MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by db48x | 2025-04-15 11:40:57+00:00
What you really want to do is put out the stars sooner then, and feed all the hydrogen into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Dump in all the mass in the galaxy and all of its satellites and everything from Andromeda and its satellites too and it will grow. Nudge Andromeda’s central black hole into orbit around ours so that they merge, etc, etc. Grow it big enough and and you can build a Birch World around it, with a surface area larger than all the planets in those galaxies put together. All of the exploration with none of the boring travel in between interesting places! You can seed it with life from every planet your civilization ever encountered and watch all those ecosystems compete and hybridize as you while away the years. How many years would you have?

While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.

Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-04-15 11:42:34+00:00
You're right it reduces to Bayesian vs frequentist views of probability. But you seem to be taking an adamantly frequentist view yourself.

Imagine you're not interested in whether a dice is weighted (in fact assume that it is fair in every reasonable sense), but instead you want to know the outcome of a specific roll. What if that roll has already happened, but you haven't seen it? I've cheekily covered up the dice with my hand straight after I rolled it. It's no longer random at all, in at least some philosophical points of view, because its outcome is now 100% determined. If you're only concerned about "the property of the dice itself" are you now only concerned with the property of the roll itself? It's done and dusted. So the entropy of that "random variable" (which only has one outcome, of probability 1) is 0.

This is actually a valid philosophical point of view. But people that act as though the outcome is still random, allow themselves to use probability theory as if it hadn't been rolled yet, are going to win a lot more games of chance than those that refuse to.

Maybe this all seems like a straw man. Have I argued against anything you actually said in your post? Yes I have: your core disagreement with OP's statement "entropy is a property of an individual". You see, when I covered up the dice with my hand, I did see it. So if you take the Bayesian view of probability and allow yourself to consider that dice roll probabilistically, then you and I really do have different views about the probability distribution of that dice roll and therefore the entropy. If I tell a third person, secretly and honestly, that the dice roll is even then they have yet another view of the entropy of the same dice roll! All at the same time and all perfectly valid.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-15 11:45:16+00:00
I'm a scientist and I've spent a lot of time at Harvard, including working there for years.

These demands seem on point to me. I see a lot of uninformed opposition in this thread, but I think most of you all don't have any idea how it actually is at elite universities.

- Political tests for employment, or continued employment. The UC system (a public system!) is one of the worst offenders here, but Harvard is really, really bad.

- Overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion (or lack thereof). The number of academics who aren't even aware that this sort of discrimination is illegal is mind-boggling. I would say 9 months ago it was 80% or more. The number of emails I've received either indicating a candidate isn't viable because of his genitalia or skin color, or telling me this is the reason I didn't get the job is crazy. They literally don't know and don't care.

- Compelled speech. This is a bright line we have so far, as a society, successfully succeeded in not crossing. Harvard and other elite universities were crossing it, and the Biden admin's Title IX rules overtly crossed it. A bad look, to put it mildly.

- Widespread censorship, to the point where we (social scientists) have developed code to talk about certain things "nurture a thriving culture of open inquiry on our campus" hahaha...dear lord.

And these aren't small effects. It's not 55% / 45% type scenarios. You have to view the Administration's requests in the light of: Harvard is 95+% Blue Team, and that's largely because they actively filter. There are plenty of people who aren't willing to bend the knee who don't have jobs because of it. Harvard has created an intellectual monoculture. They want "diversity" in the sense that they want people who look different on the outside, but who are all the same on the inside.

Asking for monitoring to make sure they're no longer illegally and immorally discriminating in hiring and admission is warranted, indeed it would be kind of crazy to not monitor. They'll just continue racist and sexist hiring otherwise.

What's in this letter is a reasonable set of asks in response to a situation that is so off the rails it's hard to describe.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-15 11:45:49+00:00
Returns fluctuate wildly, while expenses are roughly constant. So obviously expenses are drawn conservatively. And if investment works well, you can grow the endowment too. Obviously it is up to the university to strike the right balance.

The more it grows, the less risk there is in the future. But if you start spending it more than the levels of its average returns, that's high risk. And the point is it's supposed to last forever.

You also need to grow it simply to account for inflation and other rising costs.
by immibis | 2025-04-15 11:45:58+00:00
When I was approximately 14, I had an MSN Messenger (or Windows Messenger... or Windows Live Messenger... Microsoft was doing the stupid naming thing even back then?) modded client called Messenger Plus! Live. And a script for that called Cache Answering Machine. When enabled for that user, it would respond to all messages with a random message selected from the chat history of another or the same user. i.e.

onMessage(sender, message) {if(config[sender]) sendMessage(sender, selectRandom(chatHistory[config[sender]]));}

Some of my friends would talk to it for several minutes before realizing. Mind you, they were also approximately 14.

