MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noduerme | 2025-04-21 05:22:31+00:00
Is calling a massive embedded JS obfuscator a "VM" a bit of a stretch? Ultimately it's not translating anything to a lower-level language.

Still, I had no idea. This is really taking JS obfuscation to the next level.

One kind of wonders, what is the purpose of that level of obfuscation? The naive take is that obfuscation is usually to protect intellectual property... but this is client-side code that wouldn't give away anything about their secret sauce algorithm.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-21 05:23:00+00:00
> You're just making things up.

Sounds like you can't provide any response to that. Hopefully you've heard about "at will" before and how that works in US. So far it sounds like you're making stuff up or are talking about some other country or region.

> You're mistaking plausibility with convincingness.

That's exactly what you're confusing. Some juries can be convinced but doesn't mean that it's a winnable strategy. How many people are laid off across the US and how feasible is for them to bring up lawsuits and how many would be won with the current laws?

The only exception to this perhaps are the ADA laws, where one can show that the workplace has not accommodated a worker properly. (The ramp is not there / the elevator doesn't have the buttons at the correct height etc). But here we're talking about DEI initiatives not ADA.

> They can and a jury can still think that was not the actual reason someone was fired.

Here you're again mistaking plausibility with convincingness. Just because it's plausible something could have happened, say a person was "managed out" because they were DEI hire, without some evidence convincing the majority of the jury won't work, based on a hunch. That's just not how it works. We can discuss some fantasy world where all the citizens are righteous activists and fight back against the system or the how it usually works out in the real world.
by perching_aix | 2025-04-21 05:25:37+00:00
Perhaps it wasn't clear what I meant. When I said significantly, I meant it in the colloquial sense, not in the statistical significance sense.

I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).
by noduerme | 2025-04-21 05:25:58+00:00
A generous take would be that they have their own internal GUI tools that make it easier for non-programmers to set up visual elements in this. That was historically the reason to invent VMs like Flash. A less generous take would account for the enormous potential for hiding nefarious code inside such a thing, and account for the nature of the government which deployed it, and conclude that it was a national security / defense project disguised as a candy-coated trojan horse.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-04-21 05:26:53+00:00
I would have cut Microsoft a lot of slack if the purpose of Windows 11 was to cut down on the sheer amount of cruft and legacy jank that Windows has acquired over the years.

Alas, Windows 11 is merely rounded corners, a worse file explorer, telemetry galore, and a mandatory Microsoft account meant to hock OneDrive and Copilot on unsuspecting laypersons everywhere.

Even simple applications like calculator and photo viewer now launch with a noticeable delay, no doubt because they have to try and communicate with some Microsoft service somewhere in the cloud before letting someone use an application locally.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-21 05:27:10+00:00
How does centralizing and nationalizing innately lead to less of a grind? I wasn’t thinking about that aspect when I wrote my comment.

Life seems like work to me. I think I live in a country that’s fortunate enough to get to believe otherwise, but when we factor in all of the externalities of our goods and services, there’s a tremendous amount of work and environmental debt (future labour) occurring. If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
by godelski | 2025-04-21 05:27:29+00:00
> I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.

If anything, businesses just turn into entities indistinguishable from governments as they grow. It would be weird if anything different happened. They're long living entities with massive populations. Should be unsurprising that they converge to similar solutions. But I think the key difference is corporations have fewer incentives to care about the general public (take what you will about government incentives to care about the public but certainly corporations have less incentives. It's much rarer for public to storm into a corporate headquarters with the intent to take it over)
by max__dev | 2025-04-21 05:27:36+00:00
I think that framing makes the argument vacuous. If an action is framed as murder, how would OP defend in the first place? Any argument would be tough to carry. It would be arguing against a tautology. You are right to mention how the "debate" here is people asserting their arguments.

What I find most tough to carry is the consequent: there are ~600,000 (rough number of abortions per year in USA) people "murdering" their own "children" every single year. I suppose in the process of putting their faith in god these people have removed all their faith in humanity...
by rurp | 2025-04-21 05:27:42+00:00
The first time I noticed one of these errors I was pretty shocked to have spotted a clear error while casually watching a show. Now that I know to look for these types of inconsistencies though I see them all the freaking time. It's surprising how often an actor's positioning bounces back and forth between shot angles, to the point that now it distracts me from what I'm watching at times.
by fakedang | 2025-04-21 05:29:03+00:00
> it takes time (and effort) before you find the joy in it.

