MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2025-04-27 16:57:42+00:00
If it's for educational purposes and you want to explore various tradeoffs, then you shouldn't necessarily restrict yourself to languages that make similar tradeoffs regarding safety guarantees in the language as Rust. Again, the goal of writing a memory-safe program is understandable, but there's more than one way to achieve that goal when it comes to language guarantees. That doesn't only apply to languages that offer fewer guarantees than Rust, but also to languages that are possibly less low-level (e.g. OCaml, Nim).

But even for educational purposes, using a language with a poor selection of libraries is likely to lead to a bad experience if what you want to produce is working, non-trivial software. Every project includes some "boring" aspects -- such as parsing configuration and data files -- that you won't necessarily enjoy writing from scratch. The overall programming experience is shaped by much more than the design of the language alone.
by grumbel | 2025-04-27 16:57:49+00:00
Give every Internet user a domain name and routable IP for free with their Internet account.

That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.

Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.

Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-27 16:57:58+00:00
And probably only because Disney was his target and could pay a technical team unlimited money to investigate and spoon-feed the FBI and prosecutor everything they needed. A smaller chain or independent bar/restaurant would not have even gotten the time of day with a complaint about someone changing prices on a menu. And they would have been the ones in court defending any claims of injury due to undisclosed allergens, with only a vague claim of "our menu must have been hacked."
by gwern | 2025-04-27 16:58:19+00:00
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.

Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
by sspiff | 2025-04-27 16:58:19+00:00
This is true and standard for (really) old projects, and dealing with this scripts and their problems used to be the bane of my existence 10 years ago. But I can't say I've encountered any such projects in the last 5 or so years.

Either they use a modern programming language (which typically has an included build system, like rust's cargo or simply go build) of they use simple Makefiles. For C/C++ codebases, it seems like CMake has become the dominant build system.

All of these are typically better than what GNU autoconf offers, with modern modern features and equally or better flexibility to deal with differences between operating systems, distributions, and/or optional or alternative libraries.

I don't really see why anyone would pick autoconf for a modern project.
by margorczynski | 2025-04-27 16:59:25+00:00
I think a general speed limit for all vehicles would be a good idea. If you want it removed then your vehicle can't travel public roads, any kind of modification of it in secret would be a crime.

Not sure about the US but in Europe (at least the EU) 150km/h max would be fine, at least it would make life harder for some sociopaths that treat public roads as a racing track.
by xyst | 2025-04-27 16:59:45+00:00
Blame corporate greed for this never ending cycle of (human/psychological/and physical) exploitation in the name of pRoFiT.

A companion presentation to the OP is "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" by Nick Haneaur in 2014 —- https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...

He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.

The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
by pavlov | 2025-04-27 17:00:14+00:00
Why not? There are a lot of people who use the 2010s de facto standard JS server stack — Node, Express, Webpack etc. — but don't necessarily have the time or inclination to keep up to date with every new project in this space. It's a lot to follow.

The exclusive gatekeeping messaging doesn't seem very useful. There's probably a much bigger audience for "Hey, instead of starting yet another Node project, why not try this?" rather than preaching to the already converted early adopters.
by thraway79879s8d | 2025-04-27 17:00:22+00:00
That's bad reasoning

- Sex work is much more dangerous because it is illegal

- Legal sex work could lead to increased trafficking when there is so much unmet demand for legal immigration, but abundant legal immigration would solve that

- The people currently seeking out illegal sex work, or seeking it out in countries were there is more violence against women in general, are probably much more prone to violence. Increasing the size of the industry would result in a "regression to the mean" among johns

The porn problem is a bunch of people subtlety rewire their libidos in anti-social ways over time. That is involving orders of magnitudes more people than those that currently beat sex workers, and men and women alike (as the interview makes clear). A good legal prostitution system would have be:

1. Still quite expensive

2. No "pimps" or anything of that nature

3. Sex workers higher their own private security, run their own brothels, little reliance on police (who are likely to continue to be misogynist fucks regardless of how the law changes)

Basically poorer men, instead of going to cheaper brothels where the workers are treated worse, would have to "save up" for fewer trips to still-expensive establishments where 2 and 3 are still abundantly true. High American equality does also make this a challenge, for sure.
by szupie | 2025-04-27 17:00:30+00:00
Good point! I did include snowball Earth as one of the events in an earlier draft, but felt it was out of place and confusingly too similar to the writeup about Pannotia’s effects on life. There are many more theories on what contributed to the development of complex multicellular life, and it’s possible that it’s a result of multiple coinciding factors. But for this narrative centered on plate tectonics, I thought it made the story clearer to not include the snowball Earth hypothesis.