And you have the ELIZA effect, where people believed ELIZA (a very primitive chatbot) was a real person even after being told how it worked.
by thrance | 2025-04-15 11:46:13+00:00
You're beyond saving then, if basic historical research is "dangerous nonsense". What's the risk there? Discovering a theorem was known at an earlier point in history? Big whoop.

Seriously, what's the danger? Be clear. It feels like you peolple are unable to articulate anything more than "thouhtcrime!!".

Also, what do you think of the actual threats Trump made to academics? Is it dangerous too or not?
by worewood | 2025-04-15 11:46:53+00:00
I agree. That documentation really needs some love. But if you see the discussions on github issues about quadlet features a common theme is maintainers dismissing requests because "that shouldn't be done in production" or "that won't scale". It seems they can't wrap their head around people wanting to do simple things or someone doing things by themselves at home and not for work at a big company or corporation, and that reflects on that documentation.

Working for one myself, which does have a support contract wit Red Hat, I kinda get where they're coming from--if they make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, dumb people shoot themselves in the foot in production and they have to fix the mess later. But for that they could have a sanctioned build for clients and a community build for everybody else, just like they have Fedora and RHEL.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-15 11:47:32+00:00
It is more a side effect of JavaScript bootcamp programming wihtout learning anything else.

I have been coding since 1986, nowadays most of the UIs I get paid to work on are Web based, yet when I want to have fun in side projects I only code for native UIs, if a GUI is needed.

Want to code like VB and Delphi? Plenty of options available, and yes they do scalable layouts, just like they used to do already back in the 1990's for anyone that actually bothered to read the programming manuals.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-15 11:47:35+00:00
but most cameras with RTSP enabled allow any other device on the network to trivially get the camera stream, and sometimes also control the camera.

Not a real concern when the network is fully under my control. I can easily restrict access as I see fit.

I surrender all control when I give up my wifi password and allow similar access to somebody's network located somewhere on the internet. Further access can be (and has been) granted to others without user knowledge or consent. For example:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/amazon-finally-a...
by d3nj4l | 2025-04-15 11:47:37+00:00
It isn’t all or nothing, products from Temu/Shein/AliExpress are not all “crap”; (and the idea that Chinese products are crap is also seriously outdated). Yes, there’s a lot of shovelware on those websites, but if you know how to navigate them you can get the same products that you’d get from Amazon for a third of the price. I’ve bought bags, tools, hobby equipment etc from aliexpress that has lasted me years and saved literally 50% on average.
by belter | 2025-04-15 11:48:38+00:00
They argument of more compression makes the model smarter as argued in the last few minutes, will make you look good and stay in the good graces of Sam Altman, and something he can push to his infinite money backers.

But if intelligence were just about compression, then zip files would be "smarter" than humans. The reliance on scaling laws is a symptom that current AI is fundamentally not intelligent, it’s just very good at statistical mimicry. True AGI requires qualitative breakthroughs, not just quantitative scaling.

These researchers have fine-tuned their noses to ignore the stench of overhyped benchmarks
by gus_massa | 2025-04-15 11:48:41+00:00
Clicky: http://github.com/muhammadyasir-dev/dustdb

I can't find them. I only see a comparison table with words like "Excepcional (95%)".

I'm not a database guy. (I used SQL a few times (not in a few project, a few total times), but I used only single line commands that I can't remember, and I never used Redis.) If I were considering your project, I want to see a few runs of standard benchmarks with number comparing your projects and other projects. Bonus point for a script to run the benchmarks. Something like:

Benchmark Redis XYZ DustDB ---------------------------------------------------- U. of Somewhere (2019) 56% 27% 81% Google++ (2013) 123ms 110ms 77ms VeryDeepDB (2017) 37/s 39/s 44/s

I'm sorry that I have no idea about the subject to recommend a few standard benchmarks, but if I were a DB guy and I were considering your project, I'd want to see a few clear examples with standard benchmarks and hard numbers.
by IShowSlow | 2025-04-15 11:49:09+00:00
This is inherently funny because the site where most hacks and breaches appear (like the Nintendo gigaleak and others) got hacked themselves.

Apparently, the hacker had been in since 2021, and they were running an extremely outdated PHP version. The hacker claimed to have full shell access.

But I'm willing to bet this will all be forgotten about in a week.

Currently, as I'm writing the following, I've managed to find: Source code leaked. Hacker said they've dumped the database. Moderators emails leaked (some were using personal emails like .edu). And likely way more that I myself don't know of.
by apothegm | 2025-04-15 11:49:45+00:00
Who’s responsible for updating your docs?

