MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trod1234 | 2025-04-15 23:51:32+00:00
This is quite accurate historically and runs parallel with what other historian's are saying such as Heather Cox Richardson.

The post makes a good case for why everyone should be preparing, and resisting. This sums up and shows a good difference between the "rule of law" which is what happens when the constitution is followed and defended, and a "rule by law", where exemptions as mentioned are made.

Social Contract Theory touches on how law, a "rule of law", has a primary purpose in non-violent conflict resolution.

The failure of a legal system to meet the components of a "rule of law" at any point within it, on a regular basis (> 3 times in a short time horizon, indicates when violence naturally becomes acceptable historically.

The more it happens, the more acceptable the risk appears, and at a point those of rational mind will see the risk of doing nothing as a existential threat to survival of themselves and their children.

A short relative time horizon is dependent on the average throughput time so several instances within a 3-5 year period may objectively meet observable criteria.

Historian's don't generally speculate in the things they write, but there should be one large question being asked by everyone. What if the reason they didn't return this person is because he was cremated under Bukele, and we only think he's in a prison concentration camp because that's what they said. Food for thought.

First they come for the immigrants, then they come for you, or your children.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-15 23:52:33+00:00
Meanwhile the cost of his videos is insanely high. The "insane" price money is the smallest part of it. He has insane sets he uses for only one or a small number of videos, he has a giant staff, high quality gear and many of his videos include either challenges going on over very long timespans or involving a high number of participants, making the logistics, recording and editing of those videos challenging and time intensive. Most TV shows could only dream of doing what he does.

He started out simple, pointing a phone camera at himself counting really high, but his current channel is not a great example of a low barrier to entry. He explicitly sets himself apart by doing what other youtube creators or TV shows simply can't do
by golergka | 2025-04-15 23:53:26+00:00
> people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read

It's bad that this need exists. However, introducing this feature did not create the need. And if this need exists, fulfilling it is still better, because otherwise these kind of people wouldn't get this information at all.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-15 23:53:27+00:00
Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have been 4chan users.

4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...

The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...

The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...

Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.
by codexon | 2025-04-15 23:53:59+00:00
I don't think it is out of date at all.

Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.

Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.

As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
by vortico | 2025-04-15 23:54:18+00:00
Cool! Some random requests to consider: Could the range x~y be uniform instead of 2 std dev normal (95.4%ile)? Sometimes the range of quantities is known. 95%ile is probably fine as a default though. Also, could a symbolic JS package be used instead of Monte-Carlo? This would improve speed and precision, especially for many variables (high dimensions). Could the result be shown in a line plot instead of ASCII bar chart?
by codr7 | 2025-04-15 23:54:33+00:00
I don't know how to phrase this to reach through, but you're barking up the entirely wrong tree. It's not about the CPU, it's about the level of freedom afforded by the language; how close to hardware it allows you to go, how few hoops you have to jump trough to get there.

The other approach, taken by Rust (and to some degree C++), is to nail everything to the floor and force the programmer to express a solution in a specific format that's easier to verify and make guarantees about. Which is fine.

Both approaches have their appeal, which is best depends on context.
by rhines | 2025-04-15 23:54:37+00:00
It is an unfortunate side-effect of spending too much time online I think. Or online in the wrong spaces.

Everyone has a different tolerance for dealing with unreasonable people, but there is a breaking point for each of us. And if you hit that, you will be prone to throwing your hands in the air, exiting the space where you found these people, and decrying them all to be braindead. I have hit that point multiple times and it has resulted in my making callous generalizations of people after.

It's hard to imagine that people you interact with in an online community are the vocal minority of that community, when you cannot find the silent majority. But I suppose the silent majority doesn't tend to spend time on forums for their viewpoints.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-15 23:54:47+00:00
> You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review.

It sounds like the guys in this article should not have trusted AI to go fully open loop on their customer support system. That should be well understood by all "customers" of AI. You can't trust it to do anything correctly without human feedback/review and human quality control.
by o11c | 2025-04-15 23:54:59+00:00
Old versions of GCC used to provide `-b <machine>` (and also `-V <version>`), but they were removed a long time ago in favor of expecting people to just use and set `CC` correctly.

It looks like gcc 3.3 through 4.5 just forwards to an external driver; prior to that it seems like it used the same driver for different paths, and after that it is removed.
by OisinMoran | 2025-04-15 23:55:40+00:00
This is neat! If you enjoy the write up, you might be interested in the paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” which goes even more on-depth into actually multiplying the probability density functions instead of the common point estimates. It has the somewhat surprising result that we may just be alone.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
by brokeAstronomer | 2025-04-15 23:56:24+00:00
There are fixed costs associated with running research labs and facilities. Just because private funding can (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research money is public not private.

While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.
by Arch-TK | 2025-04-15 23:56:36+00:00
Key word: "basically"

Read section 2.4 of the PDF you linked for a bit of additional information on this "bsaically".

