MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-05 16:33:05+00:00
Interpret all information as "ambient texture", and if something catches your attention, ask why and what real value it contains - what is the essence, motivation. Real value is something that refines your current version of your understanding.

Try to recognize redundant information: if there is more than one version of something, it is some entity's implementation/opinion/recommendation/product of some general concept. E.g. there is only one real "programming language" that your computer cares about, machine code (few ISAs generally, of course), and the redundant noise comes from all other programming languages that we humans care and fight. Same is for computer programs: there is only one real computer program: operating system kernel (few OS's + bootloaders, of course), and all other software is just redundant noise that is loaded by the OS. Same applies for religions: if people believe in different gods, well, redundant noise if watched from outside. Political parties, countries, currencies, companies.. redundant implementations of general concept. Purify yourself from redundant information - don't let special cases confuse from the general case!
by mikestew | 2025-04-05 16:33:12+00:00
Anyone that has revisited a glacier they visited 10-20 years ago can see with their own eyeball(s) that the glaciers might still be there, but not for long at this rate. Besides, it begs the question of who made this “prediction” to begin with (yes, the U. S. National Parks Service at Glacier NP, which they’ve since corrected after much-deserved ridicule.)
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-05 16:33:19+00:00
Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side.

More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-04-05 16:36:07+00:00
The best concert I ever saw was one I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't caught a TV commercial for it the week before.

A moderately intelligent adult can understand that ads are biased and can separate the fact from the opinion. I want to know if there's a new pizza place that opened near me, that's a fact. I can resist taking their claim that it's the best pizza ever at face value. I don't need to fear it.

Advertising contains information. We can own the responsibility for deciding which information is valuable and which isn't.
by pathless | 2025-04-05 16:36:34+00:00
Hey, I happen to own the vocal tool they used for this song and Digital Love. It's called the Digitech Vocalist. It's a MIDI-controlled pitch corrector, and it's the key to that whispery sort of grainy sound to Thomas's voice in both tracks. YouTube has plenty of demos of it, and one even directly of a Digital Love cover.
by Teever | 2025-04-05 16:36:53+00:00
People always say that working on hair growth is vanity and that there are more pressing issues to work on but I disagree.

Burn victims would like to have smooth skin with hair on it. Now I know this specific treatment probably won't help burn victims, but research on hair growth in general does.

Ultimately medicine is working towards a fountain of youth and if R&D can develop a revenue source from people who want their hair to grow back it's a means to further fund that quest for the fountain of youth and a reduction in human suffering.

It's not like people who buy toupees or hair transplants were going to otherwise spend their money on donations for burn victims.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-05 16:36:59+00:00
> Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.

Well yeah, obviously bring in Palantir. 10x the headcount so they can have the task completed in 3 days.
by exyi | 2025-04-05 16:37:47+00:00
I intentionally stayed in the small integer range to avoid benchmarking the cache. 256 distinct values should fit into L1 just fine in both cases.

I'm now thinking that the difference might be even larger if we instead avoid small integers and let the CPU get stuck chasing pointers. The idea is that it gets stuck on a memory access, which forces it to speculate much further, which in turn makes it backtrack a longer path if a branch was mispredicted. I'm obviously no expert on this, feel free to correct me

The results for 1B range instead of 255 are 17.6 ms for unsorted / 68.2 ms for sorted! We are back to what the original article observed and it's a way stronger effect than what branch prediction can offer. So don't sort your arrays, keep them in the order the boxed values were allocated ;)
by adrian_b | 2025-04-05 16:37:48+00:00
Molting their chitinous exoskeleton is a shared characteristic of a huge group of animals, which is named using a Greek word for this feature (Ecdysozoa) and which includes not only spiders and all other arachnids, but also all insects and crustaceans and all other arthropods, and also other animals related to arthropods, i.e. velvet worms, tardigrades, roundworms and several kinds of marine worms.

Molting is one of the features that makes difficult for arthropods to reach great sizes (because their skeleton and tegument cannot grow between moltings; it only is exchanged with a bigger external skeleton during molting), but otherwise it has been an important factor for the success of this group of animals, by allowing them to live in any environment, because their bodies are better separated and protected from the environment than for most other animals.
by fipar | 2025-04-05 16:38:01+00:00
We had one as a friend-pet for a while a few years ago. We went outside one day and found one leaf in our plum tree was tube-shaped with some spiderweb and after some waiting, off she came (I have no idea if it was male or female but Spanish is a gendered language and spiders are female, so we always referred to it as “her”).