And the right mentor.

I distinctly remember that for my master's thesis, I had initially chosen a topic that I loved deeply, but getting constantly rebuffed by my supervising professor who constantly berated me and insulted my intelligence led me to not only hate the dissertation topic (not to mention him also), but hate that field which I loved so much.

I later switched topics, to a very different field, under a professor who actually took stride in and complimented my achievements however meagre they were. Net result, we've collaborated on multiple papers together and even after 10 years or so, consider each other friends instead of a mere teacher-student relationship.

I could give multiple anecdotes in other completely unrelated fields, from painting and art to driving a stick. Guides and teachers matter in finding the joy in things, even more so than the time invested.
by pmontra | 2025-04-21 05:32:08+00:00
It's strange that they didn't write about the Erlang /Elixir approach of

1. returning a tuple with an ok or fail value (so errors as values) plus

2. pattern matching on return values (which makes error values bearable) possibly using the with do end macro plus

3. failing on unmatched errors and trying again to execute the failed operation (fail fast) thanks to supervision trees.

Maybe that's because the latter feature is not available nearly for free in most runtimes and because Erlang style pattern matching is also uncommon.

The approach requires a language that's built on those concepts and not one in which they are added unnaturally as an afterthought (the approach becomes burdensome.)

Pattern matching: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/pattern-matching.html

With: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.18.1/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#wi...

Supervisors: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.18.1/supervisor-and-application....
by therealpygon | 2025-04-21 05:32:23+00:00
Unfortunately, that argument tends to break down almost immediately after birth, so “protecting the children” becomes a cheap catch-all excuse for selective engagement. Defunding education, defunding school food, defunding numerous programs that actually protect children in favor of cash in their pocket. Morality sold cheaply or abandoned for convenience, except when forcing their will on others, especially if it only affects someone else.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-21 05:32:48+00:00
They’re regular human beings. If we believe we’re stronger than them, I think we should stand up for them rather than laugh at them.

One could just as easily write something like “lol anyone who leaves disparaging comments on the internet is so weak. Imagine not being able to resist ridiculing unfortunate people”. But the world is more nuanced than that. It requires a more constructive attitude. And it requires people looking out for one another. We can care about the people who can’t resist a random website. It was designed to be hard to resist by intelligent, competent people. It’s meant to exploit their weaknesses.
by Too | 2025-04-21 05:32:51+00:00
How well does this work on unknown code bases?

The tutorial on requests looks uncanny for being generated with no prior context. The use cases and examples it gives are too specific. It is making up terminology, for concepts that are not mentioned once in the repository, like "functional api" and "hooks checkpoints". There must be thousands of tutorials on requests online that every AI was already trained on. How do we know that it is not using them?
by safety1st | 2025-04-21 05:33:42+00:00
That is not the only possible explanation. A more likely explanation imho is that social media falls into the long list of things you do for a short term reward even though you know you shouldn't, like smoking a cigarette or getting drunk.

You know it is not good for you but your executive function and ability to plan long term are compromised (whether chronically or acutely), so you do it anyway, and regret it later.
by rsync | 2025-04-21 05:33:45+00:00
Score 4753 Top 2% Avg. Years Off. 3.0

I didn't really recognize any of the current events - or anything at all - I just ... kind of knew ...

In fact, it had less to do with the actual content of the photo than the qualities of the photo itself ... I sort of felt like photos looked like that around 1990 ... and I was right.
by barnabee | 2025-04-21 05:33:50+00:00
Markets are tools.

They are good at some things (allocating resources, adapting to changing supply and demand, revealing preferences and discovering prices, incentivising innovation and socially useful risk taking, …)

and bad at others (ensuring new entrants don’t repeatedly make the same safety mistakes, preventing exploitation of customers, protecting IP, solving for long term social needs, maintaining national resilience against threats, preventing waste…)

Fetishisation of markets is the issue.

Though markets and generally free trade are incredibly important and have brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) great benefits to humanity, they also have downsides, and other tools (regulation, taxation, industrial strategy, …) are needed to balance these.

