MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by luckylion | 2025-04-06 14:35:00+00:00
Money is much easier to combine though. You can convince 1000 people to each donate $100 and now you have a sizeable amount to run a campaign. Convincing _and coordinating_ 1000 people to each talk to five neighbors is _much_ harder, and much less effective since the messaging will be all over the place.

Strict regulation of ads is one thing, outlawing advertising is another. There are places that don't allow billboards and other street-level advertisement, but that's a long way from outlawing advertisements in general.

I get that it's a nice idea to many, but I follow a general rule of adding extra skepticism if the problems of some approach are absolutely obvious and the response to pointing them out is "don't worry about, that'll sort itself out, let's just do it". Especially when the collateral damage might be huge and the energy feels like "this will save us".
by lightedman | 2025-04-06 14:35:09+00:00
"It’s not just that self-driving cars in general are dangerous for motorcycles, either: this problem is unique to Tesla. Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame."

Doesn't matter when mileage isn't what's being compared - it's whether or not others have caused the same problem - PERIOD.
by Terretta | 2025-04-06 14:35:53+00:00
Abstract

Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element). Recent studies have suggested that animals lack nontrivial compositionality, representing a key discontinuity with language. In this work, using methods borrowed from distributional semantics, we investigated compositionality in wild bonobos and found that not only does each call type of their repertoire occur in at least one compositional combination, but three of these compositional combinations also exhibit nontrivial compositionality. These findings suggest that compositionality is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system, revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv1170
by imrehg | 2025-04-06 14:36:44+00:00
I still have my Thinkpad X201 from 2011 running, and I use it as my personal machine (have an M1 MacBook from/for work).

Of course, had to replace the hard drive once or twice, replaced the whole motherboard once[0], and even though it's 64-bit, the CPU arch (Westmere) lacks some instructions that make some things non-functional (MongoDB, some Steam games don't start), and I had to limit the CPU frequency so it doesn't go into thermal shutdown. Nonetheless it's a joy to use still, and I boot it up with pleasure every time...

Thinking when will I pull the trigger on a Framework, though at least I don't feel the pressure too much just yet. :)

[0]: https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherb...
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-06 14:37:08+00:00
There’s controversy about this book - claims that some or all of it was fabricated. Terrible book to teach the holocaust with since a lot of gen Z or alpha either doesn’t think the holocaust happened or thinks it should have been worse. Giving them a book of fabrications plays into this narrative.

“ Franklin argues that the power of the narrative was achieved at the cost of literal truth, and that to insist that the work is purely factual is to ignore its literary sophistication”

“

Wiesel wrote in 1967 about a visit to a rebbe (a Hasidic rabbi) who he had not seen for 20 years. The rebbe is upset to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. "Stories," Wiesel tells him, " ... true stories": About people you knew? "Yes, about people I might have known." About things that happened? "Yes, about things that happened or could have happened." But they did not? "No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end." The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: That means you are writing lies! I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred."[68]“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(memoir)

It was the same year that I read this crap book that they forced me to read Lolita by Nabokov. I realized that year that “classic literature” was decadent and degenerate - and often so were my teachers!
by Fannon | 2025-04-06 14:37:40+00:00
Thanks for posting the reddit comment, it nicely explains the line of thinking and the current adoption of MCP seems to confirm this.

Still, I think it should only be an option, not a necessity to create an MCP API around existing APIs. Sure, you can do REST APIs really badly and OpenAPI has a lot of issues in describing the API (for example, you can't even express the concept of references / relations within and across APIs!).

REST APIs also don't have to be generic CRUD, you could also follow the DDD idea of having actions and services, that are their own operation, potentially grouping calls together and having a clear "business semantics" that can be better understood by machines (and humans!).