Every day around noon she’d come out of her leave and wait to catch an insect. It was amazing to see her precisely jump to get it, and watching her eat was a mix of gross and interesting. I normally dislike spiders (though I don’t kill them unless I really feel threatened) but jumping spiders are an exception and I’d actually describe them as nice, almost pet/friend material.
by hinkley | 2025-04-05 16:38:24+00:00
Changing the data structure can in some cases also be a “don’t do it. “

I advised another engineer to write the code to generate error pages for the sites we host the same way I pre-generated stylesheets. He did not, and ended up making almost 50k service requests across four services to my 4500 across two. And then it broke after he quit because it tripped circuit breakers by making FIFTY THOUSAND requests. The people paying attention to capacity planning didn’t size for anomalous traffic.

He was trying to find a specific piece of customer data and didn’t notice it was in the main service and only needed to be parsed. So I didn’t just rewrite it to work like mine, I extracted code from mine to call from both and that was that. Went from an estimated 90 minutes to run it per deployment (I got exasperated trying to time a full run that never completed and instead I logged progress reports to figure out how many customers per minute it was doing) down to less than 5:00. And by not thrashing services that were being called by user-facing apps.

If that data hadn’t been in the original service I would have petitioned to have it so. You shouldn’t have to chain three or four queries to find a single column of data.
by antirez | 2025-04-05 16:38:45+00:00
Because there were plenty of evidences that the statements were either not correct or not based on enough information, at the time they were made. And to be wrong because of personal biases, and then don't clearly state you were wrong when new evidenced appeared, is not a trait of a good scientist. For instance: the strong summarization abilities where already something that, alone, without any further information, were enough to seriously doubt about the stochastic parrot mental model.
by DistractionRect | 2025-04-05 16:38:55+00:00
I agree, today's challenge was really easy. But I did enjoy the other days, I played all of them!

What I'd like is an option to show the answers after failing (not by default, so you can still choose to replay if you want). For instance, I cannot for the life of me get the music act that's associated with "FALMO".
by pmags | 2025-04-05 16:38:56+00:00
Note that MorphoSource is precisely the type of scientific resource that will be lost if Trump, Elon, and the DOGE-ies have their way.

This has been jointly funded by NSF and the investigators home institution (Duke).

Scientific databases, like this, but also many model organism genome databases have already been at risk because maintaining and curating high quality data is often seen as "not sexy enough". Many such resources are being forced to consider subscription models (e.g. [1]) to "keep the lights on". Ironically such resources are in fact critical for modern, high impact science.

This is only going to get worse as the Trumpists and DOGE-ies continue to kneecap NIH, NSF, and other critical parts of our infrastructure.

[1] https://veupathdb.org/veupathdb/app/static-content/subscript...
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-05 16:40:18+00:00
That's pretty sweet the argparser

It's kind of nice to be able to access all native libraries. I usually use ruby, but having something compiled and strict is super nice. Shellscripting it one big minefield.

Compiling is a simple step ofc. But it's nice to only have the scriptfile and it's nice to not have your directory cluttered with binaries. I'll see if I can post it tomorrow. It's very small anyway
by kazinator | 2025-04-05 16:41:24+00:00
No, treating some letter sequences like fi and ffi so that the letters stick together in a certain way is not "by this measure".

> who stops a font from displaying A as B

It's noticeable; a B consistently occurs everywhere there is an A, wherever that font is used. You can't perpetrate an easter egg whereby a certain A is replaced.

We could prepare a page where every glyph appears, and detect substitutions via OCR.

With text replacement, we could look for a particular sentence, and change a word in it, without playing any games with glyphs at all. It will be undetectable in a document in which the target sentence doesn't occur.

Anyway, we can't think about not using fonts. Fonts are necessary for rendering text.

Fonts that substitute arbitrary text are not necessary. Just because I need fonts doesn't mean I need term-rewriting fonts.

We don't have to accept one threat just because there is some inevitable minor threat. That's the Package Deal informal fallacy, or something along those lines.
by pathless | 2025-04-05 16:42:01+00:00
Also, ReverbMachine does this sort of thing regularly for all different artists. They have covered Daft Punk's albums pretty thoroughly:

https://reverbmachine.com/blog/how-kavinsky-created-nightcal... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...

All their work is amazing. Perhaps I will post all of these here as posts individually? Someone should...
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-05 16:42:30+00:00
They might be flying too close to the sun on this one. A lot of the IRS' "inefficiency" is intentional, so it can be abused by moneyed interests to evade tax without anyone noticing.

