MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gcanyon | 2025-04-17 15:16:58+00:00
> It has an effective context window of 2M tokens, and can index projects of 20M tokens and beyond using tree-sitter project maps (30+ languages are supported). It can effectively find relevant context in massive million-line projects like SQLite, Redis, and Git.

Does this possibly have non-coding-related utility for general reasoning about large volumes of text?
by gruntbuggly | 2025-04-17 15:17:04+00:00
Probably my only good advice is to not take internet advice too seriously, which I'm sure you are aware of. The most epistemologically sound advice i can give is try everything and find what works for you. Lots of internet people advocate for low carb approaches for many apparently valid reasons. Recently, i tried eating whole food plant based and it's been an amazing 2 weeks (yes incredibly short time to report). I'm not trying that hard, i'm eating well, and feel amazing. If i keep going I'll probably supplement protein, vitamin b, omegas, fish, etc, but my weight is just falling off so far, unlike any other eating plan i've tried. Not super strict either. Eating whatever i want when i eat out, but i like how it makes me feel so i tend to stick with it when possible. Your mileage will vary. It's literally 2 weeks so far lol
by setgree | 2025-04-17 15:17:21+00:00
I don't think I'm just saying that. I'd say instead:

1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high.

2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't.

(I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
by haswell | 2025-04-17 15:17:32+00:00
> but these demands aren't going to go away

To me, this just means that we must remain vigilant. The slow creep towards authoritarianism isn’t going to go away either. The solution is not to look for reasonable ways for authoritarian rules to exist. Continuous harmful pressure must be met with continuous resistance.

> Every society is a compromise between anarchic freedom and authoritarian tyranny

Except not every society is such a compromise. Some are fully under authoritarian control, and serve as a warning for others who are tempted by authoritarian ideas.

> this is another discussion about how a (relatively) new set of technologies can fit into that compromise in a way that is acceptable and reasonable.

Breaking encryption need not inherently be part of that compromise. And until someone can explain how breaking encryption will actually stop the kind of bad actors used to justify such a direction (vs. driving them deeper underground, i.e. even if you outlaw encryption, it’s not as if law breakers will obey such a law), I see no merit in entertaining such a compromise. The crimes being committed are already illegal.

> It's frankly a bit of an article of faith in our community that encryption == unalloyed good

I don’t think most people in our community see it as inherently/perfectly good, but as extremely important and necessary. This is a critical distinction. As with everything, there are harms that come with the good, and such is the nature of all things. The question becomes: are the harms allowed worse than the good that is preserved? And would the new harms of disallowing the status quo be potentially worse than the harms supposedly prevented?

> I think we'd be right to think more critically about that position.

I agree that we need to think critically about this. But clearly we disagree about what one should conclude from such a critical analysis. I’d argue that taking the position that the government needs more power - especially at this moment in history - is the result of not thinking critically enough.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-17 15:17:57+00:00
Similar adaptions occur in muscle. The extent of new muscle fiber development (hyperplasia) is debated, so there are multiples factors influencing how muscle retains some memory of past strength ability.

Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.

For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
by kxyvr | 2025-04-17 15:18:54+00:00
Automatic differentiation was actively and continuously used in some communities for the last 40 years. Louis Rall has an entire book about it published in 1981. One of the more popular books on AD written by Griewank was published in 2000. I learned about it in university in the early 2000s. I do agree that the technology was not as well used as it should have been until more recently, but the technology was well known within numerical math world and used continuously over the years.
by RHSeeger | 2025-04-17 15:18:55+00:00
The goal of the system as a whole should be to help people live better lives. That includes providing the knowledge for people to do the jobs that help society function. And whatever is needed to help them convince employers to hire them (ie, credentials). And (hopefully) other knowledge that helps them in a more general way (ie, the various generic classes that teach non-domain knowledge).

The fact that public colleges are a credentialing system is (supposed) to be in pursuit of the above; not the end goal. If we can find ways to help them achieve the above that doesn't actually need credentialing, that should be fine, too. I don't know if that's possible (or even a goal); but it's important to be able to distinguish between the actual goal and what we're trying to do (atm) to achieve them.
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-17 15:19:35+00:00
I remember 40-30 years ago I heard exactly the same thing we hear about TikTok from parents leaving their kids in front of the TV 4 to 10 hours a day.

It was something like "The Japanese plan is to make our children stupid with their animations to overtake us"

It might be true but also you don't put your child in front of the TV at 3 years old...

It is like serving them beer and then blaming the Belgians for turning our kids into alcoholics.
by enslavedrobot | 2025-04-17 15:19:45+00:00
Well lots of institutions hold hundreds of billions worth of the stock. It's easy to forget that the easiest person to fool is yourself.

There were equally compelling reasons for me to think that Google, Amazon, and Apple were wildly over valued in the 2000s. I was dead wrong.

When evaluating a stock's value it's always important to look for reasons you're wrong instead of minimizing contradictory data.