When we made it the responsibility of the Support team and they developed an internal rotation, the problem went away.

We had a slack channel that spit out summaries and ticket links from our CI/CD system. Support would watch that and respond to it for doc updates. If they didn’t understand a specific ticket, they’d consult with Product, who were supposed to fully understand the changes but could pull in Engineering in a pinch.

Major releases would be coordinated in advance, and our KB had a system for preparing and promoting new drafts of already-published docs so those could be staged as well.
by Thimothy | 2025-04-15 11:49:45+00:00
My point is that FPGAs have become very cheap, competing with microcontrollers. I would agree that high end audio manufacturers are about as rational as they costumers.

If FPGAs are not a growing market, how come we have gone from 2 companies (we'll ignore niche space stuff) to ~10 in the last 20 years? Not many IC fields where there is a growth in manufacturers instead of consolidation...
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-15 11:50:11+00:00
It's not cognitive dissonance, or bad faith. Of course.

If you let Harvard do "merit-based hiring", they'll move a little in the direction of actually complying with employment law, but not much. If you institute a regime such as the one that existed for race and sex for decades (i.e., if you don't have "enough" black people, you need to show how your recruitment pipeline means that's necessarily the case, like not enough get the required type of degree), you'll get much better compliance.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-15 11:50:57+00:00
Happy to see Ada still gets some interest outside of MIC. When I went off to university, I was a Perl snob but my school used Ada as its primary teaching language. It was a great way of expanding my knowledge across the horizon to understand the value in strong typing.

After nearly half a century, I still don't have ASCII memorized either but usually just use asciitable.com to do a quick lookup. Having a system utility like this one would be handy in situation without internet access. Plus like he noted, it was a good way to learn more about Ada.
by gurkwart | 2025-04-15 11:51:09+00:00
Nice, I like the colored output tables. Started tinkering with a small profiling lib as well a while ago.

https://github.com/gurki/glimmer

It focuses on creating flamegraphs to view on e.g. https://www.speedscope.app/. I wanted to use std::stacktrace, but they are very costly to evaluate, even just lazily at exit. Eventually, I just tracked thread and call layer manually.

If I understand correctly, you're tracking your call stack manually as well using some graph structure on linear ids? Mind elaborating a bit on its functionality and performance? Also proper platform-independent function names were a pita. Any comments on how you addressed that?
by breppp | 2025-04-15 11:51:28+00:00
It's dangerous because of post colonialism and earlier post structuralism is in its basis.

That philosophical school sees truth as being a fantasy and subservient to power.

Therefore it is common for an adherent of post-colonialism to believe a statement is true if it was made by a person arbitrarily considered oppressed, while the same logic might be false if made by an 'oppressor'.

As this approach makes all science to be political effort before a discovery effort, it was highly successful in the highly political environment of the academics, as it also has highly favorable economical results for its followers. (New departments, ability to religiously outcast the old, new postions)

The problem as it reaches the hard sciences, for example the religious sacrifice each ML paper needs to make to the gods of ethics, is that it assaults the very notion of truth by its very essence. It is easy to see why this is highly problematic for mathematics
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-15 11:52:32+00:00
Easy. No one knows this but In science and therefore reality proof is impossible. Proof is the domain of mathematics and logic.

But disproof is possible in reality. It can be done by a single counter example.

So if I’m wrong about your experience. Why don’t you lay out a single example in web development in your experience where what I said is utterly incorrect because I literally cannot even imagine a counter example.

One counter example is all it takes to disprove my “bet”. Even better if the example is extremely common. But this is up to you to you decide if you want to debate this. I’m certainly willing to tell you about my entire experience and all I’m asking for is a single counter example from you.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-15 11:53:03+00:00
There is no reason to expect any particular number of universes. We've observed exactly one, this one, which had to exist or else we wouldn't be here to observe that it existed.

Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-15 11:53:43+00:00
I was one of the people who briefly tried to take right wing “free speech” arguments at face value, eg when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Almost instantly he began allowing white supremacists and actual declared neo-Nazis back onto the platform, while kicking people off for any speech he didn’t like. I don’t think the claim “the recent right wing enthusiasm for ‘free speech’” does, in fact, selectively benefit Nazis and white supremacists” is actually wrong when you evaluate the effects.
by blitzar | 2025-04-15 11:54:29+00:00
> OK, burning is happening right now

Nowhere near it, the hand is hovering near the fire - people are shouting "don't put your hand in the fire" and the kid is saying its nice and warm and see nothing bad has happened, I am going to put my hand right into the fire and it will be great.