Fixing those inefficiencies would bring this problem to light and force them to deal with it. While it's not past the current administration to formally legalize it, it's still "stirring shit" for no good reason and worse than leaving things as-is where the evasion falls through the cracks.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-05 16:43:00+00:00
I don’t know if we should actually deploy geoengineering. My fear is that we will soon reach a point where we’re pretty certain that we’re headed towards a major tipping point, and even aggressive GHG reductions won’t be enough. (It’s possible that the findings in TFA are the literal representation of that realization.) We need a hail-Mary option at that point and we might need it in a hurry.

BTW I am actually cautiously optimistic about the GHG reduction piece. We’re way past where we should be at this stage, but rapid decarbonization now looks like it will be at least technically possible. Most global emissions are in China and Asia, and China is actually deploying the technology we need to eliminate those emissions. The US shouldn’t be screwing around the way it is, but I’m hopeful that what’s happening with renewable technology costs in Asia will eventually be more meaningful than any short term political interference that’s limited to the US. (This is very much a lemonade-out-of-lemons opinion, but the alternative is to be very depressed.)
by guhidalg | 2025-04-05 16:43:23+00:00
I wouldn't call pattern matching intelligence, I would call it something closer to "trainability" or "educatable" but not intelligence. You can train a person to do a task without understanding why they have to do it like that, but when confronted with a new never-before-seen situation they have to understand the physical laws of the universe to find a solution.

Ask ChatGPT to answer something that no one on the internet has done before and it will struggle to come up with a solution.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-05 16:43:41+00:00
Why am I imagining this being used for really serverless iot infrastructure?

Like imagine that you wanted to deploy something on a lot of huge devices, well by using something like this open source and really limited but (with it just works), you can actually have pcb providers build it and ship it in their warehouse / wherever and just provide it energy and ethernet and now you can probably ssh into it / even create some sort of Vercel-like UI on top of it(Coolify/Dokploy? though we would need to slim down docker a lot for Dokploy? )

and when the work is done , they would actually scrape the metal /pcb and / reuse it again...

I am not sure if such metal /pcb recycling makes sense...

If anyone technical can respond to this, it would be great.

This can also be done with risc-v as well. I am not sure but I was thinking of creating a very dead simple company (my brain and its weird thoughts... , also Don't copy me or if you do, then hire me xD) which just can take a device like old phones and then just root them using AI? / manual or maybe not even root it? IDK...,

Basically then providing them internet access and energy (Not a traditional warehouse) because you actually only pay for the one time fees and afterwards all the fees that you pay, they are of the real costs bore by the company operating it / no middle man profits.

Kind of like a "Costco" (oh I had forgotten name of Costco and I had to search target alternatives xD) where they actually are there to help you save money but for you to use their services you gotta have a card.
by jpjoi | 2025-04-05 16:43:42+00:00
This reminds me a lot of NYT strands, in the sense that it’s “multiple themed rounds of classic word game format X” In the strands example, the base word game is a word search in which they break the rules a bit to make it harder. Here it’s a simple word unscrambling. Makes me wonder what other games you could make by following this “themed rounds of X” format.
by pornel | 2025-04-05 16:43:43+00:00
The warp model in GPUs is great at hiding the DRAM latency. The GPU isn't idly waiting for DRAM.

All threads that need a memory access are in a hardware queue, and data coming from the DRAM immediately dequeues a thread and runs the work until the next memory access. So you compute at the full throughput of your RAM. Thread scheduling done in software can't have such granularity and low overhead, and hyperthreading has too few threads to hide the latency (2 vs 768).
by nurettin | 2025-04-05 16:43:51+00:00
Sometimes seeing something that resembles reasoning doesn't really make it reasoning.

What makes it "seem to get better" and what keeps throwing people like lecun off is the training bias, the prompts, the tooling and the billions spent cherry picking information to train on.

What LLMs do best is language generation which leads to, but is not intelligence. If you want someone who was right all along, maybe try Wittgenstein.
by norir | 2025-04-05 16:44:21+00:00
The hardest part of writing a compiler is designing a language. In my opinion, most compiler courses seem too fixated on the implementation details. The fact that this course targets x86 already misses the mark for me. Computers are very fast, there is no reason to start with a language that translates to asm. This is incidental complexity that distracts from language design.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-05 16:44:33+00:00
I grew up with "easy" languages. Pascal, VB, C, C++, Java, C#. And frankly I'm getting real sick of them.

I'm porting Dijkstra's algorithm over to C# at the moment, and in the last several hours here's the two most clownish things that have happened:

1) I have:

if (node is null) { .. }

My IDE is telling me "Expression is always false according to nullable reference types' annotations". Nevertheless it enters that section every time.

2) I have:

SortedSet<int> nums = []; Console.Out.WriteLine(nums.Min);

You know what this prints?

0

The minimal element of a set which has no elements is 0.

