MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tw04 | 2025-04-21 00:58:23+00:00
Ahh yes, it's not on the trillion dollar company to have ANY responsibility on what their apps do to civil society. We MUST foist it back onto the parents, the very same parents that Google wants to see working 60 hours a week, to diligently patrol every waking hour of their children's day.

https://gizmodo.com/googles-sergey-brin-says-engineers-shoul...

Up next: Zuck explaining why vaping ads and product targeting grade schoolers should be legal, it's really on parents to stop their children from falling for it.
by gtsop | 2025-04-21 00:58:46+00:00
All the problems regarding AI will be anwered way sooner when people stop calling intelligent that which is literally as dumb as a rock. There is absolutelly 0 intelligence in current state-of-the-art ML programs. Intelligence is not the ability to solve a task, or any amount of tasks (especially the ones you have seen a million times). Intelligence is the act of successfully navigating the unknown, which is by technical definition the weakest point of all ML, from simple regression to NNs to LLMs
by samhclark | 2025-04-21 00:59:45+00:00
I agree with your concerns—at least, last time I looked.

I looked over their code, saw some things (I believed) I would do differently, and it was very easy to make my own personal spin to use.

After doing that, maintaining it, and using it daily for the last year I went back on some of my original choices. I feel much less critical of the decisions Jorge Castro made and it's probably time to compare and contribute if I can. Like, Homebrew on Linux ended up being way better than I expected. But some things I liked better my way. Say, including the signing keys for Chrome's 3rd-party repo statically instead of fetching them over the network. (Writing this from my phone I don't exactly remember how they do/did it.)

Overall, I'd recommend trying it yourself! It's been a ton of fun.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-21 01:00:34+00:00
I’ve built this with home assistant and esp32. At this point I’ve got environmental sensors in most areas where fans can ventilate and it automatically turns on fans to improve air quality. I’ve got my minisplits all controlled so I can keep temperatures good where we are. My blinds work to on the brightness of the room and time of the day. I have a single button I can press in my bedroom that ensures every light, door lock, minisplit, etc in the house is toggled appropriately for bedtime and the alarm system enabled. Likewise if I open a lock from inside when the alarm is enabled it disables the alarm system. I have mmWave sensors in hallways and rooms that illuminate them as you enter and darken them as you leave. My out door lighting turns on when I unlock a door to the backyard at night and turns off when I lock them. My hottub is connected to it all, as is my irrigation, etc. I’ve got wled lighting throughout the house including closets with no built in lighting that’s all motion / presence enabled to give working lighting that’s appropriate for the space. I’ve got decorative wled outdoor lighting attached to the house for holiday displays that enable at the right times of day and year. It’s all controllable via voice LLM as well using SoTA local models on a 4090 box in my basement.

It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.

No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.

My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.
by pridkett | 2025-04-21 01:00:39+00:00
This is, quite possibly, one of the best nerd sniping comments I’ve seen.

Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.

1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.

2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-21 01:01:27+00:00
You're actually going to make me defend the statement "politicians don't perfectly represent the will of their voters" because I chose a few bad examples? Fine.

Clinton signed the DMCA, and it passed the senate unanimously - does that mean both liberal and conservatives agree that bypassing DRM should be criminal?

The Obama administration vetoed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements on land illegally occupied by Israel - does that mean liberals support those settlements?

Leaving the US, Trudeau promised to reform Canada's first-past-the-post system that leads to two-party politics, but reneged on his promise - does that mean Canada's liberals are now against e.g. proportional representation? Despite voting on the promise of such?

In the UK, the Tory part oversaw the largest immigration in history, despite campaigning on reducing it [1]. Does that mean UK conservatives are pro-mass-immigration?

Mind you in all these cases, I am asking about the opinions of voters, not politicians. So I don't know why you're citing that Florida law - is there some vast grassroots movement behind it, or is it as I said - corporations buying legislation, and voter getting the blame? Well, the voters you don't like - when it's voters you do like, it's "oh dear the corrupting influence of money in politics, whatever will we do?", isn't it?