This is one such case. The market is creating downsides that society should not tolerate.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-21 05:34:26+00:00
> it makes the rest of the code balloon out with enormous lists of exceptions

That's mostly developer laziness: They write a layer that calls the exception-throwing code, but they don't want to to think about how to model the problem in their own level of abstraction. "Leaking" them upwards by slapping on a "throws" clause is one of the lowest-effort reactions.

What ought to happen is that each layer has its own exception classes, capturing its own model for what kinds of things can go wrong and what kinds of distinctions are necessary. These would abstract-away the lower-level ones, but carrying them along as linked "causes" so that diagnostic detail isn't lost when it comes time for bug-reports.

Ex: If I'm writing a tool to try to analyze and recommend music that has to handle multiple different file types, I might catch an MP3 library's Mp3TagCorruptException and wrap it into my own FileFormatException.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-21 05:37:16+00:00
First, I was an avid Facebook user. I cared about what photos I put up, my status updates, what groups I was in, the lot.

Then life got busy and somewhat difficult, and I had no more time for this. Still, I'd occasionally go on Facebook and get really down. I'd see all my "friends" living it up, having fun etc while I was stuck in my rut. Very depressing.

But then, a few things happened. One, I understood it's really all fake. Two, all my real human friends stopped using Facebook, basically. And anyway, Facebook now just shows me AI slop that is nothing to do with anything - weird videos, people definitely shutting down a 5000 year old family business, you-wont-believe-what-she-did videos etc. Not that I use it much, just some friends for whatever reason are still on Messenger.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-21 05:37:33+00:00
Very low quality article, seems to be a growing issue with grist.

The numbers are incorrect, and some of the word phrasing suggests it may be AI generated.

They market themselves as independent media, several of the articles I've see so far seem to be misinformed, or pushing a false narrative.

A dozen eggs in March, 2025 was at $15, not $6, it dropped to $6 when the DOJ initiated a price fixing investigation, the announcement of which was also in March.
by willtemperley | 2025-04-21 05:39:40+00:00
Unfortunately, governments are highly incentivised to allow mandatory on-device spyware to feed your location into the global information market.

Why run a sophisticated surveillance and information retrieval system when a you can just ask big-tech for the data for free, or buy from the market at a fraction of the running cost of a dedicated system?

Personally I think the best way to combat this is for concerned people to build businesses with privacy as a feature. Dumb TVs, dumb washing machines etc.
by toast0 | 2025-04-21 05:42:20+00:00
> Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.

OTOH, it's fun to watch for goofs in movies, and if they're fixed up, then there's less reason to watch some of these movies.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-04-21 05:43:14+00:00
If this system subsumes successful iterations it becomes more efficient. I would prefer a system that spreads out and flattens the profit curve. If you want to be a big genius and have a house 5x bigger than any in your community then you should actually work for it. Join the toilet paper co-op or whatever the fuck and iterate. I would like to see "risk" entirely eliminated. You either work your job, or you apply for a grant.

Risk is a stupid thing. There are plenty of insanely smart people who will not rock the boat because they do not want to undertake risk and so we lose out on their productivity. We've created a thunderdome where only the most callous and pathological survive and win, anyone else gets crushed.

>If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.

We are living inside of the externality of a small group of peoples pathologies.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-21 05:43:39+00:00
I am astounded at how much this short, humorous quote from Philip Dick's "Ubik" was prescient:

"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
by kacesensitive | 2025-04-21 05:44:39+00:00
A 0.060 standard deviation improvement is super small. If the average person rates their happiness/anxiety/depression score at, say, 50 out of 100, and the standard deviation (how spread out people’s scores are) is around 10 points, then 0.060 SD = 0.6 points. So quitting Facebook gave an average person a ~1% bump in mood score. Instagram was even smaller: ~0.4 points, or 0.8%.

It's real, but barely noticeable for most people—unless you're in a more affected subgroup (e.g. undecided voters or younger women). Your experience feeling way better likely means you were an outlier (in a good way).
by steventhedev | 2025-04-21 05:46:07+00:00
It means that there is a statistically significant improvement, but that improvement is tiny, and will not make you happier than your peers all by itself (assuming a standard peer group of 200 people - you'd likely swap places with 1 or 2 people).