This was the original writeup for the glaciation event:

# Snowball Earth

Between 715 to 635 million years ago, the Earth experienced a series of intense and extensive glaciations that covered the planet in ice.

The earliest fossils of large multicellular life are dated soon after the end of these “Snowball Earth” conditions. Some theorise that the increased selective pressure during glaciation, followed by the return of vast coastal environments without competitors, helped drive the diversification of multicellular life.

References

Gee, H. (2021). A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters. St. Martin's Publishing Group.

McCall, G.J.H. (2006). The Vendian (Ediacaran) in the geological record: Enigmas in geology's prelude to the Cambrian explosion. Earth-Science Reviews, 77(1–3), 1-229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2005.08.004.

Lenton, T.M., Boyle, R.A., Poulton, S.W., Shields-Zhou, G.A., & Butterfield, N.J. (2014). Co-evolution of eukaryotes and ocean oxygenation in the Neoproterozoic era. Nature Geoscience, 7(4), 257–265. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2108
by hobs | 2025-04-27 17:00:35+00:00
I think its ok if you have a traditional server approach, but in the cloud this is a really great way to make yourself pay a lot for a little.

Most systems have a minimum amount of traffic they'll let you pay for, most object stores are not setup to stream small updates in a transactionally consistent way, there's a ton of complexity "in the small" as it were.
by kazinator | 2025-04-27 17:00:41+00:00
It's a bad practice commonly found in GNU projects, which results in an overcomplicated, inconvenient and unstable build system that will discourage future collaboration. Many of these projects are very old, two decades or more; they are living with ancient decisions made in a world of dozens of incompatible Unix forks.

One thing to do instead is to just write a ./configure script which detects what you need. In other words, be compatible at the invocation level. Make sure this is checked into the repo Anyone checking out any commit runs that, and that's it.

Someone who makes a tarball using git, out of a tagged release commit, should have a "release tarball".

A recent HN submission shows a ./configure system made from scratch using makefiles, which parallelizes the tests. That could be a good starting point for a C on Linux project today.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-04-27 17:00:43+00:00
Sex parties are fun!

I’m in the “embrace sex, skip the shame” boat. In the Bay Area there’s a really solid polyamory community. I’ve been reading the books and working on my own communication issues and anxieties for a good 15 years now and at this point things flow so smoothly. I have so many people in my life I’m on a kissing basis with. It’s so lovely! I’m surrounded by genuine connection and affection. Me and my community have good communication. No one ever gets jealous as we’re all consensually dating a bunch of people. (I’m mostly “solo poly” these days.) I have some regular partners I share more structured, intentional loving and intimate connection with. I have cute friends I go on bike rides with and then kiss and cuddle while taking a break at the waterfront. I get invited to all kinds of functions. Sex is a source of genuine joy for me. I get tested once every two or three months and I have a clear communication protocol and safer sex practice I use with new people.

Amongst all this, porn is just a way to get my motor running. An arousing way to engage in self play and to build energy for what weekend adventures await. Or, if I’m so inclined, a way to ease my own stress and experience some physical release of energy and ease stress.

I’ve heard this notion before - that people who suffer from “porn addiction” often have an unhealthy relationship with sex, often coming from Christian puritanical views and shame of the self and the body. Drop the shame! Learn to love yourself. Learn to communicate your needs and desires. Be with your community. Have fun! I am. :)
by latency-guy2 | 2025-04-27 17:01:12+00:00
How is that a "step 1" when thats describing something else entirely?

How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.

I don't work for free, and I know damn well neither do you.
by maronato | 2025-04-27 17:01:41+00:00
Huggingface has a few datasets of Wikipedia embeddings.

Here’s a few results: https://huggingface.co/search/full-text?q=Wikipedia+embeddin...

And the first result, which is probably what you’ll want to use: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Upstash/wikipedia-2024-06-bg...

I recommend you go for pgvector or a similar self hosted solution to calculate the similarities instead of a service like Vector.
by TOGoS | 2025-04-27 17:02:05+00:00
Don't even need to 'distribute' the wealth[1]. Just burn it. It's the inequality itself that causes problems--out-of-touch billionaires having the power to make the rest of us do their bidding, whether it makes any dang sense or not--not the lack of giant wads of dollar bills in everybody's pockets.

