MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-14 21:12:43+00:00
You made several good points. While I am struggling to validate "Student groups must be vetted so that they don't violate orthodoxy", it may be because I am unfamiliar with the actions of the student bodies listed at the end of the section, or maybe subtleties in the wording that I am missing that could be exploited later.

Also I find the mask-ban strange and alarming. That example alone was probably enough of a red flag for me to more carefully scrutinize the good-faith of the rest of the letter.

Thank you for taking the time to actually engage with me constructively. Unfortunately many others decided to just downvote my questions.

I find it so disappointing that on a forum like Hacker News I am being downvoted for asking a question in good faith in an attempt to better understand a complex and nuanced topic.

When I ask ChatGPT to explain Facism to me, two aspects it pointed out were: - Suppression of political opposition, dissent, and individual freedoms. - Use of state power to enforce conformity.

I can see how the letter from the government to Harvard would be considered use of state power to enforce conformity. As someone who is open minded trying to understand the truth, the letter on first pass reads like they are using state power to unwind enforced ideological conformity. This is confusing, because on its surface it seems anti-fascist, so when people label it fascist (with charged emotions), it's hard for me to take them at their word without further explanation.

When the people who are concerned about the current actions of the government attack me for asking questions in an effort to actually understand their concerns rather than just accepting them, it makes me more suspicious of their viewpoints, not less.

Also, ChatGPT's thorough explanation of Fascism indicated to me that both administrations have been showing signs of increasing fascism, almost complimenting each other in their policies as they rock the cultural and institutional trunk of the united states back and forth with ever increasing momentum until it tips over into catastrophe. If such is the case, then maybe the only hope is for people to engage in these thorny issues with curiosity and nuance, to carefully sift out the bad from the good instead of assuming that everything the other side is doing is evil.

I have no control over what other people do, all I have control over is my own actions. I don't see a good way out of this mess that doesn't involve curiosity, empathy, understanding and reconciliation. So I will continue engage in the conversation with these intentions, and if people attack me for that then I suppose to will just have to accept what's inevitable.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-14 21:12:57+00:00
really the next big leap is something that gives me more meaningful artistic control over these systems.

It's usually "generate a few, one of them is not terrible, none are exactly what I wanted" then modify the prompt, wait an hour or so ...

The workflow reminds me of programming 30 years ago - you did something, then waited for the compile, see if it worked, tried something else...

All you've got are a few crude tools and a bit of grit and patience.

On the i2v tools I've found that if I modify the input to make the contrast sharper, the shapes more discrete, the object easier to segment, then I get better results. I wonder if there's hacks like that here.
by jakeydus | 2025-04-14 21:13:14+00:00
That's just how government works, buddy. I disagree with my tax dollars being spent to shoot wild horses and fund Lockheed-Martin, but here we are. It's not forced speech, because you have representatives who (in a working system) you could ask to fight against tax dollars being spent on something you dislike. You have a voice, you just don't get to have the only voice.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-14 21:13:15+00:00
It makes sense if you understand that they aren't focused on general principles. Diversity is bad when it involves non-whites, women, gay people or research involving these groups. Diversity is good when it involves "race realists." Free speech is bad when students are advocating for divestment initiatives. Free speech is good when a professor calls somebody the n-word online.

The goal is white supremacy and antifeminism.
by systoll | 2025-04-14 21:14:34+00:00
Magic links take the 'I forgot my password' workflow, and:

1. Stop labelling it with a confession.

2. Stop forcing the user to reset their password when they demonstrably don't have their password manager ready to store it. [Whether that be 1Password, or just autofill in google chrome]

As the only auth method, it isn’t great. As an option? I wish it were universal. Anything other than those or passkeys creates more issues in your mum's case. And passkeys are new.

(That said – If we’re distinguishing between magic links and email OTPs, there’s really no good reason not to have both in the same email, and the latter is better for the public library use case.)
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-14 21:14:39+00:00
What? I am not claiming there is no "agreement", duh.

You can't fly aircraft full of prisoners into a foreign country and have a televised propaganda show depositing them into a gulag without "an agreement."

Great job moving the goal posts and answering now to my original point: the USG has not produced evidence of a contract, as they are legally required to have and present.

Neither I, nor you, nor the public, nor the judge actually know what the terms of any agreement actually are. We know only what appeared in a memo written about an agreement.

Sorry but there's no way you thought I was suggesting the US just unilaterally put people in a foreign prison, lol. Good luck lifting those goal posts.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-14 21:14:52+00:00
Governments exist to protect rights, not grant them. This was a core truth of our founding fathers beliefs and their entire justification for why it was OK for them to break British law and rebel against King George III.

If you have rights only because a government grants them, then they are not rights, they are privileges.