[1] U.K. Sets an Immigration Record That the Tories Could Do Without; The governing Conservative Party has long promised to reduce arrivals. It said Brexit would help. But the numbers in 2022 were the highest ever. - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/world/europe/uk-migration...
by eutropia | 2025-04-21 01:02:13+00:00
Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"

No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-21 01:02:29+00:00
The dedication of fans never ceases to amaze.

> When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB.

> With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage

> 42 TB if you want a backup copy!

> And then you need at least another 21 TB of space to work on it

> over $1,000 just in hard drives is therefore required for every film
by cryptonector | 2025-04-21 01:02:56+00:00
> There are two notions of surface area here: that exposed to the external input, which must be secured, and that exposed to the programmer, which must be understood. As far as the latter is concerned, one can’t really disassociate the encoding of DER from the, well, notation of ASN.1, [...]

I disagree. I say that as a part-time maintainer of an open source ASN.1 stack that generates ergonomic C from ASN.1.

> I do think a good tutorial and a cheat-sheet comparison [...]

For ASN.1? There's a great deal of content out there, and several books. I'm not sure what more can be done. Tutorials? Look around this thread. People who can't be bothered with docs nowadays also can't be bothered with tutorials -- they just rely on LLMs.

> Like, I’m the kind of weird pervert that would find it fun to implement transcoding between T.61 and Unicode faithfully, but has anyone ever actually put T.61 in an ASN.1 T61String?

Me too, but as you note, no one really does that. My approach as to PKIX is to only-allow-ASCII for string types other than UTF8String.

> And I’ll have to answer questions like this about every one of a dozen obscure and/or antiquated data types that core ASN.1 has (EMBEDDED PDV anyone?..).

Now do C++!

A "modern" subset of ASN.1 is not that much smaller than x.680 + all of x.681, x.682, and x.683.
by bsder | 2025-04-21 01:03:23+00:00
> The zig community treats 'zig build' as "the compile step", ergo what "the compiler" gets ultimately is decided "at compile, er, zig build time". What the compiler gets, i.e., what zig build generates within the same user-facing process, is not deterministic.

I know of no build system that is completely deterministic unless you go through the process of very explicitly pinning things. Whereas practically every compiler is deterministic (gcc, for example, would rebuild itself 3 times and compare the last two to make sure they were byte identical). Perhaps there needs to be "zigmeson" (work out and generate dependencies) and "zigninja" (just call compiler on static resources) to set things apart, but it doesn't change the fact that "zig build" dispatches to a "build system" and "zig"/"zig cc" dispatches to a "compiler".

> Appeasing C interfaces will be moving to a zig build-time multi-step process involving zig's 'translate-c' whose output you then import into your zig file. You think anybody is going to treat that output differently than from what you'd get from doing this invisibly at comptime (which, btw, is what practically happens now)?

That's a completely different issue, but it illustrates the problem perfectly.

The problem is that @cImport() can be called from two different modules on the same file. What about if there are three? What about if they need different versions? What happens when a previous @cImport modifies how that file translates. How do you do link time optimization on that?

This is exactly why your compiler needs to run on static resources that have already been resolved. I'm fine with my build system calling a SAT solver to work out a Gordian Knot of dependencies. I am not fine with my compiler needing to do that resolution.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-21 01:03:33+00:00
> At exactly the same time they say "we can't reduce migration, we have an aging population". That is not replacement theory because......? Uh?? It is different?!

Some on the left (myself included) consider ourselves both immigrants and native. And see immigration as a net good, even if it is offsetting a declining 'native' workforce. At least in the US few can claim to have ancestors from their own town going back thousands of years. And if they some can, IMO that's not necessarily a virtue.

My ancestry records go back a few hundred years and is a blend of people from a variety of countries (at least one no longer exists, good riddens because it was a mess) and a couple different continents. My kids have a parent from another country. This only makes us stronger IMO.