My feeling is that MCP also tries to fix a few things, we should consider fixing with APIs in general - so at least good APIs can be used by LLMs without any indirections.
by jimbob45 | 2025-04-06 14:38:30+00:00
Heavyweight support for corporate usecases is exactly what Lisp is missing right now. I would love for MS to pump out a Visual Scheme or TypeLisp. It’s the perfect scripting language for embedding in CLR Managed Code. Rather than bringing in something massive like C#.

Alas, I think MS saw the failure of Clojure within the Java ecosystem and foresaw the same if they made a similar effort.
by Terretta | 2025-04-06 14:38:43+00:00
I noticed the term "syllable" doesn't appear in the paper. If you use single utterances to convey things, and mostly are uttering across treetops far away to share things others aren't seeing directly (much less chatty when sitting together and everyone is sharing experience), then maybe when you run out of single noises that carry, you might make multi-part noises to mean single things. Is that composition?

Also, given the data, "prominent" (in abstract) seems to be overworking.
by xbmcuser | 2025-04-06 14:38:53+00:00
The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Why the fuck would you want ai cars to be the same as humans you should want them to be many times better and radarr/lidar sonarr type tech make them better
by nailer | 2025-04-06 14:40:13+00:00
Herzl’s zionism is simply a belief that Jewish people should buy land and live in their ancestral homeland.

He wasn’t orthodox, didn’t believe God promised anything to anyone, didn’t speak Hebrew, but after the Dreyfuss affair (usual racist fake accusation BS) started to petition Rothschild (he was denied) and then other wealthier Jewish people with more success to start buying sand dunes and swamplands for Jewish families to return to Israel.

Herzl is definitely worth either reading or just studying for HN, the books are short and to the point, they dispel a lot of myths one gets from the media, and starting a country is a fairly ambitious project worth studying for any founder.
by mrangle | 2025-04-06 14:40:14+00:00
It's supposed to be prescriptive because its a literature education list.

Where we may agree is that Mensa isn't in the business of measuring education, but instead of horsepower.

And the reading way toward maximizing a developing child's base ability to think is to read as much as possible, which will necessarily be what piques their fancy much of the time.

But literature education and recreational reading shouldn't mean one doesn't engage in the other. Every high performing child does both, at least to meet the the standards with which I'm familiar.

Still I'm unsure as to why Mensa feels the need to cobble together a basic prep school reading list, if wildly uncurated.

To your point, something more in line with their rasion d'etre might be to provide short best of lists for recreational, slightly advanced reading in age appropriate genres.
by dagw | 2025-04-06 14:40:56+00:00
Without knowing how many FSD miles Teslas have done compared to other brands, it's hard to judge. It could just be that Tesla owners are far more likely to trust and use their cars FSD capabilities, and thus end up in more FSD accidents. Other brands might have so bad FSD that people simply not trust it and basically never use it, and thus never get into an FSD accident.
by dijit | 2025-04-06 14:41:47+00:00
this seems like a good place to ask, I don’t write very much unsafe Rust code… but when I do, it’s because I’m calling the Win32 API.

Tools like valgrind do not work on windows, and I am nowhere near smart enough to know the entire layout of memory that should exist.

When using Windows and calling system system functions, there’s a lot of casting involved; to convert wide characters and DWORDS to rust primitives for example. And given that I don’t have a good debugging situation, I’m terrified that I’m corrupting or leaking memory.

does anyone know any good tools that work on windows to help me out here?
by robocat | 2025-04-06 14:41:55+00:00
Comments that smell of defending to moderators are by definition poor comments. The crux of HN is to choose to write politely and intelligently. Any comment that could need defending shows poor judgement.

> bastion of freedom; kings; liberty; cruel punishment; thought crimes; 1930s

These are all fine intellectually stimulating things which I believe are critical to inform ourselves and others about. HN is not stopping you from discussing them. HN is not a jail. The request is that you discuss politics elsewhere: please just use other forums that welcome political discussion. Nobody is preventing you from doing that.