It is a core American belief, the core American belief, that a government that violates rights is illegitimate because governments are instituted among men to protect certain unalienable rights.
by woleium | 2025-04-14 21:14:53+00:00
You can in fact run http, https (and ssh and many others) on the same port with SSLH (its in debian repos) SSLH will forward incoming connections based on the protocol detected in the initial packets. Probes for HTTP, TLS/SSL (including SNI and ALPN), SSH, OpenVPN, tinc, XMPP, SOCKS5, are implemented, and any other protocol that can be tested using a regular expression, can be recognised

https://github.com/yrutschle/sslh
by aurizon | 2025-04-14 21:14:55+00:00
She is correct. Colonial economics designed to enrich the conquering country = laws to disable the local people and a thick veneer of legalry that obstructed newcos for the people. India is also hampered by this = endemic corruption and bribery. India is better, but has far to go - Africa further but the internet will help. Africa is full of laws that make the internet very expensive. Startink does and end run on many of these = local rulers hate Starlink(for the most part) and steal installations - which are soon set up on ruler's buddies place - once Starlink knows = cut off
by throwway120385 | 2025-04-14 21:16:53+00:00
The thing is there's really no choice. The version of Harvard we get if they cave is the same as burning it all down. It would be dead as an educational institution and would only serve to foster the same kind of insane doublethink that leads people to ask for "diversity in viewpoints" at the same time they ask for the removal of the viewpoints they disagree with.
by settrans | 2025-04-14 21:17:18+00:00
Save The Children estimates 50,000 births in Gaza in the first 9 months of the war, when the fighting was the most intense: https://www.savethechildren.net/news/women-self-inducing-lab...

Unless there have been zero births since this article was published, even if you take the 50,000 death estimate from Hamas at face value, the population has increased since the start of the war. Of course, there is reason to suspect the Hamas figures, since they have been systematically manipulated, don't distinguish combatant deaths, don't separate out deaths from natural causes, and don't call out deaths caused by misfired Palestinian rockets.

The central camps have been almost totally untouched since the hostages are being kept there: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-804993 (article is a few months old but this is still true). And even outside of these camps, 16+ hospitals remain operational in Gaza despite serving as terror HQ.
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-14 21:17:52+00:00
I’ve found that when I work on something I’m genuinely interested in, time flies, and the results are far better. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time on mundane tasks I didn’t care about, which felt like a drain. But when I started choosing projects that sparked my curiosity, I naturally went deeper, asking better questions and finding creative solutions. One tip I use is to gamify tasks that aren't inherently exciting, whether it’s racing the clock or setting personal challenges. It transforms the process, making it feel more engaging and rewarding. The best part? This approach doesn’t just improve immediate results but leads to long-term growth and deeper understanding.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-14 21:18:16+00:00
I feel like I must be missing something, because I don’t understand why representing data in an s-expression is better than representing it as nested arrays (lists of lists) and hashtables/dictionaries. I also don’t see why representing data in a language’s data structure is inherently better than representing it in a language-agnostic format like JSON, and having libraries to parse and convert data from that format into a language data structure, or a library that defines a JSON type, or storing the JSON in a string and using a library that operates on strings that contains valid JSON. I’ve worked with data in this way (JSON on disk, converted to nested arrays/tables in code) and haven’t felt it to be painful.

I can see how one might have a taste preference for it, but I’m struggling to understand what the tangible benefits are.
by timssopomo | 2025-04-14 21:18:58+00:00
Metal bodied planes are adjusted with thumb screws and levers - they just aren't accurate enough for fine work.

Re: a woooden body, there are a couple reasons it's preferable despite the maintenance - the biggest is that they can be adjusted to fit a specific blade and chip breaker. Since the blade and chip breaker are made by hand, you can't mass produce a body and still have the tool perform. The other big concerns are weight and economy. Metal bodies are way heavier. And if they break or are damaged, can't be easily fixed. A wood body can be made in a few minutes with materials that are usually found on hand.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-04-14 21:19:09+00:00
You left off...

"Also, one where many views can be represented with no cancel culture."

...before "that is worth federal funding."

Such cherry picking in ways that misrepresent what is said, also common in liberal media, is one reason distrust in liberal politics is at an all-time high. Put the truth of what others said side by side with your own position, like I mentioned intersectionality with my counterpoint. See if your ideas stand up to scrutiny.
by kashunstva | 2025-04-14 21:19:09+00:00
From the United States government letter to Harvard: "Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension."

So if a student has, say, an immunodeficiency syndrome and wears a mask to protect their health during the riskier seasons of the year, they would face dismissal from the university? (Or worse - whatever that is - according to the letter.)

This is how we know that the Republican party has no interest in freedom as the word is conventionally defined.
by settrans | 2025-04-14 21:19:13+00:00
Let's ask the world's leading expert in urban warfare, then:

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnwspencer2018_israel-has-d...

Note the falsification of Hamas casualty figures:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-quietly-drops-thousands-dea...

