MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agwa | 2025-04-19 22:12:39+00:00
Domain owners may find my CAA record generator <https://sslmate.com/caa/> useful, as it can automatically generate a CAA policy that covers all the certificates found in CT logs for your domain. It's not always obvious how to translate from issuer name to CAA domain (due to white labeled intermediates); my tool consults CCADB data to determine the correct CAA domain.
by pdonis | 2025-04-19 22:13:12+00:00
This is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather out of this, instead of recognizing "life" and "death" as approximate categories that are useful for many purposes but can break down at the edges, is just muddled thinking.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-19 22:13:50+00:00
1. The original 1787 apportionment would result in a House of Representatives of ~30k members[1].

2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in seats since ... 1910.

3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would argue in favor of two immediate changes:

- Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, benefits from regular turning.

- A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.

[1] https://thirty-thousand.org/
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-19 22:15:28+00:00
Me being forced to do tons of horrible math by my abusive grandfather at a young age for literally 4+ hours at a time gave me a few things.

1. A true hatred of work, make work, and a strong desire to defend laziness as a concept (note that Bertrand Russel agrees hard with me here!) -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Ot...

2. A love of subversives and cheating the system. Basically, the guys writing leetcode cheating software are saints in my book. All subversions of the attempt to turn society into a meritocracy (a term which was originally supposed to be a slur/negative connotation - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy) is extremely good.

3. An advanced knowledge of TI basic, so I could cheat hard on every single school assignment I could get away with. AP Chemistry? I’ve got a symbolic stoichometry solver app! Calculus? CAS system in the palm of my hand!

Play stupid games with children, win stupid prizes. Maybe don’t force them to work like little slaves in their early life, and they won’t strike back at your society systems.
by pdonis | 2025-04-19 22:15:43+00:00
I agree. I think it's telling that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is basically entirely about how all those philosophers peddled nonsense masquerading as deep thinking. For example, here's his money quote about Kant:

"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
by NoboruWataya | 2025-04-19 22:15:54+00:00
> why should everybody have to show the same level of care for everything they do/consume as aficionados

Nobody has to do this in any city I have been to. Even in the most hipstery independent coffee shops, you can still ask for a black/white coffee and they will make you one. And if you simply can't stomach the independent coffee shop there is most likely a Starbucks or Pret next door.

Granted I have not been to Iran, and am loathe to make assumptions about countries I have not experienced, but I simply do not believe that OP cannot find a "basic" coffee in his city.
by froh | 2025-04-19 22:16:50+00:00
thanks for the link. and the section in controversy is really worth reading for nuance and thoughtful conversation.

the humans with intersex conditions themselves object the term, as it tags them as sick, a "disease". their personal experience based political interventions have lead to the prohibition of cosmetic surgeries on genitals of minors, or forced hormonal sex assignment on minors, in several European countries that is. so they can decide on their own when they are old enough. that's all the personally affected humans ask for, for the next generation: let them be as they are and allow them to decide on their own.
by twodave | 2025-04-19 22:17:35+00:00
Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling down or backing off has had any impact. She has absolutely no interest in math. But the kid reads faster than I do, which is not slow at all.

The only thing I know about kids after having adopted 4 of them is that none of them are alike. The only time when you can really train them to do anything consistently is when they are babies. As a result all 4 have great sleep habits :)
by anon373839 | 2025-04-19 22:17:46+00:00
> Keeping off weight after a diet requires near superhuman control.

No. This is wrong.

Keeping weight off requires retraining your habits and relationship with food so that it becomes natural and even enjoyable to stay healthy. It also may require addressing some emotional and psychological issues that are keeping you stuck.

The path to that point may be challenging (not always!), but it is simply false that you must exert “superhuman control” forever to keep your progress. In fact, the opposite is true: if you view yourself in an adversarial posture with your diet, and are relying on willpower to “win”, then you are likely to fail because nobody can deprive themselves forever.

Circling back to that 80/20 statistic: I think it’s evidence that most people are not approaching this problem in the right way. And part of the problem, in my opinion, is defeatist beliefs like the ones I am criticizing here.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-19 22:17:56+00:00
I didn’t. Why do you feel compelled to engage in “both sides” fallacy?