One data point of interest is that for the past few weeks Tesla cars built in Texas have been driving unsupervised from the factory across the highway to the end of line facility on uncontrolled roads. So far 50k miles without incident. They are also driving unsupervised at the Fremont factory.
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 15:19:51+00:00
If you start calling out things that are clearly not that then you start looking like a crazy person and lose credibility. We have a popular children's story about this called The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Maybe take a few minutes to actually read the piece and look at what else the author has written before jumping to the conclusion that they're just part of Trump's propaganda machine.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-17 15:19:57+00:00
> A “white celebration” would be deemed to create a hostile learning environment.

> Under a fair application of the civil rights laws, it would be improper to have any university sanctioned race consciousness.

Who would deem a white celebration would create a hostile learning environment? Harvard? Would courts not require evidence? Or courts? They had a double standard before but would not now?

Would this apply to all protected characteristics? Why not if not? Why did you discuss race only if so?
by Lendal | 2025-04-17 15:20:04+00:00
It's not that I don't care. I don't know how real it is. Bad faith arguments and pseudoscience are ubiquitous.

When I was growing up the same types of people were saying that D&D was a demonic movement meant to turn kids to satanic rituals so I never got to play D&D. Rock music had subliminal messages that were converting children into zombies but I listened to it anyway and that's how I discovered that most adults were full of shit and straight-up lying to us. There's so much garbage out there that separating the noise from true threats is an overwhelming task for most average people.
by obscurette | 2025-04-17 15:20:26+00:00
It's not much better with adults. I see it even with people in my age (I'm in my sixties). I take long walks (several hours) with my dog and if I tell about it to people the same age as me, a common question follows – "What headphones you use?". I don't use headphones, it's only me with my thoughts. And people say that they can't do it (any more).
by neonsunset | 2025-04-17 15:20:35+00:00
FWIW WinRT / WinUI 3 was ported onto NativeAOT (9). There is are greater ongoing efforts[0] to make the two play nice together from the people working in Windows. But I think it's just efforts from specific individuals who care and the outcome solely relies on their motivation and continued employment, and is not facilitated by the org or its culture in any way, if anything, it happens despite it.

[0]: For example https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/114024
by gh0stcat | 2025-04-17 15:20:42+00:00
I actually think I communicated my point incorrectly, I also agree with you, I meant more that at least if you had some guidance as a child and your environment wasn't so antagonistic, you might have a fighting chance, not even that you will definitely succeed. We see it now with food deserts, etc. It's a challenging environment to navigate when you have all of this "freedom". :p
by eduction | 2025-04-17 15:21:06+00:00
My impression at least watching chatter over the last several years isn’t that it has a bad reputation but rather that people haven’t found a need for it, atoms are good enough for vast bulk of shared mutable state. Heck even Datomic, an actual bona fide database, doesn’t need STM it’s apparently all just an atom.

But I’ve never heard someone say it messed up in any way, that it was buggy or hard to use or failed to deliver on its promises.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-17 15:21:08+00:00
>Projects that were stopped after Harvard rejected the government’s demands include a $60 million contract supporting an international study of tuberculosis, a $15.2 million project to develop treatments for long-term radiation exposure like the kind cancer patients experience in radiation therapy, a $3.2 million study on the effects of microgravity and radiation in space on human cells, and a $700,100 project to detect ALS early.

https://archive.today/latest/www.wsj.com/us-news/education/h...
by cootsnuck | 2025-04-17 15:21:37+00:00
Very good read. They've articulated points I keep trying to express to people.

I think their stances and predictions will start to be held by more and more people as the illusion / frenzy / FUD from the current..."fog" created by all the AI hype and mystique subsides. It may take another year or two, but public discourse eventually adapts/tires of repeated notions of "the sky is falling" once enough time has piled up without convincing evidence.
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-17 15:21:41+00:00
Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc.

I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
by ben7799 | 2025-04-17 15:22:03+00:00
I can't remember exactly what I was listening to, maybe some kind of NPR podcast.

But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.

Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
by jimbob45 | 2025-04-17 15:22:08+00:00
Because if Hamas isn’t victimizing themselves as hard as possible, everyone will remember that they abducted, raped, and maimed 1500 people at a concert. And then refused to apologize. And took hostages. And still have the hostages.

I guess the closest analog is the rape of Nanking? I don’t think Japan ever truly apologized or even properly acknowledged it and I’d definitely still be salty if I was a Chinaman today. That said, the Japanese got nuked twice and lost their dignity in a number of other ways.

Edit: I forgot about the 6+ million Chinese the Japanese wiped out in WW2! WW2 China really is what Palestine thinks it is today.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-17 15:22:33+00:00
The admin demonstrates very little rational reason. Demanding a purge of American history, banning words from research, insisting private colleges control student speech, end so called DEI programs, and demanding to install their own crony shits in the faculty... The list goes on and on with madness that is beyond reason.