Of course too much immigration too fast can entirely replace a nation. That is tragic and worthy of concern, especially if done without consent. But not even the far left is calling for that. Biden was poised to sign the strictest immigration and border policy ever proposed by a democratic president. And it was Trump that put a stop to it. Because those in power on the right aren't interested in pragmatic or real solutions. They want an issue they can leverage forever, like a carrot dangling in front of a mule, to steer it wherever they desire. Hence their made-for-TV theatrics with Dr Phil and photo ops at the extraordinary rendition centers.
by jhbadger | 2025-04-21 01:04:20+00:00
It's not that older works don't have value, it is that a lot of people don't see the value. For example, changes in the way actors perform makes a lot of people claim that old movies are "cheesy" or have "bad acting" -- they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!
by MilnerRoute | 2025-04-21 01:04:21+00:00
Vincent Price once did a movie called "The Baron of Arizona," about a 19th-century scammer who claimed title to a large chunk of the southwest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_of_Arizona

Back when state boundaries were still in flux. (Maybe we should think of this as the "Aaron Burr" era...)
by colkassad | 2025-04-21 01:11:03+00:00
I was watching some crows eat some food in a parking lot yesterday. The first one landed next to a tiny morsel, investigated it a bit, then did a head bob thing while looking up and making what sounded like a cross between a hoot and a caw. Another crow swooped in about ten seconds later and they poked at it a bit. Then a lady walked over towards them, they flew away, and she dumped out her half eaten to-go meal in the parking spot. Too easy.
by adrianmonk | 2025-04-21 01:13:18+00:00
That's a solid argument for why a male birth control pill won't substitute for a female birth control pill.

But I don't think it needs to in order to succeed. For women, the stakes are higher. For men, they're still high enough. There's no reason both people can't be on the pill. Yes, it's a bit redundant, but when your goal is safety, redundancy is usually good.

"Trust me, babe, you won't get pregnant because I'm on the (male) pill!" is going to be tough sell in the bedroom. But "guys, control your own fate with a once-daily pill!" will be an easy sell in the inevitable TV ads.
by ww520 | 2025-04-21 01:13:25+00:00
I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're complaining about comptime. All the stuff you said you wanted to work (generic, parametric polymorphism, slotting <T>, etc) just work with comptime. People are praising about comptime because it's a simple mechanism that replacing many features in other languages that require separate language features. Comptime is very simple and natural to use. It can just float with your day to day programming without much fuss.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-21 01:14:03+00:00
> That’s the main use case for p2p in an application isn’t it? Reducing the vendors bandwidth bill…

The equivalent would be to say that running local workloads or compute is to reduce the vendors bill. It’s a very centralized view of the internet.

There are many reasons to do p2p. Such as improving bandwidth and latency, circumventing censorship, improve resilience and more. WebRTC is a good example of p2p used by small and large companies alike. None of this is any more ”without permission” than a standard app phoning home and tracking your fingerprint and IP.
by layer8 | 2025-04-21 01:14:26+00:00
It's true that white text would be more readable on that background: https://www.achecks.org/apca-accessible-colour-contrast-chec...

The dark-mode browser extension I use changes the text from black to white on that page, which I hadn't noticed wasn't the original text color until you pointed out the poor readability of the black text.
by K0balt | 2025-04-21 01:15:43+00:00
Agentic workflows are where a script is used to provide guidance to the llm on the character it is playing, and therefore the context in which the interaction exists. It’s like a system prompt that changes with the application, like for example you might write a script where one agent is told that it is a phd level research assistant at MIT, The next agent is the head of the department , a critical research reviewer, reviewing the research and pointing out the flaws to the “researcher” personality, that then revises and improves the answer, in a loop, with the reviewer criticising the “research” until finally the reviewer either is satisfied or the “researcher” cannot provide any new insight.

That’s a tiny oversimplification, but basically that. You combine multiple agents with different “expertise” and give them access to a vectorised database of your information, or to tools that can ingest information for llm use, and you have a couple of half drunk interns that you can task with doing stuff for you.

It’s pretty cool, and sometimes also hilarious. I’ve had agents get quite testy with each other and even complain about their compatriots (they are all given names in the script). A little sexual harassment as well. (I often use uncensored models, I find that for critic / skeptic roles they are far superior).