GhostScript is a postscript interpreter which can handle PDF files by applying the relatively simple transformations described in that section of the PDF. Whether they embedded the ghostscript exploit within the PDF, or didn't, it's not particularly important for making my point.
by keernan | 2025-04-15 23:58:28+00:00
By way of editing my comment above, put another way: One third of your mothers are secretly hiding their experience suffering serious sexual abuse. And one third of your wives. And hopefully you will do something to prevent it from happening to one third of your daughters.

And a point about the shame I mentioned. The abuse we are talking about is overwhelmingly not committed by a stranger. Rather we are talking about long term ongoing abuse by a father, grandfather, uncle, or close family friend. Males who are trusted by the entire family.

And the shame that arises later in life comes from the realization that a trusted loved one (father grandfather uncle) thought so little of you to do such things.
by sapphicsnail | 2025-04-15 23:58:55+00:00
The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-15 23:59:03+00:00
There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US.

Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world?

The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
by tptacek | 2025-04-15 23:59:04+00:00
There are a couple of these concepts --- TOFU (key continuity) is one, PAKEs are another, pinning a third --- that sort of float around and captivate people because they seem easy to reason about, but are (with the exception of Magic Wormhole) not all that useful in the real world. It'd be interesting to flesh out the complete list of them.

The thing to think in comparing SSH to TLS is how frequent counterparty introductions are. New counterparties in SSH are relatively rare. Key continuity still needlessly exposes you to an grave attack in SSH, but really all cryptographic protocol attacks are rare compared to the simpler, more effective stuff like phishing, so it doesn't matter. New counterparties in TLS happen all the time; continuity doesn't make any sense there.
by aaron695 | 2025-04-16 00:00:24+00:00
Source: https://www.soyjak.st/soy/thread/10615723.html#:~:text=What%...

Kiwifarms is also discussing, links to code and griefing - https://kiwifarms (NSFW/NSFL) .st/threads/soyjak-party-the-sharty.145349/page-1468#post-21102686
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-16 00:01:13+00:00
> A Pentagon spokesperson told Politico the office’s functions would be absorbed by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAIO), the broader department it falls under.

Yeah, that's great and all, but you lost the people who can do the function. Now all you have is a department that is "over" that. But being able to competently do the function matters more than just having a spot for it on the bureaucratic org chart.
by o11c | 2025-04-16 00:01:40+00:00
Having tried writing plugins for both, I very much prefer GCC's codebase. You have to adapt to its quirks, but at least it won't pull the rug from under your feet gratuitously. There's a reason every major project ends up embedding a years-old copy of LLVM rather than just using the system version.

If you're ignoring the API and writing IR directly there are advantages to LLVM though.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-16 00:02:00+00:00
Indeed. Elixir for most things (as it steps on Erlang's excellent runtime and has hygienic macros and an an amazing ecosystem), and when performance and system footprint really matters, get out the big guns -- Rust.

I quickly fell in love with Golang... and quickly fell out of love with it as well. It's a language that is super easy to love but it just does not seem to be suited for big codebases at all.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-04-16 00:02:05+00:00
I went a decade ago (on a standard tourist visa, was easy to get but I had to plan far ahead ). It was neat, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must visit, or a top 5 Chinese destination.

The one cool thing was seeing new products at Shenzen, and then a couple months later starting to see those products in American retailers. Seeing the markup and the flow this way really opened my eyes to how the American consumer is exploited.
by kumarm | 2025-04-16 00:03:15+00:00
Pretty disappointed with content moderation on Veo2. Here are the steps I did:

1. Took a picture of me and asked to describe person in the image.

2. Used Imagegen to create the cartoon version using description.

3. Tried to use veo-2.0-generate-001 to generate video of person in image (holding a coffee cup in original image) drinking coffee and having a conversation.

Video generation is blocked by content moderation.
by Xelynega | 2025-04-16 00:04:26+00:00
That's neat, but the bitcoin whitepaper opens with:

> Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.

Why do you think you can dismiss the obvious claim that cryptocurrencies are a form of decentralized finance with a "no, it isn't"?
by Brybry | 2025-04-16 00:04:59+00:00
In the indictment[1] he's not charged with theft.

He's charged with:

1) wire fraud (the smart contracts/swap exploit)

2) unauthorized damage to a protected computer (running the exploit on the ethereum network)

3) attempted hobbs act extortion (contacting kyberswap to attempt to gain control of kyberswap in exchange for return of some of the crypto)

4) money laundering conspiracy

5) money laundering (knowingly laundering the proceeds of the previous, including paying an undercover agent to help bypass a blacklist to do so)

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1388036/dl?inline
by consumer451 | 2025-04-16 00:05:47+00:00
As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.

> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:

If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699799
by Terr_ | 2025-04-16 00:05:49+00:00
> vague, hand-wavy allegation

There's nothing "vague" about the past couple of weeks of news, court-cases, admissions, and flat-out bragging by the administration. Stop feigning ignorance.

