MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noodletheworld | 2025-04-20 08:02:55+00:00
> The only thing that I have seen convince people (and it always does)

...when anyone starts talking in universals like this, they're usually deep in some hype cycle.

This is a problematic approach that many people take; they posit that:

1) AI is fundamentally transformative.

2) People who don't acknowledge that simply haven't tried it.

However, I posit that:

3) People who think that haven't actually used it a serious capacity or are deliberately misrepresenting things.

The problem is that:

> In reality, I go back and forth with AI constantly—sometimes dozens of times on a single piece of work. I refine, iterate, and improve each part through ongoing dialogue. It's like having a thoughtful and impossibly fast colleague who's always available to help me develop and sharpen my ideas.

...is only true for trivial problems.

The author calls this out, saying:

> It won't excel at consistently citing specific papers, building codes, or case law correctly. (Advanced techniques exist for these tasks, but they're not worth learning when you're just starting out. For now, consider them out of scope.)

...but, this is really the heart of everything.

What are those advanced techniques? Seriously, after 30 days of using AI if all you're doing is:

> Prepare for challenging conversations by using ChatGPT to simulate potential scenarios, helping you approach interpersonal dynamics with empathy and grace.

Then what the absolute heck are you doing.

Stop gaslighting everyone.

Those 'advanced techniques' are all anyone cares about, because they are the things that are hard, and don't work.

In reality, it doesn't matter how much time you spend learning; the technology is fundamentally limited. It can't do some things.

Spending time learning how to do trivial things will never enable you to do hard things.

It's not missing the 'human touch'.

It's the crazy hallucinations, invalid logic, failure to do as told, flat out incorrect information or citations, inability to perform a task (eg. as an agent) without messing some other thing up.

There are a few techniques that can help you have an effective workflow; but seriously, if you're a skeptic about AI, spending a month doing trivial stuff like asking for '10 ideas about X' is an insult to your intelligence and doesn't address any of the concerns that, I would argue, skeptics and real people actually have about AI.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-20 08:03:07+00:00
One very common reason is to make the code non-blocking. In fact Rust's async/await system works by converting the code into a state machine.

Unfortunately Rust doesn't have proper support for coroutines or generators yet so often you'll want to use a hand written state machine anyway.

Even if it did, sometimes the problem domain means that a state machine naturally fits the semantics better than using a control flow based approach anyway.
by procaryote | 2025-04-20 08:03:28+00:00
If you love programming, there's quite a lot of programming where math is vital. Graphics, optimisation problems, cryptography, neural networks, figuring out if a hash works, projecting if an algorithm will scale...

The tricky bit is often that you need to learn some of the math before you can see how it's useful, but if you need stronger motivation, you might try diving into a slightly math heavy programming problem and learn the math as you go
by seventhtiger | 2025-04-20 08:04:09+00:00
Unless the game designers specifically accounted for it, cooperative games can rob the autonomy of less confident players. One overbearing player can hijack the whole game. To them to win the game as designed it feels correct to do.

In competitive game it's possible the less skilled player may never win (not true for party games), but at least only they are personally invested in their win so no one can righteously take over.
Show HN: LLM Shell Tools – AI-powered command line helpers(open source + local)
by cepstrum9 | 2025-04-20 08:04:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I ve been playing around with LLM integrations for the shell and I have a tiny set of shell tools that use LLMs to improve my CLI experience. I’ve been using it while building and it’s already proving usefu to me.

Right now it includes:

1. Command Not Found Hook Catches “command not found” errors and asks an LLM to suggest what might have gone wrong (e.g. typos, missing tools, etc), works for bash and zsh 2. Git Commit LLM A wrapper for git commit that suggests clearer commit messages based on your staged changes. It’s helped me avoid a bunch of lazy messages like “fix stuff”.

Prereqs: • OpenAI API key • Bash or Zsh • curl and jq

Still minimal and hacky—but I’d love feedback or ideas. Especially curious if others would find this helpful or have feature suggestions.

Repo: https://github.com/CepstrumLabs/hooksh
by toasterlovin | 2025-04-20 08:05:11+00:00
To be clear, I am not arguing that nuclear and extended families are exclusive of each other. I think most of the people arguing against me are confused about this. Anthropologists dichotomize societies by nuclear family vs extended family because Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all, whereas in many societies the extended family is an important social unit. And the difference usually has a lot of implications. Hence the dichotomy being useful. But this does not mean that in societies where extended families are important that they are more important than nuclear families. And really this shouldn’t be surprising: we’re not bees. We form reproductive pairs. Our children are twice as related to us as our nieces and nephews. There’s no way it could ever come to be that the nuclear family would not be the primary human social institution.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-04-20 08:06:10+00:00
I think you may have an overly rosy view of the US system. Search former rep Justin Amash's tweets for keywords like "house", "speaker", and "deliberation":

https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036

On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia.