The Spanish Empire killed about 55M people or 90% of the indigenous population in a hundred years. That’s a scale of slaughter and suffering unprecedented even by the murderous ways of modern society, greater than even the Roman slaughter in Gaul.

Why is it so difficult for you to imagine that perhaps some of those 50 million people perhaps knew something? We’ll never know for sure, as everyone was killed and most aspects of their societies were destroyed.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-19 22:17:57+00:00
> California could make this change by referendum.

No, it could not, because Article I, Section 3 (emphasis added): "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators." (the last part of that about choosing Senators has its effect eliminated by the 17th Amendment, but that isn't important here.)

And Congress has exercised its authority in U.S. Code Title 2, Section 2c (emphasis added): "In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section 2a(a) of this title, there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress)."
by sfilipov | 2025-04-19 22:19:24+00:00
Worth mentioning that virtual nodes also ensure that the order of servers is random. Which helps when a server is removed - the keys that need to be moved will be spread across all other servers. If we were to evenly chop up the hash ring, server B will always be after server A. And when we remove server A, all keys residing on it will need to be moved exclusively to server B.
by II2II | 2025-04-19 22:20:30+00:00
You're a developer who devoted time to develop a piece of software. You discover that you are not generating any income from it: few people can even find it in the sea of similar apps, few of those are willing to pay for it, and those who are willing to pay for it are not willing to pay much. To make matters worse, you're going to lose a cut of what is paid to the middlemen who facilitate the transaction.

Is that greed?

I can find many reasons to be critical of that developer, things like creating a product for a market segment that is saturated, and likely doing so because it is low hanging fruit (both conceptually and in terms of complexity). I can be critical of their moral judgement for how they decided to generate income from their poor business judgment. But I don't thinks it's right to automatically label them as greedy. They may be greedy, but they may also be trying to generate income from their work.
by maccard | 2025-04-19 22:20:48+00:00
> I’ve already had to spend hours at work tracking down bugs that ending up being in there because someone just blindly accepted the code an LLM wrote, I fear it’s only going to get worse

And I’ve also had to spend hours at work tracking down badly copy pasted stack overflow code, or from other places in the codebase that didn’t do what the programmer thought it did. A shitty carpenter will build a shitty staircase whether they have a chisel or a dremel
by ein0p | 2025-04-19 22:21:38+00:00
This is a known issue. You have to power up your SSDs (and flash cards, which are based on even more flimsy/cost optimized version of the same tech) every now and then for them to keep data. SSDs are not suitable for long term cold storage or archiving. Corollary: don't lose that recovery passphrase you've printed out for your hardware crypto key, the flash memory in it is also not eternal.
by AndrewOMartin | 2025-04-19 22:22:30+00:00
I learned about this from YouTuber Angela Collier recently and, not too take anything away from the thesis of their video or from your point, a longer video of the same event shows Bezos giving Shatner his undivided attention immediately after the shorter video ends.

Longer video here: https://cosmicperspective.com/william-shatner-overview-effec...
by ben_w | 2025-04-19 22:23:20+00:00
Once we can control fully developed adult brains, at the level you're suggesting for this thought experiment, that power will force us to reconsider criminality as a mental health issue — even if the personality disorders leading to criminality happen to be harder to fix in adults than boosting of IQ.

But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.

At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".

But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.

I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:

> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.

- http://web.archive.org/web/20080509070613/http://www.swampfo...

Silly is fine :)
by bear8642 | 2025-04-19 22:23:40+00:00
Probably, especially given the boom of GPU/Tensor computing.

You might find Stefan Kruger's book useful: https://xpqz.github.io/learnapl/intro.html or his write up of the APL Cultivations (https://xpqz.github.io/cultivations/Intro.html)

Not sure where best to start with J, although finding it interesting reading through the Dictionary (https://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/contents.htm) and seeing how it compares to APL
by rvz | 2025-04-19 22:23:53+00:00
> Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement.

I think it is. He is certainly a great AI researcher / scientist, but not really a software engineer.