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hama...
by dmwilcox | 2025-04-14 21:20:04+00:00
I lent out my copy of the Dawn of Everything so I can't get exact quotes or pages but this reminded me of a point in the book (which I highly recommend) which I'll attempt to summarize:

Domestication of plants was "easy" when tested in a controlled setting selecting seeds carefully at a university. Estimated that wheat in the agricultural "revolution" (a much scoffed about term in the book) could have been domesticated in 200 years if purposeful. Instead agriculture took something like 3000 years to become dominant versus mixed food sources (mostly gathering, fishing and hunting, with some low-effort planting on riverbanks).

And yes to your point, the idea that there is some sort of progression in human societies is contradicted by the recent decades of evidence in archeology -- every arrangement you can imagine seems to have been tried (stationary+hunter/gather, nomadic farmer, alternating back and forth, shifts toward farming for hundreds of years and then back to fishing for thousands). Humans time on the earth has been much longer than our recorded history, with more variety and less boring than we usually assume.

Anyway I hope that inspires someone to pick up the book, it really is a good read.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-14 21:20:21+00:00
>purely a result of more likely things happening more often on average

according to your wording, no. if you have a perfect six sided die (or perfect two sided coin), none/neither of the outcomes are more likely at any point in time... yet something approximating entropy occurs after many repeated trials. what's expected to happen is the average thing even though it's never the most likely thing to happen.

you want to look at how repeated re-convolution of a function with itself always converges on the same gaussian function, no matter the shape of the starting function is (as long as it's not some pathological case, such as an impulse function... but even then, consider the convolution of the impulse function with the gaussian)
by tauoverpi | 2025-04-14 21:21:37+00:00
Multithreading is exactly where linked lists are useful as in the implementation of MPSC, MPMC, SPMC, and so on it allows one to safely construct objects out of vire of other threads then use a CAS to append the new item to the list making it visible for other threads to consume even without needing to allocate additional memory.

They're also pretty useful for free-list structures which overwrite entries to be removed (they're scheduled for deletion thus assumptiong here is that the object is now dead) with linked list nodes that would fit in that space thus never needing to allocate any additional as you can reuse existing space.
by zugi | 2025-04-14 21:22:42+00:00
> As we do, we will also continue to comply with Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for universities to make decisions “on the basis of race.”

This is already a shift on Harvard's part. When the ruling first came out, they announced they'd be finding ways around the ruling so they could keep doing what they'd been doing (i.e. discriminate against Asians by systematically scoring them low on "personality.")
by entropicdrifter | 2025-04-14 21:24:14+00:00
If a function is pure, it can take in and output 100% unmodifiable values. There will never be any side-effects in a pure function.

In other words, if you need to modify the contents of a variable for a function to run, that's not a pure function. Taking something in and outputting something just like it but with some modifications is allowed, so long as the input is unmodified.

Does that make more sense? You can't modify anything inside a function that originated from outside of the function's scope.
by Dagonfly | 2025-04-14 21:24:44+00:00
Just in case you haven't read it, I can recommend this excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free." [1] It describes this exact feeling of "maybe I'm just being dramatic" during the rise of the Nazis.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973

As someone who grew up next to a former concentration camp, the main takeaway when talking to survivors was: If you give the benefit of the doubt, you won't believe fascism has taken over until it's too late. You should talk to your friends and close ones and draw a line somewhere. Maybe it's once a US citizen gets send to El Salvador. Just something to agree on. Once this happens normal is over and we need to act. And organize locally don't stay on your own during these times.

I hope the best for the US.
by bangaladore | 2025-04-14 21:24:57+00:00
I don't think that really applies here.

In general the way that works is user navigates to http://contoso.com which implicitly uses port 80. Contoso server/cdn listening on port 80 redirects them through whatever means to https://contoso.com which implicitly uses 443.

I don't see value on both being on the same port. Why would I ever want to support this when the http: or https: essentially defines the default port.

Now ofcourse someone could go to http://contoso.com:443, but WHY would they do this. Again, failing to see a reason for this.
by hnburnsy | 2025-04-14 21:25:39+00:00
Can someone confirm that if Harvard turned down Pell Grants and Federal student support, they could admit whoever they want?

>Private clubs are generally exempt from anti-discrimination laws under certain conditions. For example, being genuinely private and not engaging in business with non-members. However, there are exceptions to these exemptions. For instance, when a club receives significant government benefits or operates as a commercial enterprise.
by mtalantikite | 2025-04-14 21:25:47+00:00
As others have pointed out to you, "woke" is just from AAVE, meaning to be awake to the racial prejudices and social injustices of the world. Leadbelly used it at the end of his "Scottsboro Boys" [1] in 1938, and it likely was in use many years before that. Erykah Badu's "Master Teacher" also uses it prominently, which probably helped bring it out of AAVE into more mainstream use [2].