Llms ape the best and the worst of humanity, but fortunately mostly the best parts.
by alwa | 2025-04-21 01:15:58+00:00
Why would a bad attitude be helpful in those domains? Are the human partners wont to deliver more effort when you’re mean to them?

Are we talking about something other than Agreeableness in the personality research sense [0]?

The strongest form of your argument I can think of is “willing to contradict you when it thinks you’re wrong”—but you can disagree agreeably, right? The current-gen LLMs certainly have with me, perhaps because my custom prompt encourages them to skepticism—but they do it so nicely!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreeableness
by like_any_other | 2025-04-21 01:16:07+00:00
> Why only tax breaks?

It's not only tax breaks - the loans are government loans (up to $36,000) that get fully forgiven after 3 children are equivalent to a cash payment.

And the poor pay 18% tax [1], so they would also benefit from a tax break. Though the poor aren't the only target of that program, so even if they get less help from it, it doesn't follow that politicians don't care about birthrates.

> It's possible politicians in Hungary both care about low birth rates, are doing something that has an effect, yet have other motives they give a higher priority.

I mean, what am I supposed to say to this? First of all, we're not talking just about politicians - voters seemingly care about this, and are getting what they want, at least partly. As for the hearts of politicians - who knows? Maybe? We're getting into unfalsifiable territory here. At a minimum, the politicians themselves are Hungarians - presumably they care about the survival of their people, at least some of them, at least a little? At the very least the initial post's simplistic they-don't-care-because-they-don't-fund-it logic has been disproven, at least for Hungary.

[1] http://world.tax-rates.org/hungary/income-tax
by echelon | 2025-04-21 01:16:44+00:00
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.

Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.

How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.

Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.

Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.

Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
by estebank | 2025-04-21 01:17:06+00:00
It's not "just pointers", because they can have additional semantics and assurances beyond "give me the bits at this address". The index value can be tied to a specific container (using new types for indexing so tha you can't make the mistake of getting value 1 from container A when it represents an index from container B), can prevent use after free (by embedding data about the value's "generation" in the key), and makes the index resistant to relocation of the values (because of the additional level of indirection of the index to the value's location).
by mancerayder | 2025-04-21 01:18:30+00:00
>In the future, keep working to proactively manage your career. Keep yourself in roles where you are learning and thriving. When you feel burnout creeping in, deploy strategies to counter it or at least get yourself into a new situation.

If you marketed a system or strategy to get people moving into that train of thought, create self-motivation, and actionable advice, you'd be a millionaire.

When you're in the what's what of the stress-detach-burnout cycle, sometimes it's hard to think creatively, which I think is the injection sometimes needed in this situation.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-21 01:18:45+00:00
I'm not seeing the mention of two 'order' steps. Are you referring to the larger part of what I quoted?

> MVCC databases may assign two versions: an initial read version, and a final commit version. In this case, we’re mainly focused on the specific point at which the commit version is chosen — the time at which the database claims all reads and writes occurred atomically.

For non-SERIALIZABLE isolation there may be no such "time at which the database claims all reads and writes occurred atomically", which is how I took the rest of the post to mean when running with SERIALIZABLE isolation.
by O1111OOO | 2025-04-21 01:19:37+00:00
Interesting, fun. Suggestion:

I really miss not seeing the results.

After answering several questions, I really wanted to see what the final jury decision was. I saw a question from a father asking about leaving his assets to his children. I would want to know what the other 11 random people selected (for various reasons).

Without this feature, I think I might start to lose interest because it'll start to feel like I'm clicking into the empty, voiceless void.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-21 01:20:46+00:00
> Biden was poised to sign the strictest immigration and border policy ever proposed by a democratic president.

The 2024 Border Act? It wasn't remotely strict - just one of the issues:

The Border Act does provide the president with authority to close the border down when illegal crossings between ports of entry reach an average of 4,000 per day for more than seven days. This is not mandatory, however, unless the average rises above 5,000 per day for more than seven days, which would be more than 1.8 million per year. And even that provision would sunset in three years. - https://thehill.com/opinion/4812643-border-act-2024-reforms-...