Disclaimer: those are just one users opinions (my own) on how things seem to work here. I'm most definitely ignorant about what the managers of HN think. I too have a deep interest in politics and civics and I too struggle with the HN guidelines. YMMV.
by ReptileMan | 2025-04-06 14:42:14+00:00
We have more than 100 years of proof that visual detection works quite well.

The problem is that we don't have certification process before a tech is deployed on the streets - your AV must pass this and this tests before you are allowed to use it. We don't care how you got there lidar, gps/astrology, camera/ai are all ok as long as you pass
by Shacklz | 2025-04-06 14:42:17+00:00
I'm definitely by no means capable of giving proper advise here as it's been a long time since I've last interacted with kids of that age. But one anecdote:

When I was in the early teens (so quite a bit older than the kid in your case), I got my hands on a book about set theory, and it absolutely blew my mind. The concept of countability, axiomatic definition of functions and so on really gave me a completely different perception of math. Up until then, math seemed to be something that follows nature, so to speak, three plus two makes five because if I have three eggs and two eggs its five eggs or whatever primary school taught me. I remember back then that I'd wish that some teacher would have made me aware earlier of a more formal, axiomatic approach to math and all that, that there is a more fundamental basis to it than "that's just what it is". It really furthered my interest in math, and while I ultimately eventually moved over to CS, it definitely had quite a fundamental impact on me back then.

The particular book I've read was in German (I still have it) and unlikely to be ideal for a 5 year old; just wanted to give this little personal anecdote somewhat related to your question.
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-06 14:42:54+00:00
> Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.

Corporations don't have rights. Corporations don't have the right to free speech.

Yes, I'm aware of the SCOTUS opinion on this issue--I'm saying SCOTUS is wrong on this.

And no, granting corporations personhood isn't a viable approximation. We're discussing a case in this thread where granting corporations a right is drastically different from granting individuals rights.

> Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?

Your criticism is basically that OP didn't draft a full detailed legislation in a blog post. That's not how ideas get proposed on the internet and you know that.

> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

I agree that people don't magically know what to buy, but ads make that problem worse, not better. Ads cannot inform, because they don't come from an unbiased source and even in the rare cases where they tell the truth, they're leaving out important facts intentionally. You're basically saying, "People don't know what the truth is, so we need to let liars lie to them." The solution to lack of knowledge is truth, not lies.

In the absence of advertising, independent third party reviews such as those provided by Consumer Reports would actually fill the need for consumer information.
by dahart | 2025-04-06 14:43:09+00:00
> this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.

FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
by atombender | 2025-04-06 14:43:12+00:00
Cleaning up the connection removes a serious foot gun that you may not consider when writing code. For example, I work on an application that sets statement_timeout defensively to avoid accidentally holding onto locks for too long. This used SET on a pooled connection, causing a bug where later connections inherited the timeout.

I have no particular opinions about ActiveRecord, which I don't use, but in my opinion all poolers ought to do this. The pooler should hand out clean connections so that you can treat them as distinct.

It's about separation of concerns: A pooled connection should behave like a distinct connection, otherwise every single connection has to worry about getting an "unclean" connection.

Sure, Postgres offers SET LOCAL, which reverts the mutated state on commit/rollback, but that requires a transaction, which is not always desirable. For example, let's say you are doing many UPDATEs in batches. You can do this:

SET SESSION ... UPDATE ...; UPDATE ...; -- etc.

As opposed to:

BEGIN; SET LOCAL SESSION ...; UPDATE; COMMIT; BEGIN; SET LOCAL SESSION ...; UPDATE; COMMIT; BEGIN; SET LOCAL SESSION ...; UPDATE; COMMIT; -- etc.

This saves three roundtrips per batch, which can significantly increased throughput. Of course you can save roundtrips by bundling several statements in a single statements string separated by semicolons, but that's painful to work with and doesn't work with prepared statements or SELECTs.