> It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

So is that the future of software engineering? "Accept all changes", "Copy paste stuff", "It mostly works" and little to no tests whatsoever as that is what "Vibe coding" is.

Would you yourself want vibe-coded software that is in highly critical systems such as in aeroplanes, hospitals, or in energy infrastructure?

I don't think so.
by vinnymac | 2025-04-19 22:24:03+00:00
This is especially true for script kiddies, which is why I am so thankful for https://e18e.dev/

AI is making this worse than ever though, I am constantly having to tell devs that their work is failing to meet requirements, because AI is just as bad as a junior dev when it comes to reaching for a dependency. It’s like we need training wheels for the prompts juniors are allowed to write.
by bokoharambe | 2025-04-19 22:24:04+00:00
The real question is, what is it that you're so afraid of with gender/sexuality that you think it makes sense to show some expressions of it but not others? Sexual norms change regardless of what is officially considered normative and regardless of what is repressed, so you must know you're fighting a losing battle. So who or what is it exactly that you're fighting for? I think it has more to do with yourself than with children.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-19 22:24:26+00:00
The problem domain is part of the solution domain: writing a good specification and tests is a skill.

Moreover, I suspect the second kind of quality won't completely go away: a smart machine will develop new techniques to organize its code (making it "neat and clear" to the machine), which may resemble human techniques. I wouldn't bet much on it, but maybe even, buried within the cryptic code output by a machine, there will be patterns resembling popular design patterns.

Brute force can get results faster than careful planning, but brute force and planning gets results faster than both. AI will keep being optimized (even if one day it starts optimizing itself), and organization is presumably a good optimization.

Furthermore: LLMs think differently than humans, e.g. they seem to have much larger "context" (analogous to short-term memory) but their training (analogous to long-term memory) is immutable. Yet there are similarities as demonstrated in LLM responses, e.g. they reason in English, and reach conclusions without understanding the steps they took. Assuming this holds for later AIs, the structures those AIs organize their code into to make it easier to understand, probably won't be the structures humans would create, but they'll be similar.

Although a different type of model and much smaller, there's evidence of this in auto-encoders: they work via compression, which is a form of organization, and the weights roughly correspond to human concepts like specific numbers (MNIST) or facial characteristics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VAkrUNLKSo&t=352).
by rasz | 2025-04-19 22:25:31+00:00
In 1985 CoCom, organization controlling export of military tech and assessing possibility of using specific civilian technologies for military purposes, relaxed rules allowing 8-bit computers to go thru.

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/316764-computer-export-to-...

Still all computers with a power exceeding 8 bits, software for computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), software related to sound and image processing and artificial intelligence, as well as software used for testing computer technology were still strictly prohibited.

There were personal computers in Poland before 1985, all smuggled and illegal. Just like owning Dollars, Deutsche Marks and Pounds was illegal yet there was whole chain of official Pewex shops accepting exclusively those currencies. Poland was weird like that.

Klaudiusz Dybowski was chief of Commodore corner in Bajtek. Interview:

"Wywiad z Klaudiuszem Dybowskim" by (Atari Online PL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IC7zYjrSxo

50:40 timestamp is where he talks how he got his own Commodore 64 into Poland in late 1984 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IC7zYjrSxo&t=3043

>"natomiast Musiałem zostawić sprzęt w urzedzie celnym, bo zglosilem ze przywiozlem komputer, "musi pan to zostawic, teraz musi pan napisac podanie o zezwolenie na posiadanie komputera i wwiezienie go do Polski", i mam to podanie, napisalem je, mam do tego [....] od Zarządu Ruchu Lotniczego i Lotnisk Komunikacyjnych dostalem takie poparcie "bardzo prosimy zeby mozna to bylo wwiesc, komputer bedzie sluzyl do obliczen prodedur itd" i to zanioslem, poczekalem 2 tygodnie i komputer odebralem

>"However, I had to leave the equipment at the customs office, because I reported entering with a computer, "you must leave it with us, now you have to write an application for license to import and own a computer", and I still have this application, I wrote it .... from Zarząd Ruchu Lotniczego i Lotnisk Komunikacyjnych (name of company managing Polish airports at the time, his employer) I received such support "requesting to grant permission, computer will be used for the calculations of airport procedures etc." and I took it, I waited 2 weeks and I received the computer