Yes, every language has its warts, and anecdotes like this aren't going to change anyone's mind. I only wrote these up because they're hitting me right now in one of those languages that companies use "because anyone can learn them". I like harder languages better than easy languages, because they're easy.
by exyi | 2025-04-05 16:45:16+00:00
It corresponds to a way more than one branch at instruction level. The branch prediction AFAIK does not care based on what are you branching, it just assumes branches will go in similar sequences as they did last time. If the Python 'if' is never taken, the instruction-level predictor will learn that after the comparison operation, there is an 'if' operation and then another array access operation. If the Python 'if' is unpredictable unpredictable, CPU predictor can't be sure which opcode are we processing after 'if', so there will be penalty.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-05 16:45:16+00:00
Let's admit, the single reason to 'bring back' the Mammoth is, it's cool and a tremendous publicity scheme for ecological efforts. That alone, may be reason enough.

Don't encourage them. Before we know it they will bring back dinosaurs ... some quote about "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-04-05 16:46:39+00:00
I don't see the contradiction between "stochastic parrot" and "strong summarisation abilities".

Where I'm skeptical of LLM skepticism is that people use the term "stochastic parrot" disparagingly, as if they're not impressed. LLMs are stochastic parrots in the sense that they probabilistically guess sequences of things, but isn't it interesting how far that takes you already? I'd never have guessed. Fundamentally I question the intellectual honesty of anyone who pretends they're not surprised by this.
by ben_w | 2025-04-05 16:47:02+00:00
I've experienced making this mistake myself.

The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.

Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=private+eye+front+page&t=osx&iar=i...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-15279371
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-05 16:47:21+00:00
This is all true, and I'd also add that LeCun has the classic pundit problem of making his opposition to another group too much of his identity, to the detriment of his thinking. So much of his persona and ego is tied up in being a foil to both Silicon Valley hype-peddlers and AI doomers that he's more interested in dunking on them than being correct. Not that those two groups are always right either, but when you're more interested in getting owns on Twitter than having correct thinking, your predictions will always suffer for it.

That's why I'm not too impressed even when he has changed his mind: he has admitted to individual mistakes, but not to the systemic issues which produced them, which makes for a safe bet that there will be more mistakes in the future.
by hibikir | 2025-04-05 16:47:57+00:00
Sierra's early catalog was basically a large collection of dead-man-walking situations. A key item for the endgame of Space Quest 1 stops being available 5 minutes into the game. Kings Quest II has a bridge that can breaks down every time you cross it, and you must do the right thing on every single crossing, as one superfluous crossing alone will end the game. Even as far as 1991 they were still making games where you could put yourself in an unwinnable scenario by missing an item hours before, sometimes in what you thought was a non-interactive cutscene!

Very few modern adventure games bring any of that back.
by overfeed | 2025-04-05 16:48:49+00:00
Who, pray tell, publishes the Salvadorian crime rates? Dragnet arresting young men will reduce crime in any country, but that sure is worse than the disease because while that action of arresting innocents is not "illegal" from the regime's perspective, it should be. So "crime" has gone up, and perpetrated by the state against citizens.
by roflyear | 2025-04-05 16:49:21+00:00
I 100% agree with you, but the Fed is independent and they only have a few levers to pull.

They don't make policy and they go out of their way to not comment on policy. They say they are apolitical (though of course they are 100% pro-establishment).

If the entire government was working together, yeah, sure, your theory holds. But that isn't how things work.
by morteify | 2025-04-05 16:49:26+00:00
I really wanted Coolify to work, as I like the idea behind it. I gave it a go some time ago, and I ended up spending the entire evening battling issues like the proxy not running, with no helpful UI feedback whatsoever.

So I came to the conclusion that if I have to dig through abstractions built by someone else, only to find out that in the end I have to manually restart the underlying containers anyway, I might as well stick to using Docker directly.

And truth be told, it’s not even that difficult to handle it all yourself. And it’s definitely very educational. It gives me a nice feeling of being in control and knowing my server. And on top of that it’s fun too.
by kazinator | 2025-04-05 16:49:27+00:00
In a Lisp implementation, I could use unique, zero sized objects to implement symbols. The gensym function would create a new one.

Zero-sized distinguishable objects can have properties attached to them via hashes. At the API level, you cannot tell how a property (e.g. symbol-name) is attached to an object.

Properties, like the symbol name, would be attached to these objects via hashes.

It's not an ideal representation for symbols when all symbols have a certain property, like name.

If you have objects such that they have certain properties, but the properties are rare (only a few objects have a value of the property that requires storing space, and for the rest it is some "undefined" value, you can achieve a sparse representation by making the objects as small as possible, attaching the properties externally.