Trump term 1 they bailed out the Farmers for 20bn when they messed around on tarrifs and blew it up. They learn't that there are only two outcomes to fucking around 1) you win, 2) you find out and they give you 20bn.

If those are your outcomes the only rational choice is to vote for Trump and cheer him on in fucking around as much as possible.

Let them burn their hand.
by coldtea | 2025-04-15 11:54:45+00:00
>what else would you like to bundle in the init process? docker compose as well?

You can complain that you don't liken systemd's design or that it does too much (very overplayed complaint, but ok).

But that's an orthogonal point to the initial complaint you've made that it's somehow bad that this requires systemd to run.

That complain is moot, since you'd be running systemd anyway, with or without those containers. And it's double moot, because you can run > 1 containers (with podman) without root too.

(It's also wrong that systemd was added container compose capabilities - podman is what translates things to systemd "speak")
by salawat | 2025-04-15 11:54:46+00:00
Most of those were not built through the wholesale theft of IP at the bottom of the business model. Let's be honest here. As much as I'm an adherent of IP being an abomination, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, et al crossed a very bright and vibrant line. One they had no small part in painting. While even the most hardcore piratical mofo could motivate themselves to avail themselves of liberties they may not necessarily be socially granted for a personal project, these companies, who were the people to make a big deal in the first place that IP should be commoditizable, took it the extra step and decided to unethically turn around, and build a business off it.

You can have a change of heart. Nobody says you can't; but you don't get to go back. In that sense, I say that guilt on usage of an AI is warranted. There was a way to get there, properly and these people have admitted the only reason these things exist is because they so broke the rules of ethics wholesale. I will not reward anyone for that, and consider any work product reliant on it as indellibly tainted.

The technology I have no issues with. The manufacturing and sourcing process I absolutely do. It was taken, not given and even worse, it isn't given back, but sold back. That's not okay. Consistency matters. If we're just going to ignore rule of law, then all I've really got left to work with is shame. And one who lifts the public good, without asking and erects a tollbooth and cash register around it, is one worthy of being shamed.
by keepamovin | 2025-04-15 11:55:50+00:00
I'd do less comparison and more recognition. Some of these are kind of old or from the past and I'm no expert and the list is very incomplete but:

Jean Ichbiah - big contributor to Ada

Alain Colmerauer - creator of Prolog

Jean-Marie Hullot - iCal, iSync, NeXTSTEP GUI builder, CTO of Applications at Apple in early 2000s

Philippe Kahn - founder of Borland, inventor of first camera-phone

Olivier Fourdan - creator of Xfce, big contributor to Wayland
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-15 11:56:41+00:00
You hardly need more than a simple script to just run a generic benchmark tool. But to measure performance of your code and figure out what needs to be tuned, I don't think LLMs are there, am I wrong? They can't understand the code they generated well enough to make small adjustments and improve the benchmark score. For a dev to do that on LLM generated code, it would have to understand the codebase as intended by the LLM at least.
by saaaaaam | 2025-04-15 11:56:49+00:00
I've encountered pay machines that only accept cash twice in the past couple of years in rural areas and was surprised. Like you, I thought they were long gone, but I guess there are still some out there. Those ones did have stickers on them (fortunately!) directing me to one of the fleet of pay for parking apps out there, which I used. Not being familiar with the area though, I had no idea if the app I was being sent to was legit. I didn't even think about it, I just thought "oh, yet another parking app I need to download" and went ahead.

Contactless is easy - but there's a far higher cost (each machine needs to have connectivity etc). Plus it doesn't let you extend remotely, which is something I use very regularly. I guess from a user perspective that's a benefit, but from an operator perspective it's a potential downside - would I pre-pay for more parking if I couldn't extend? Probably. But would I potentially park elsewhere, for a car park where you pay on exit, thus removing that revenue from them entirely? Possibly. I guess it would depend on lots of factors, and my one-person study is perhaps not the most reliable data!

I agree that they are becoming ubiquitous because they are cheaper for operators, but I don't think that this is the only reason: I do think that they genuinely offer greater utility than a pay at machine with contactless option.

Interested to know what you mean "monitoring is already done by ANPR" because this is not my experience where I am based. Do you mean street based parking, or in car parks?

For the street based parking where I am the traffic wardens have a tablet that shows them the make, model, registration number of the vehicles parked in a particular area, and generally make their patrols on foot, so I'm not sure there's any ANPR being used. I guess there could be CCTV cameras cover exit and entry points to particular locations, but in European countries and the UK I'm pretty sure that there need to be notification signs that your registration plate is being captured in that situation.