especially these days 2) asked her to bring any embryos or any such things.
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-11 16:58:13+00:00
I think they were designed at the time of less powerful machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and developers are pushed to focus on features first without being given time to refine performance because features mean adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep designing more powerful machines which further enables the bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-11 16:58:15+00:00
I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.

There's evidence that language first evolved as a capacity for processing the outside world internally - your inner voice, if you will. The ability to synthesize any idea about things you can and can not see or even ever experience. The speaking and communicative part of it may have actually arisen secondarily, as evidenced by the fact that "language" does not have to be spoken - it can be expressed in many different mediums.

Communication and language are not one in the same. Language is a means of communication, but it also so much more than that.

I found the book Why Only Us by Chomsky and Berwick to a be a great introduction to the topic.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-11 16:58:28+00:00
Seems like world class acoustics are being forgotten about and not being invested in. A lot of ink has been spilled about the famous underground Columbia Records vaults for recording and applying reverb. But that building has been in renovation purgatory for years now with gutted interiors and an empty parking lot. So clearly those exquisite vaults aren’t so in demand if they are even still used.
by wonderwonder | 2025-04-11 16:58:41+00:00
They absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to. Their silence is consent in this case. You can attribute that silence to active support or cowardice but either way they can stop it and don't so they approve of it.

"In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions." Not sure if you have taken a look at Britain lately but they absolutely don't care about what the citizens want.
by projectazorian | 2025-04-11 16:58:45+00:00
> They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.

The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize" federal employees so the number of these people is likely dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick wall one too many times that private sector job starts to look a lot more appealing.
by c-hendricks | 2025-04-11 16:58:52+00:00
> if you want to, for example, have a backend API and a frontend SPA running at the same time talking to eachother on your machine

Won't `localhost:3000` and `localhost:3001` also both be secure contexts? Just starting a random vite project, which opens `locahost:3000`, `window.isSecureContext` returns true.
by yibg | 2025-04-11 16:58:55+00:00
In addition, by definition if the only way to bring manufacturing back to the US is by putting up import barriers, it means US manufacturing isn't competitive, domestically or globally.

Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
by kjs3 | 2025-04-11 16:59:07+00:00
Energy from tidal heating is a thing for Jovian/Saturnian moons (see Io for a particularly extreme example), so there is a possibility of a 'steady input of energy' that's neither solar nor dependent on residual core heat. I mean, something is keeping that water liquid. I fully confess to not knowing how significant for life that is on Titan (and I guess noone else is sure, either).
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-11 16:59:11+00:00
This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates, regardless of their own costs.

Consultancies have never saved the government money.

US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects.

The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.

Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
by mhink | 2025-04-11 16:59:17+00:00
Absolutely. I remember being about 14 or 15 years old, reading old .txt files about, like- how to build blue boxes and experiment with the phone system, C programming tutorials for MUDs that had peaked in the late 90s, IRC archives (even though IRC was still around, I had no way of finding my way to good channels), and getting this distinct sense that I had just missed something really cool, and was stuck with an Internet that had already passed its prime.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-11 16:59:36+00:00
the vast majority of economists agree that there is simply not enough income among the wealthy that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy. i favor raising taxes on the wealthy significantly, but there are also hard truths about tax receipts and current spending.

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/taxes-and-mandatory-...
by BigGreenJorts | 2025-04-11 16:59:43+00:00
Love How to sell drug online (fast), surprised to see it listed here tho 'cause I've never heard anyone talk about it. Considering it got 4 seasons, it must be popular tho.

And yeah, Bridgerton, Wednesday, Emily in Paris, and 3 Body Problem each certainly take their moment at least in my circles.
by bbor | 2025-04-11 17:00:11+00:00
This is a lively debate in linguistics, so while it’s not objectively true (i.e. it depends on how you want to use the word), it’s much more justified than you’re implying here. As others have said, it’s about distinguishing the kind of communication humans do from simple animal communication — a common hook for this topic is the fun fact that “chimpanzees can learn sign language, but they’ve never asked a question”. It’s somewhat analogous to how animal communication can be seen as categorically distinct from simple signaling done by flowers, scent markers, etc.

I’m in a bit of a rush but suffice to say that Chomsky is probably the best champion of the “language is compositional” view, or as he puts it, “language is the generation of an infinite range of meaningful outputs from a finite range of inputs”. There’s dozens of great, layperson-friendly talks of his on this topic on YouTube, for anyone who’s curious!
by VariousPrograms | 2025-04-11 17:00:23+00:00
The value of entertainment has gone down since the 90s. Inflation isn’t the only consideration. I don’t pay $15 for a movie ticket or CD anymore because 2 hours of video entertainment is basically free now and artists upload their tracks online.

That said, it’s Mario Kart and decades of price history of Sega Genesis games doesn’t matter. People will still pay whatever for Mario Kart.
by whalesalad | 2025-04-11 17:00:29+00:00
I disagree. Interfaces are a trivial concept that can get bolted-on to any language. Even in languages without an official interface construct, you can replicate them in the program space.

The BEAM succeeds because you can run 1M processes on a single node, represent complex distributed state machines with ease, and restart portions of the system with zero downtime. Among many other things.

I really don't think behaviors/interfaces is the most critical piece.
by fer | 2025-04-11 17:00:53+00:00
I have something worse. One morally questionable video popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their disability for engagement.