I understand a big part of the job of party leadership in the US is simply negotiating with / persuading representatives of your own party to vote for upcoming bills. So perhaps that's another sense in which party leadership is weaker in the US. The focus on local representation also creates problems though, since representatives are incentivized to deliver federal projects in the district they represent, even if that's not best for the nation as a whole.

I really wish there a method for prototyping new democracy designs. I feel that this area has been very stagnant, and radical improvements could be possible.
by jl6 | 2025-04-20 08:07:20+00:00
Depends why you need to know and with what level of accuracy. Just looking at their face is about 96%-98% accurate[0], and becomes even more accurate when other cues are available such as voice, gait, and build. For casual purposes, humans are incredibly good at predicting sex, without any technology or scientific understanding. One might speculate that being able to accurately find a mate is an evolutionary advantage.

For the last few fractions of a percent accuracy, a SRY cheek swab test is a simple non-invasive screening test that can flag individuals for further investigation. World Athletics have just implemented this test, stating it is “a highly accurate proxy for biological sex”.[1] A positive result in this screening test could be combined with a finger prick test for testosterone level to provide further information, and at this point we’re into methods of medical diagnosis of DSDs. About 1 in 5000 individuals will have a DSD, some of which are still unambiguously male or female (e.g. XXY Klinefelter syndrome), and some of which are almost unique individuals that defy categorization.

At this point, it is popular to seize on those rare individuals and declare “aha! So sex isn’t binary then! So it must be a spectrum!”, and while this is surely well-intentioned, it is scientifically illiterate.[2] I suspect part of the confusion is interpreting “binary” as a mathematical Boolean value (where exceptions cannot, by definition, exist) rather than as a scientific classification, where exceptions can and do exist and “prove the rule”.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/articles/cj91dr17d1no.am...

[2] https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/race-is-a-spectr...
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 08:08:01+00:00
I'm absolutely perplexed at how I'm beating around the bush regarding

> a lack of backup media that isn't a HDD for storing large amounts of data indefinitely

When I recommended LTO, which you yourself say that

> LTO is perfect for this operating model

Agreed. Which is why I recommended it. As did you. Because it's a solved issue.

> * LTO drives ($3300 for an mLogic LTO-8 drive, plus media costs)

LTO-8/9 aren't the only options. LTO5/6/7 aren't defunct/unusable/unavailable. That's like complaining that SSD's are too expensive because you're only looking at Micron 9550 or Optane P5800's and their ilk.

> making it a ripe market for a competitor.

You'd have to engineer your own controllers and drives and likely cartridges as well, including drivers, firmware and software, which is neither cheap nor easy which is why no one has done this. It's doable, but the initial CapEx is astronomical, and the target market outside of enterprise is small meaning the return is unlikely to make it worth it, so you'd also have to spend big on advertising to appeal to said prosumers to try to sell them on something that most people would think of as cumbersome or obsolete ("Tape?! This isn't the 80's!", sure, we know better, but does the layman? that's not an easy sell), or find someway to make inroads against IBM/HPE/Quantum in the enterprise space which is unlikely for a not-already established big name. Even in the remote chance that they can beat IBM/HPE/Quantum on $/TB on new latest gen products, they almost certainly can't do that meaningfully cheaper than buying used Quantums from a few generations ago.

Would it be nice? Sure. In the meantime, price sensitive prosumers absolutely do not have to pay multiple thousands to get into tape storage. And if the data being backed up is truly that important, and we only limit it to new on shelf/current gen solutions, a one time (or once per decade or less) low 4 figures expense for a tape unit and media that is a fraction of HDD's $/TB value even at the cutting edge is not an unreasonable expense. Shit, people pay more than that for some QNAP/Synology junk with spinning disks and end up with less capacity and resilience with more headaches.

If the goal is "I want to back up the data on a single HDD and don't want to spend thousands to do it" the answer is to buy another HDD and mirror/clone it.