And sure, you could yourself call RESET ALL before releasing a connection, but if the pool always does this for you, you've solved the problem everywhere and don't need to think about it ever again. (In the apps I work on, we install a global "after release" hook to automatically do RESET ALL.)

Parsing statements isn't needed for this.

You keep mentioning ORMs, but again, it has nothing to do with them.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-04-06 14:43:12+00:00
On the bright side the Cruise, Waymo and Zoox's are the greatest thing ever as a cyclist.

They do not accelerate to turn in front of me but instead slow down and pull in behind with patience for their turn off. I have a few areas i need to take up a whole lane for a short time (no bike line) and they don't get angry and honk. In general i feel safe if they are around vs an unpredictable human driver.

I think self-driving cars are going to save a lot of lives. Not Tesla's tech of course, they're too far behind, but the actual on the road right now self-driving cars are fantastic.
by energy123 | 2025-04-06 14:43:23+00:00
Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2).

Now the errors are not all independent so it's not as good as that, but many classes of errors are independent (e.g. two pilots getting a heart attack versus just one) so you can get pretty close to that p^n. Musk did not understand this. He's just not as smart as he's made out to be.
by sodality2 | 2025-04-06 14:44:12+00:00
Statistically it does matter. If FSD has a 1-in-100M miles driven chance of killing a motorcyclist, and FSD drives 10M miles a day, within 10 days it's likely to see a trend starting. Whereas XYZ other brand may have a 1-in-30M miles driven chance of killing a motorcyclist, but only drives 1M miles a day, so without adjusting, FSD is more dangerous, but in reality, XYZ is.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-04-06 14:45:18+00:00
In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems.

You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.

For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.

I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 14:45:28+00:00
We are indeed forgetting history, with most important lesson being:

How do you write a web tool that lets users configure and combine arbitrary third-party APIs, including those not known or not even existing at the time of development, into a custom solution that runs in their browser?

Answer: you don't. You can't, you shouldn't, it's explicitly not supported, no third-party API provider wants you to do it, and browsers are designed to actively prevent you from doing such a thing.

That's the core problem: MCP has user-centric design, and enables features that are fundamentally challenging to provide[0] with a network of third-party, mutually mistrusting services. The Web's answer was to disallow it entirely, opting instead for an approach where vendors negotiate specific integrations on the back-channel, and present them to users from a single point of responsibility they fully control.

Doing the same with MCP will nerf it to near-uselesness, or introduce the same problem with AI we have today with mobile marketplaces - small number of titans gate-keeping access and controlling what's allowed.

--

[0] - I'd say impossible, but let's leave room for hope - maybe someone will figure out a way.
by II2II | 2025-04-06 14:46:04+00:00
> I think it's an unfair comparison here.

Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, or fast food employee.

> Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!

Going home at the end of the day and not having to think about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one respect or other they're almost certainly operating their own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are operating their own business (even when the work arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone else). If they're working within an urban area, they're typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside of the safety envelope.

So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is than yours.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-06 14:46:13+00:00
Everyone comparing autonomous vehicles to non autonomous vehicles and number of accidents misses one important impediment to people’s and the government’s acceptance of accidents for the former.

Currently over 40K people are killed in the US every year from automobile fatalities and people think that’s just the price we pay for driving. I am not making a value judgement about that statistic.

But if even 1 person dies because of an autonomous vehicle fatality, there are going to be investigations and experience is that the entire platform is going to be paused.

Besides who is liable for an autonomous vehicle fatality? Is Tesla going to assume liability as the “driver”? Are insurance companies?

On the other hand, Tesla is not exactly known for reliability.

https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-...

And its owner is not exactly known for honesty.
by dondraper36 | 2025-04-06 14:46:31+00:00
As a software engineer myself, I agree that there are certain aspects of the job that are annoying or mentally fatiguing.

That said, unfortunately I had to learn much more than I had wanted about the work of neurosurgeons and ICU units three years ago.

This made me completely rethink the difficulties I face at work so I no longer complain.