[1] If by 'wealth' we mean numbers in computers. Actual wealth, like healthy land and clean water and manufacturing capacity should be shared by everyone, but currently money is what controls it.
by runarberg | 2025-04-27 17:02:17+00:00
In this discourse it is often forgotten that we have consumer protection laws for a reason. And that consumer protection has been a pillar of labor struggle for a long time (and consequently undermined by conservative policies).

Scary effective ad campaigns which target cognitive biases in order to persuade consumers to behave against their own interest is usually banned by consumer laws in most countries. Using LLMs to affect consumer (or worse, election) behavior is no different and ought to be equally banned with consumer protection laws.

The existing tools at any given time do very much shape which consumer protection laws are created, and how they are created, as they should. A good policy maker does indeed blame a tool for a bad behavior, and does create legislation to limit how this tool is used, or otherwise the availability of that tool on the open market.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-27 17:02:26+00:00
Just putting this out there. This is one area where Esri's software really shines. They have so many software offerings and so much is said about different things you can do with ArcGIS (and competing systems), but the capability of their projection engine and geocoding systems - the code that lies at its heart - is unmatched, by far, at least as of 5 years ago when I left for a different company.

I had long conversations with Esri's projection engine lead. Really remarkable guy - he's got graduate degrees in geography and math (including a PhD) and he's an excellent C/C++ developer. That kind of expertise trifecta is rare. I'd walk by his office and sometimes see him working out an integral of a massive equation on his whiteboard (not that he didn't also use a CAS). "Oh yeah, I'm adding support for a new projection this week."
by nerdralph | 2025-04-27 17:02:40+00:00
Part of the problem is the different ways addresses are expressed throughout the world. I was born and grew up in Canada, and was confused when I started dealing with companies in China. Instead of street addresses, many are given by province, city, district, sub-district, and a building number.

Another problem is choosing which authority for the "correct" address. I've seen many cases where the official postal address city/town name is different than the 911 database. For example Canada Post will say some street addresses are in Dartmouth, while the official civic address is really Cole Harbour. https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/ac/ https://nsgi.novascotia.ca/civic-address-finder/

Even streets can have multiple official names/aliases. People who live on "East Bay Hwy", also live on "Highway 4", which is an alias.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-27 17:03:21+00:00
This is great news.

Across the way, it seems like the smaller fiber ISPs in Texas have the install game solved as well.

I've seen them run an entire street in less than a day. They had 5gbps into my office within 45 minutes beyond that point. These installers are doing 10+ residential jobs a day.

I think the local governments and HOAs can have a large impact on how these things play out. Getting involved with your HOA might have some silver lining if you are stuck in a shoddy ADSL or DOCSIS network.

From a technological perspective, FTTP is actually really easy to install compared to pretty much every alternative. Getting permission to directionally drill under streets and common areas can be more convenient than getting permission to broadcast RF signals or leverage the easements of other utilities who might be threatened by your business model. Fiber is also robust from a materials perspective. Buried glass will last forever and isn't worth trying to steal.

I think advancements in directional drilling technology (or experience regarding how to use it) could be a big factor in why we are seeing the phenomenon of multiple FTTP providers competing in the same neighborhoods now.
by ryao | 2025-04-27 17:03:59+00:00
I assume that the VM2 project achieved something similar to the ABD changes that were done in OpenZFS. ABD replaced the use of SLAB buffers for ARC with lists of pages. The issue with SLAB buffers is that absurd amounts of work could be done to free memory, and a single long lived SLAB object would prevent any of it from mattering. Long lived slab objects caused excessive reclaim, slowed down the process of freeing enough memory to satisfy system needs and in some cases, prevented enough memory from being freed to satisfy system needs entirely. Switching to linked lists of pages fixed that since the memory being freed from ARC upon request would immediately become free rather than be deferred to when all of the objects in the SLAB had been freed.
by mindslight | 2025-04-27 17:05:09+00:00
Does anyone know why Virginia has always been so notoriously draconian about speeding? Is it DC-adjacent policy wonks outsized faith in the effectiveness of top-down prescriptions, lots of DC politicians flagrantly violating the law, culture clash between stuffy suburbanites and yokels (Virginia was the first place I ever saw a trans truck), or what?
by folkrav | 2025-04-27 17:05:21+00:00
I do some maintenance myself but not oil changes - mostly from a time/cost perspective, I don’t really wish to go down that road and deal with spills in my driveway, etc. However the oil collection part isn’t particularly hard around here. I don’t know if there’s something similar in the US (or wherever you are located) but in Canada we have UOMA (Used Oil Management Association), a nonprofit which partners with garages to coordinate the recycling of used oil and related byproducts. They have a handy map which shows me 5+ garages in a 10min radius from my place which participates, including the shop I already go to - and I’m in a medium sized agricultural town, surrounded by corn fields, an hour from the nearest metropolitan area.