So as you see even Bajtek chief had to have a license to own mere C64.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-19 22:27:44+00:00
Previously (20+16+10+15 points, 4+0+5+2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43720535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43729896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733560

Related: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025 (148 points, 4 months ago, 133 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42554008
by ogogmad | 2025-04-19 22:29:11+00:00
Raising kids is hard. Sad. And what do I know about it? Regardless, parents do need to get involved in their children's education. For instance, they should help their children prepare for entry exams into secondary school. This shouldn't take their child 4 hours a day. Maybe 10 minutes on some days, and 1 hour on others.
by smath | 2025-04-19 22:29:21+00:00
About a year ago I came across the concept of ‘math circles’, here on HN. It was this longish but very interesting article: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven...

The key element here is nurturing curiosity. Since then i and my 10yr old have been sitting through a virtual math circle led by Aylean McDonald on parallel.org.uk an organization run by Simon Singh
by zoogeny | 2025-04-19 22:29:22+00:00
> This leads me to believe he thinks death is better than any punishment

The fact that he proposes a fine is strong evidence that he doesn't (and is one reason it may be included at all, to counter this assumption effectively). Nor would he reasonably think a slap on the wrist would be worse than death. I don't think your use of "any" in this context is appropriate and only serves to advance your case rather than engage honestly.

> He could also have the opinion that death is better than a kick in the testicles

Again, as I have said time and time again, Plato is asking us to consider particular alternatives to death. He spends one sentence on imprisonment and then two large paragraphs on exile. That is evidence of the relative importance he places on the specific alternatives. Note he does not bother addressing your "kick to the testicles" opinion. Perhaps you can write an essay on that which will stand the test of thousands of years of consideration.

I think you are committed to exile in a personal sense and you are refusing to engage with this dialogue as it was meant in order to avoid facing its implications. I am sorry to treat you so cynically and I wish you luck in your continued intellectual journey.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-19 22:29:22+00:00
> A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up

This creates an obvious and huge perverse incentive to throw a wrench into the works any time you want a do-over.
by code_biologist | 2025-04-19 22:29:56+00:00
it's not clear that there is anything better to do than buy and hold low-cost index funds.

Sure, 100%. The growth of this strategy has limitations though. Check out Mike Green's interviews on Youtube about the growth of passive investments post 2008 as a source of systemic volatility.

Though I can't tell if this project supports it, how do you feel about non-stock price indicators? Things like housing starts, gas prices, or various constructions of a "Walmart indicator"?
by simonw | 2025-04-19 22:30:23+00:00
The "ultrathink" thing is pretty funny:

> We recommend using the word "think" to trigger extended thinking mode, which gives Claude additional computation time to evaluate alternatives more thoroughly. These specific phrases are mapped directly to increasing levels of thinking budget in the system: "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink." Each level allocates progressively more thinking budget for Claude to use.

I had a poke around and it's not a feature of the Claude model, it's specific to Claude Code. There's a "megathink" option too - it uses code that looks like this:

let B = W.message.content.toLowerCase(); if ( B.includes("think harder") || B.includes("think intensely") || B.includes("think longer") || B.includes("think really hard") || B.includes("think super hard") || B.includes("think very hard") || B.includes("ultrathink") ) return ( l1("tengu_thinking", { tokenCount: 31999, messageId: Z, provider: G }), 31999 ); if ( B.includes("think about it") || B.includes("think a lot") || B.includes("think deeply") || B.includes("think hard") || B.includes("think more") || B.includes("megathink") ) return ( l1("tengu_thinking", { tokenCount: 1e4, messageId: Z, provider: G }), 1e4 );

Notes on how I found that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/claude-code-best-pract...
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-19 22:31:05+00:00
If you’re writing laws, your choice of language matters quite a lot. “Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms” alongside “humans are entitled to unalienable rights” could lead to foreseeable problems, so specifying in your writing that “humans typically have two legs and two arms” would be a smarter bet. It’s not important in a hacker news comment, but is important in law.