The reality is tape is still around because it already is and continues to be quite affordable (in addition to it's shelf-life/reliability), and in all likelihood (barring some breakthrough) going to outlast HDD's.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-20 08:09:25+00:00
This has given me decent success:

"Write simple, rigorous statements, starting from first principles, and making sure to take things to their logical conclusion. Write in straightforward prose, no bullet points and summaries. Avoid truisms and overly high-level statements. (Optionally) Assume that the reader {now put your original prompt whatever you had e.g 5 yo}"

Sometimes I write a few more lines with the same meaning as above, and sometimes less, they all work more or less OK. Randomly I get better results sometimes with small tweaks but nothing to make a pattern out of -- a useless endeavour anyway since these models change in minute ways every release, and in neural nets the blast radius of a small change is huge.
by pembrook | 2025-04-20 08:09:51+00:00
Great idea! The trick is to zoom into peoples clothing, and then the associated event becomes quite obvious. Eg. Photo of Disco, no crazy lapels, obviously towards the end of disco, which puts you within a year or two.

Might have gotten lucky but zooming in on clothing got me to 1.8 years off on average (top 2%).
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-20 08:10:14+00:00
They have the right to try to convince me to let them scrape me. Most of the time they're thinly veiled data traders. I haven't seen any new company try to scrape my stuff since maybe Kagi.

Kagi is welcome to scrape from their IP addresses. Other bots that behave are fine too (Huawei and various other Chinese bots don't and I've had to put an IP block on those).
by toasterlovin | 2025-04-20 08:12:06+00:00
> if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?
by alkonaut | 2025-04-20 08:14:01+00:00
I don’t really want to learn hundreds of different individual political platforms. It’s even a stretch to study 7-9 platforms. Instead I tick the party that is closest to my views but the individual that dissents on a specific issue, or who focuses on that particular issue I like. This is how you can, as a non member, try to steer the politics of the parties.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-20 08:14:25+00:00
When a random device on your network gets infected with crap like this, your network becomes a bot egress point, and anti bot networks respond appropriately. Cloudflare, Akamai, even Google will start showing CAPTCHAs for every website they protect when your network starts hitting random servers with scrapers or DDoS attacks.

This is even worse with CG-NAT if you don't have IPv6 to solve the CG-NAT problem.

I don't think the data they collect is used to train anything these days. Cloudflare is using AI generated images for CAPTCHAs and Google's actual CAPTCHAs are easier for bots than humans at this point (it's the passive monitoring that makes it still work a little bit).
by Calebp | 2025-04-20 08:15:04+00:00
It doesn't use a TEE or a real TPM. I may try to simulate a TPM to get a better feel for what working with that is like, or maybe use the secure enclave. The main thing the project demonstrates is verifying the integrity of files in one container to another container - similar to how measured boot work in remote attestation (or at least my understanding of it).
by closewith | 2025-04-20 08:16:31+00:00
I'd like to know which app and model you were using, along with the prompts.

We have had a steep learning curve in prompt preparation (what we're doing is certainly not engineering), but Claude Code is now one-shotting viable PRs in our legacy codebases that are, well, good.

Saying LLMs are only good for boilerplate acceleration is so far from my experience that it sounds absurd.
by anthk | 2025-04-20 08:17:02+00:00
And Lisps too, fitting a sector from a disk:

https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/

And probably a small forth too, with a dictionary defining every math word, something not so different to Lisp.

LLM's? 4GB of RAM? Your grampa's 486 with 16MB of RAM can do calculus too.
by markwrobel | 2025-04-20 08:17:26+00:00
> So as you see even Bajtek chief had to have a license to own mere C64.

This was not the experience of Poles in general in 1985 according to [1][2].

> "There is a wide range on offer at the Warsaw bazaar. There is everything from microcomputers and peripherals through software to services like repairs and hardware modifications. There is no problem with the availability of literature. [...] Among computers for sale the most popular are ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. [...] Certainly, software is also available.

The above quote is taken from the writing of Patryk Wasiak from 2014, with the title "Playing and copying: social practices of home computer users in Poland during the 1980s" [3].

In [3] there is also mentions of the frequent import of electronics by Poles visiting West Berlin. I find no one mentioning that the equipment bought on the Bazaars should be registered.

Finally, both Poland, and the Soviet Union, in the 80s allowed limited private enterprises in the realm of electronics. All sorts of clones of 8-bit computers, like the ZX Spectrum were available, including a rich ecosystem of peripherals. However, they were generations behind their western counterparts. Surely they were late in the game, but they did not lack creativity.

[1] Roman Poznański, “Informatyka na Perskim,” (Informatics on the Persian Bazaar) Bajtek (October 1985): 24-25.