Anyway, that's all to say I find it sad and funny that people are all up in arms about being "woke" these days. It's like stating "I'd prefer to be ignorant".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrXfkPViFIE&t=249s

[2] whole song is great, but I forgot about this second section of the song: https://youtu.be/Dieo6bp4zQw?si=fCPJpWIbQV_g5yx3&t=203
by bedhead | 2025-04-14 21:26:19+00:00
One framework I like to use is, “If this thing didn’t exist today, and someone proposed it, how would people react to it?”

I think it’s fair to say that if none of this existed today, and someone proposed that the federal government simply give universities like Harvard seemingly endless billions, it would be laughed out of existence by republicans and democrats alike. All of this is the product of inertia at best, corruption at worst. It’s a different world today and we don’t need our tax dollars going to these places.
by tacticalturtle | 2025-04-14 21:26:41+00:00
I posted this deep in another part of this discussion - but the majority of the money being discussed here isn’t really for Harvard or educating its students - the largest portion are for NIH grants funding to Boston area hospitals, most of which have affiliations with Harvard Medical School.

> The Crimson analyzed the proposed Trump administration funding cuts and estimated that the five hospitals’ multi-year commitment from the NIH is over $6.2 billion and the University’s multi-year federal research funding exceeds $2.7 billion.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/4/funding-review-h...

I’m sure that you have legitimate issues with politics at Harvard, but penalizing a number of independent non-profits that serve the community because they associate with a University that the administration disagrees with also seems to be forcing speech.
by kristianp | 2025-04-14 21:26:52+00:00
Looks like the Quasar and Optimus stealth models on Openrouter were in fact GPT-4.1. This is what I get when I try to access the openrouter/optimus-alpha model now:

{"error": {"message":"Quasar and Optimus were stealth models, and revealed on April 14th as early testing versions of GPT 4.1. Check it out: https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-4.1","code":404}
by fuzztester | 2025-04-14 21:27:02+00:00
>> "Lisp is better because it is homoiconic"

>- Lisp is better because it manipulates the same data that the program code is represented in (car works on a data list, and it works on a code list as well).

Don't those two sentences mean the same?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676798
by betenoire | 2025-04-14 21:27:14+00:00
I think they understand that, and are referring to more nuanced side effects. Logging, for an example, is a side effect, same with even using a date function. Hitting an API endpoint without cache may be functional if the response never changes, but do you want that? Usually we want a cache, which is skirting idempotency. The closer you look, the more side effects you see
by bangaladore | 2025-04-14 21:27:18+00:00
> In general, it would be inadvisable at this point to try to switch hit between HTTP and HTTPS based on the initial packets from the client, because then you would need to ensure that there was no ambiguity.

Exactly my original point. If you really understand the protocols, there is probably zero ambiguity (I'm assuming here). But with essentially nothing to gain from supporting this, its obvious to me that any minor risk outweighs the (lack of) benefits.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-14 21:28:08+00:00
It literally doesn't matter how you structure a democracy, at the end of the day, all the rules and requirements etc are just words on paper. None of it will work unless people choose to play their parts.

Democracy cannot survive a political party that spends 50 years electing worse and worse criminals, and sacrificing everything to the alter of "More power for our party"

Voters did not punish republicans for Nixon. Voters did not punish republicans for Iran-Contra. Voters did not punish republicans for several market and economic failures. Voters did not punish republicans for multiple outright illegal wars waged on false pretenses that cost us tens of trillions of dollars, spent explicitly from debt.

So this is what you get. The bar will keep getting lower until republican voters finally decide they won't support literally any criminal with an R next to them.

So we are fucked basically.
by lxgr | 2025-04-14 21:28:12+00:00
As a ChatGPT user, I'm weirdly happy that it's not available there yet. I already have to make a conscious choice between

- 4o (can search the web, use Canvas, evaluate Python server-side, generate images, but has no chain of thought)

- o3-mini (web search, CoT, canvas, but no image generation)

- o1 (CoT, maybe better than o3, but no canvas or web search and also no images)

- Deep Research (very powerful, but I have only 10 attempts per month, so I end up using roughly zero)

- 4.5 (better in creative writing, and probably warmer sound thanks to being vinyl based and using analog tube amplifiers, but slower and request limited, and I don't even know which of the other features it supports)

- 4o "with scheduled tasks" (why on earth is that a model and not a tool that the other models can use!?)

Why do I have to figure all of this out myself?
by bogwog | 2025-04-14 21:28:38+00:00
> What's the point of getting FTC approval

Efficiency? The people at the FTC reviewing mergers can't be experts of every corner of the economy, but if they catch an illegal merger during the approval process it can be blocked early without having to go to court.

An illegal merger is illegal no matter what. It's the corporation's responsibility to not break the law.