Of course, this study only considered normative people, not marginalized or those who were experiencing active harm from exposure to social media - your personal results may vary and it's important to remember that science is imperfect and social sciences are doubly so.

If going off Facebook improves your life - you do you.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-21 05:46:22+00:00
Your comment is proof to the contrary. You are thus lying and everything you say or do is now severely tainted. I will now produce a seven-pronged argument for why exactly this type of behavior is the hidden root cause of climate change and why you should feel bad. (/s)

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.
by mmooss | 2025-04-21 05:47:50+00:00
If I understand you, just read the paper for its analysis and interpretation of those numbers.

Alternatively, you'll want to grasp the meaning of "standard deviation" (you're right that you can't multiply all standard deviations by a number and get a percentage - and a percentage of what?), and then find the "index of happiness, depression, and anxiety" they use and grasp its meaning.
by 8s2ngy | 2025-04-21 05:47:55+00:00
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.
by sinuhe69 | 2025-04-21 05:48:02+00:00
For me, AGI is like a human assistant. I can ask it to do useful things that one would face in daily life. Like doing a bit of research about something. What I mean by doing research is not just Google it but also asking questions, calling people and using other resources. Say I need a new type of windows for my project. For a human assistant, I’d give a few instructions and the assistant will go his way. He will make sure that the windows types are locally available, or deliverable with minimal cost depends on my needs. He/she will know if some types is good enough and will pick the phone and ask questions if something is not clear.

It’s obvious that currently none of the SOTA models can do such tasks, agentic or not. And therefore they are NOT AGI to me.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-21 05:48:05+00:00
Austral's specification is one of the most beautiful and well-written pieces of documentation I have ever found. It's section on error handling in Austral[0] cover everything from rationale and alternatives to concrete examples of how exceptions should be handled in conjunction with linear types.

https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html#rationale-errors
by cyberax | 2025-04-21 05:48:17+00:00
Preventing increase in _density_ leads to better outcomes long-term.

It sounds crazy, right? Supply/demand, and all of that.

But it's an example of one of the things in economics where the effects end up being different because of collective actions. As a result, no large growing city within the US within the last 30 years managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density. I checked that using the Census statistics database.

And no, Austin (TX) doesn't count. It decreased prices by decreasing the _population_.
by djmips | 2025-04-21 05:49:01+00:00
So I was curious about the Japanese domestic version and it was called Desk Top 144 - I've found a Japanese instruction paper with that name. It's also shown here amongst a dizzying array of SKUs including a mobile unit!

https://www.theoldrobots.com/images6/ar04.JPG

https://www.theoldrobots.com/armatron2.html
by colechristensen | 2025-04-21 05:49:06+00:00
Even if it's statistically significant, it's a laughably tiny effect.

Like have one nice meal or a one walk in the woods 2 months ago and rate your mood today kind of effect size.

0.06 std deviation is not anything to write home about and really doubtfully real, given the general quality of psychological science.

Perhaps, how much better of a day would you have if you found a dollar on the ground.
by methuselah_in | 2025-04-21 05:51:15+00:00
Well, let me tell you its far better. I had been using in collage upto 2013 i suppose. It use to make me sick in multiple ways. Now i use mastodon, almost same goes with it as well. But i just check things in mastodon which you can check without signing up as well. The Urge to check news multiple times a day is there. But i am getting hang of it. I didn't knew that how these companies suck your brain. With adblock and using just few times the phone makes me feel better.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-21 05:51:41+00:00
Interesting. versine has a lovely and intuitive geometric definition. If you construct a right triangle from the origin to some point on the circle, most people who have done trig will know that the x-coordinate of that point is r cos theta, where theta is the angle and r is the radius. Geometrically the distance from the origin to where the triangle rests on the x axis is r cos theta. But what about the rest of that radius? ie the line segment on the x-axis from there to where the circle intersects the x-axis?

That is r versin theta (ie r - r cos theta). Pretty cool no? I mean I've literally never had to find the length of that line, but that's how you would if you wanted to..
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-21 05:52:00+00:00
They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value.

There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-21 05:54:35+00:00
> In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.

The fact that when I die nobody will care about my porn collection is deeply unsettling. I'm saying this seriously, because it's something I enjoy so much, yet nobody else cares.