I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-27 17:05:27+00:00
I think we’ve skipped defining terms, which makes it hard to work out exactly what your thought experiment is trying to say.

What does it mean to be conscious? I (layman, this is a well-explored space so maybe somebody more informed will come along with a better definition) would define a conscious being as one which has subjective experiences, that is, one which has has the sensation of thinking. Therefore I know I am a conscious being by definition.

I mean this is just “I think, therefore I am.”

It is definitely possible that I’m an artificial being programmed to have first person subjective experience. I can confirm, if so, to my creators that their experiment was successful. But, I can’t offer any proof, and of course they would be totally reasonable to assume I am lying.

In your thought experiment, you say an entity that thinks it is conscious, but isn’t. By my definition of consciousness, that is impossible, because thinking things is definitionally a characteristic of conscious beings. It is fine if you want to use a different definition of consciousness or thinking, I just assumed and later supplied (my bad, I also should have defined in the beginning) what I thought were typical definitions.
by selfhoster11 | 2025-04-27 17:05:27+00:00
Those tokens won't come up during training, but LLMs are capable of In-Context Learning. If you give it some examples of how to create new words/characters in this manner as a part of the prompt, they will be able to use those tokens at inference time. Show it some examples of how to compose a Thai or Chinese sentence out of byte tokens, and give them a description of the hypothetical Unicode range of a custom alphabet, and a sufficiently strong LLM will be able to just output bytes despite those codepoints not technically existing.

And like I said, single-byte tokens very much are a part of word tokenisers, or to be precise, their token selection. "Word tokeniser" is a misnomer in any case - they are word piece tokenisers. English is simple enough that word pieces can be entire words. With languages where you have numerous suffixes, prefixes, and even in-fixes as a part of one "word" (as defined by "one or more characters preceded or followed by a space" - because the truth is more complicated than that), you have not so much "word tokenisers" as "subword tokenisers". A character tokeniser is just a special case of a subword tokeniser where the length of each subword is exactly 1.
by latency-guy2 | 2025-04-27 17:05:31+00:00
Send a pitch to Meta's board or executive suite describing how much you and your cohort would like to pay in aggregate for an ad-free experience for social media, then the rest of the internet based business as you wish.

There are absolutely alternatives, you won't use them because few others that you care about are on them. Similarly, free is the best price next to being paid.
by pdfernhout | 2025-04-27 17:05:36+00:00
I wrote StoryHarp for creating speech-interactive choose-your-own text adventures back around 1998 (in Delphi for Windows desktop), and ported it to the web about seven years ago (with some limitations) using TypeScript and Tachyons: https://storyharp.com/v3.0

Realistically, StoryHarp might be most fun to use as an authoring tools for kids making short idiosyncratic adventures to share with friends. StoryHarp could help people practice creative writing and learn just a bit of logic to set up puzzles (without getting bogged down in more computing complexity like writing C code or even just the conceptual demands of TADS or Inform, as amazing as those tools are).

I recently added a option (inspired by "flems.io") where you can create a StoryHarp link that includes the entire world definition in the hash. For example, here is a URL for a game that just says "You are visiting the Hacker News website" when you click "look": https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...

Otherwise the game stores data only in the browser (not the server) which can be exported or imported as files.

While I can see how LLMs might make for more realistic interactions with text adventures, writing text adventures is its own sort of puzzle (like coding programs manually), and I am not sure adding LLMs will really make creating such adventures a much more joyful experience. But maybe it could. I agree in general though that text adventures make a great playground for experimenting with new ideas (as with StoryHarp as an experiment in bringing browser ideas from Smalltalk into interactive fiction design).

P.S. I just expanded that Hacker News story with a couple more rules so you can have more of an experience: https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...

Anyway, that is the sort of idiosyncratic short experiential interactive fiction I am talking about. Just spend five or ten minutes and make something that captures an emotion or a theme or a concern or an moral conundrum or whatever.