The reason to be a pig headed totalitarian mind-controlling gaslighting bully over this particular man is because being a bully requires putting on a strong front, requires avoiding or besting challenges. Alas, this admin is a bully staring down the Constitution and all America.
by CharlesW | 2025-04-17 15:22:44+00:00
Great read, thanks for posting. What I like about it is that while it notes Haidt's ideas get flimsier the closer they're examined, it also thoughtfully gives him credit for a more important observation — that the increasing loss of societal structure is the actual and larger problem (and seemingly the target of his next book), with social media as one of many symptoms or contributors, depending on how you look at it.
by qwerpy | 2025-04-17 15:22:49+00:00
I completely agree (I use yt-dlp to download curated content onto VLC on the iPad) but in practice, for two working parents and 2+ kids, there are often times where you're too exhausted to do anything but plop them in front of screen so you can take a sanity break / do some chores / prep meals / etc.

I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury.

"If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
by onetimeusename | 2025-04-17 15:24:01+00:00
I am surprised how common it is for younger women and teenagers to receive requests for gifting and get sexualized comments which this article mentions. I don't see a lot of people talking about it but I think it would really warp someone's mind to be under 18 and be receiving requests for foot pics, "spoiling", and more. I've wanted to put this out there for a long time but felt like no one wanted to talk about it.
by aisenik | 2025-04-17 15:24:25+00:00
You should probably dig through your right-wing propaganda outlet's database to support your position so you can provide cites to be responded to. I'm certainly not going to read through a hundred reports like "Antifa demands [person] be fired" and "Professor says he was fired for using N-word" to make your argument for you.

Absent providing evidence of your claims, it seems reasonable to conclude that your position is unsupportable.
by jgeada | 2025-04-17 15:24:41+00:00
Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!

Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.

Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.

While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-17 15:25:32+00:00
Yeah. From time to time, you hear that reading books is somehow obsolete, and that valuing books reflects an undue emphasis on medium rather than content. This view is mistaken. The form in which information is delivered is not irrelevant to how it is processed, understood, or retained. There is a crucial difference between sustained engagement with a coherent body of thought and the piecemeal consumption of isolated informational fragments.

Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.
by crabbone | 2025-04-17 15:25:44+00:00
Our neighbor told this story about her mom. They are both French, but the daughter lives in the Netherlands for about a decade. The mom lives in France.

The mom came to visit her daughter during COVID and while eating something bought from the local supermarket, she noticed that the food has a very weak taste if any at all. COVID was said to impact one's sense of taste or smell. So, upon returning to France, she went to take a test and... she didn't have COVID. In fact was completely healthy :)

I went to France last summer. And... truth be told, I don't taste the difference between Dutch vegetables and French vegetables. To me they are both fine. The bread on the other hand is on a completely different level.

Anyways. I don't really know what may be causing these perceived differences in taste. But, I have a theory that it's a learned thing. Maybe our sensors adapt to a particular food and then a very small change overall can affect them in a major way?
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 15:26:27+00:00
Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.

I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.

For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
by thechao | 2025-04-17 15:26:28+00:00
This is my gut reaction; but, then I've been looking at Barcelona — which has analogs in New Jersey and Chicago. In these three cities there used to be significant housing stock that could be affordably purchased by low income families. (These are row-houses and 2x3s, etc.) In Barcelona, for instance, a unit could be purchased by a single family earner in about 5–8 years. What happened, over time, was that a neighbor would move out, and so a tenant would buy the neighboring unit to "expand" (remember: the units are cheap). Over a period of 25–30 years a relatively modest income could be used to gradually buy up an entire unit. Then, at the end of that period the whole unit would be sold as a single family dwelling. The problem is that what was once 6 modest (affordable) units, is now a single fantastically expensive unit. The economic model that covers this is a deflationary zero-sum market. (Pretty much all real estate is going to fall into this trap without very careful consideration.)

I think this problem is much, much, much harder than most people think. Almost every single society — except for Japan, AFAICT — is getting hit by this issue, but each in their own, novel way, that covers every possible "obvious" solution.
by ben7799 | 2025-04-17 15:26:50+00:00
It happens because we act like calories are calories when it's clearly not true.

Calorie counts in nutrition data are generated by something like burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. Which is most definitely not what our bodies do. We have all kinds of different biochemical ways of metabolizing different types of foods.

So someone eating 1000 calories of day could be eating very healthy or they could be ingesting a whole bunch of garbage full of sweeteners. It doesn't seem like anyone really understands how it works but all those sweeteners are more likely to make you gain weight.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-17 15:27:06+00:00
Yeah, I earn well over US median, and just going from evidence in the essay I'm pretty sure the author makes more than I do, but that we both earn less than her sense of "Technical" (US coastal big-tech workers that get programmer-scale salaries) which makes the attempts to connect this to struggles due to sex and gender identity and race and SES background fall pretty damn flat for me.

Incidentally, the photo at the top of the piece would make for really good "rich coastal tech worker" in-group signaling.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-04-17 15:27:08+00:00
Agreed, I find platform DMs completely unnecessary. If I want to solicit messages from people I don't know, I'll just publish an email address. A semi-disposable one if I'm worried about too much volume. On the occasion I've received a DM on Twitter, it generates an email to notify me that I've received a DM, but I can't reply to the email to reply to the person. Wastage.