I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock.

Big mistake.

For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.

At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.
by pc86 | 2025-04-11 17:01:58+00:00
Employers want the degree because it's supposed to verify that you have a certain set of knowledge and/or skills, or at the very least, you're capable of thought to the extent required to get that degree. That's the only reason they want it.

Student being unable to unwilling to learn that knowledge or acquire those skills should mean they don't get that degree, they don't get those jobs, and they go work in fast food or a warehouse.

"Just give them the degree" is quite literally the worst possible solution to the problem.
by jijijijij | 2025-04-11 17:02:11+00:00
Does anyone else feel seriously... demotivated(?) by these reckless games with the economy? Like, it's really getting to me. It's a new quality of helplessness seeing these shenanigans in my books. More tangible, raw, direct. Much more insulting. My job, the financial security I've been working for hard, honest struggle, if a handful of people can at will gamble with all of that like it means nothing at all, then why the fuck bother? Why should I get my ass up, if some entitled rich fuck can wipe away years of work and sacrifice for some blatant inside trades with their homies? I mean, for them it's just funny numbers, for me it's life changing money and existential security. I don't know, man. I feel like a fucking peasant.
by mhnthrow | 2025-04-11 17:02:20+00:00
> Now the only "correct" way is a slew of media queries to set some designer's idea of the font for every possible viewport size.

Nested H1s was never semantically correct in the first place, at least for accessibility purposes.

You can do flexible sizes without media queries (eg, viewport size units + clamp). Designers generally understand the web pretty well these days.

I only see one situation where people might have depended on these styles, but it's a big one - anywhere that you output the plain HTML of a "rich text" component from a CMS or whatever. There, if the stakes are low, it might not have been a big deal to just let the browser do it and headings might look too big sometimes now.
by bumby | 2025-04-11 17:02:21+00:00
>Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea.

The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-11 17:02:56+00:00
I agree that "properly working lambda expressions were only available in Lisp until recently" is perfectly idiomatic, but easily misunderstood, English. I believe that the suggested fix "properly working lambda expressions were only available in Lisp since recently," which is what I was responding to, is not idiomatic. Claims about what is and isn't idiomatic aren't really subject to definitive proof either way, but it doesn't matter, because the suggester now agrees that it is not what was meant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43653723).
by skmurphy | 2025-04-11 17:03:00+00:00
Key points:

Timothy Gallwey’s “Inner Game of Tennis” came out in 1974 and sparked a revolution in coaching and how athletes should approach improving their performance. Entrepreneurs can use several lessons to improve their personal performance and coach others.

The inner game is about self-mastery. And the path to self-mastery starts with humility because the humble are willing to observe and listen. As Wynton Marsalis observed: “the humble improve.” This is a tough challenge for any entrepreneur. You have to have the courage of your convictions in starting a new business, but you have to be alert to what you can learn by observing and listening to prospects, customers, partners, competitors, employees, and others.

The Usual Way of Learning:

+ Criticize or Judge Past Behavior

+ Tell Yourself to Change, Instructing with Word Commands Repeatedly

+ Try Hard; Make Yourself Do It Right

+ Critical Judgment about Results Leading to Repetition of Process

The Inner Came Way of Learning

+ Observe Existing Behavior

+ Ask Yourself to Change, Programming with Image and Feel. No commands are used.

+ Let it Happen!

+ Nonjudgmental, Calm Observation of the Results: Leading to Continuing Observation of Process until Behavior Is Automatic.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-11 17:03:31+00:00
You're being way too generous about the values they're trying to set. If it were about "people who value outcome over process", they would have done cuts in a way that keep those type of people, and programs that already have good outcomes.

Instead they just cut everything uncritically, because the outcome they want is for nothing to work.

And the value they want in the remaining people is personal loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to the law or expertise in their job.
by w10-1 | 2025-04-11 17:03:45+00:00
> How can having a comprehensive understanding of your infrastructure/stack be a weakness exactly?

Weakness in the inverse: not being ready to change to new code, because you have a clear and distinct understanding of the old, and an uncertain take on the new. In that case, even if the new were better objectively, it would be discounted for you by uncertainty.

Conversely, if you understand something complex deeply and newbies don't, to them something that's easy to understand (but defers problems your stack solves) is preferable, and you end up with culture and governance issues. Managers who are relatively ignorant then set up competitions to surface issues, validate claims, and develop alternatives to mitigate their reliance risks on employees.

So: move fast and forget things, and expect a fight :)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-11 17:03:52+00:00
Seems like when they buy a new engine now its never your bog standard diesel ladder truck. Its some hybrid or electric beast that looks like a hot wheels designer made it. I can’t imagine that is saving money over a simple diesel truck platform but I can understand why its worth paying that cost too as these old trucks are certainly unpleasant to anyone near them in noise, smell, or air quality.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-11 17:03:59+00:00
> The U.S. still leads in producing top AI models—but China is closing the performance gap.

Most researchers that I know do not think about things in this lens. They think about building cool things with smart people, and if those people happen to be Chinese or French or Canadian it doesn’t matter.

Most people do not want a war (hot or cold) with the world’s only manufacturing superpower. It feels like we have been incepted into thinking it’s inevitable. It’s not.

In the other hand, if in some nationalistic AI race with China the US decides to get serious about R&D on this front, it will be good for me. I don’t want it though.