[2] Link to scan of Bajtek October 1985 https://archive.org/details/bajtek_85_02/page/n23/mode/2up?v...

[3] (PDF) https://atarionline.pl/forum/?PostBackAction=Download&Attach...
by fleshmonad | 2025-04-20 08:18:32+00:00
When I was 8, I went to the library in our town a lot. My parents went there sometime to return their books. At some point I just stayed there when they would go home. First I was in the children/teenager section and soon in the general library, where I would read about programming and computers. I learned C by age of nine.

The "undeveloped PFC" argument is shallow, unspecific and usually just used to infantilize younger people. It may be useful if the child is under 6 years old, but at the time someone is 17 or older, it becomes essentially useless.

My learning process was always, and still is fueled by curiosity.
by achenet | 2025-04-20 08:18:56+00:00
my viewpoint is that the human ability to cooperate effectively is why there's currently 8+ billion of us on earth and chimpanzees are an endangered species.

Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage.

Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana".

Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species.
by eastbound | 2025-04-20 08:19:26+00:00
Any proof of why it is best?

I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much.

Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, otherwise we’ll all become fat americans.
by XorNot | 2025-04-20 08:20:02+00:00
The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.

Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).

Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]

[1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-explained/
by nickcw | 2025-04-20 08:21:27+00:00
In my opinion, not allowing circular dependencies is a great design choice for building large programs. It forces you to separate your concerns properly.

If you get a circular dependency something is wrong with your design and the article does a good job on how to fix them.

I sometimes use function pointers which other packages override to fix circular dependencies which I don't think was mentioned in the article.

My only wish is that the go compiler gave more helpful output when you make a circular dependency. Currently it gives a list of all the packages involved in the loop which can be quite long, though generally it is the last thing you changed which caused the problem.
by renerick | 2025-04-20 08:22:43+00:00
Explaining loops is independent of the concepts of collections though. It's also more general, since map/filter/reduce use some kind of loops under the hood anyway, the fact that probably shouldn't be ignored in education process. Unless of course you go with pure functional recursive iterator, but good luck explaining that one.

Maps and filters also require understanding of higher order functions and the very idea of passing function around as a value. I would argue that implementing map/filter with a loop and then demonstrating how this pattern is generalized as .map()/.filter() functions is better and more accessible
by laserbeam | 2025-04-20 08:22:57+00:00
I first found it hilarious that there are 9 authors for a 10 person experiment, but I double checked.

There are multiple experiments with 82 total participants. One of those experiments does indeed have a sample size of 10.

Yup, this is still “wait and see”. For these kinds of papers my stance is: “cool read, I won’t click the share button”.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-20 08:23:53+00:00
I don't want computers to know everything. Most knowledge on the internet is false and entirely useless.

The companies selling us computers that supposedly know everything should pay for their database, or they should give away the knowledge they gained for free. Right now, the scraping and copying is free and the knowledge is behind a subscription to access a proprietary model that forms the basis of their business.

Humanity doesn't benefit, the snake oil salesmen do.
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 08:26:12+00:00
Hetzner is a great service, but what you're pitching is in no way a solution tailored for the aforementioned usecase.

We're talking long term cold storage backup medium, as in meant to last many years.

SX65, Storagebox, and Backblaze are not cold storage. SX65 would be $7000 over 5 years for 80TB without redundancy. You could get an LTO-7 or even 8 drive and many times SX65's storage for less, and have literal hundreds if not thousands left over for compute or whatever else with no recurring cost. Hell you could get an autoloader all-in-one tape library with tapes to fill it for less than that. There are absolutely scenarios where SX65/Storagebox/Backblaze/Cloud-hosted-storage makes sense and is a decent value, but this isn't one of them. If you want off-site cold storage, Glacier handily beats them with money and TB's to spare.

If you want always-on and available "warmer" storage, great, but that's an entirely separate discussion/usecase.
by RossBencina | 2025-04-20 08:26:24+00:00
> "And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday. [last week]

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...

The entire Council on Foreign Relations on stage chat is on YouTube.
by gyomu | 2025-04-20 08:26:36+00:00
Kids tend to want to partake of their own initiative in activities that are 1) physical, and 2) that they see adults themselves do.

Hunting in wilderness is a good example; so are sports, cooking, crafts, etc.

But unfortunately not all important activities that kids need to learn to become well adjusted adults in our modern societies fit those 2 criteria.

Point 2) can be hacked to an extent by modeling the behavior yourself - eg kids who see adults read books are more likely to want to read themselves.