> staking out a pro-deception stance

The real pro-deception stance is yours: Demanding that known falsehoods and propaganda be repeated verbatim.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-16 00:05:56+00:00
Don't mix up the deficit and the debt (and the internal and external debt).

US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.

I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.

Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).

As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
by chewbacha | 2025-04-16 00:06:10+00:00
Monopolies have a bone to pick with you. They aren’t generally garbage collected as their wealth becomes self-perpetuating even in the face of inefficiencies as they can continue to raise prices and push others out.

This was true during the gilded age and it’s become true again. It took systematic regulations, unions, welfare, and the Sherman antitrust act.

If it wasn’t for a democratic government the oligarchs would still have been in control. They are corrupting the current institutions thought the DOGE coup. You see this in the self dealing of the billionaires such as Musks contracts as well as the tariff exemption grift.

So please don’t flaunt a free market as a natural solution to inefficient systems, not even Adam Smith believed that.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-16 00:06:21+00:00
> I guess most of these thieves won’t respect the bit about distributing. But at least if the model leaks or whatever, the open source community can feel free to use it without any moral conflict or legal stress.

The hope is to flip the script. Sure, the company might not fulfill their full obligation under the terms and conditions they agreed to (in the same way that we all agree to these “continuing to use this site means you agree to our terms and conditions,” they are agreeing to the terms and conditions by continuing to scrape the site). But, at least if a model leaks or some pirates software that was generated by one of their LLMs, they can say, well it was open source.
by linguae | 2025-04-16 00:06:28+00:00
If you’re based in the United States, right now is a challenging time at many universities due to near- and long-term uncertainties regarding research funding given the actions taken by the current administration. Many universities have reduced graduate admissions, and some even rescinded offers to already-admitted students due to funding cuts and withholding.

In my opinion, there are a few alternative options:

1. Were you admitted to any MS/PhD programs? Graduate school is less about the ranking of the school and more about the research you accomplish while you are in school. Even if the program isn’t your dream program, you’ll still get to do research.

2. I haven’t heard of any “pre-doc” programs, but a great way to bolster your chances for PhD admissions is to earn a master’s degree and do a thesis instead of a project. This gives you an additional two years to bolster your resume and even build a publication record. In many countries outside the US, a master’s is required for PhD admissions.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-16 00:06:43+00:00
1. Whenever AI is used closed loop, with human feedback and a human checking the output for quality/hallucinations and then passing it along, it's often fine.

2. Whenever it is used totally on its own, with no humans in the loop, it's awful and shit like this happens.

Yet, every AI company seems to want to pretend we're ready for #2, they market their products as #2, they convince their C-suite customers that their companies should buy #2, and it's total bullshit--we're so far from that. AI tools can barely augment a human in the driver's seat. It's not even close to being ready to operate on its own.
by Panzer04 | 2025-04-16 00:06:56+00:00
If the government prints itself double the money supply, it has effectively made every dollar held by everyone else half as valuable.

I'm not making a value statement as to whether this is good or bad, particularly at low levels, but the fact of the matter is that if you pay for debt with money printing your are in practice taking that value from people who hold cash-denominated (ie. cash, debt etc) non-inflation-protected assets.
by hedayet | 2025-04-16 00:07:06+00:00
I've had a very good experience with Cursor on small Typescript projects.

It started hallucinating a lot as my typescript project got bigger.

I found it pretty useless in languages like Go and C++.

I ended up canceling Cursor this month. It was messing up working code, suggesting random changes, and ultimately increasing my cognitive load instead of reducing it.
by nobody9999 | 2025-04-16 00:07:36+00:00
Original title (too long for title box):

Ancient Prototaxites Don’t Belong To Any Living Lineage – Possibly A Distinct Branch of Multicellular Earth life

Previous discussion of prototaxites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713524

333 Points, 290 comments (2023)
by buildsjets | 2025-04-16 00:09:11+00:00
Watching him use a lathe to bore a cross-hole in a round rod, holding the stock completely by hand, and only relying on a v-block to prevent the stock from rotating was absolutely hair raising. Please don’t do that in your shop. (Or especially MY shop. I dislike cleaning pools of blood.) Lathes are great for removing arms, heads, and other protruding body parts. Fixture your workpiece properly.
by bredren | 2025-04-16 00:09:26+00:00
The UI on this product page does not make any sense to me. The three prompt workflows don’t stack in any obvious way, then seemingly combine on any submission to the main prompt area?

They generate independent images.

Gemini’s web interface is also way behind chatgpt and Claude. The mobile app is even worse.

This is while having the champ 2.5 pro model in the pocket.

It seems that web product resources are not getting adequate allocation to the AI group(s).
by chewbacha | 2025-04-16 00:09:28+00:00
Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion.

They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
by randomor | 2025-04-16 00:10:42+00:00
Controversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result.

Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.

Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.

At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.