MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GauntletWizard | 2025-05-07 18:30:19+00:00
An API that uses JSON isn't "Stringly Typed". An API that lacks any validation on the JSON you pass to it is. Under their definition, nearly everything is stringly typed if if passes a system boundry, because serialization transforms everything into a string - Sometimes a byte string, sure, but you end up with transport-neutral single object whose interpretation is understood by metadata, and that's a good thing, because you don't need to waste time interpreting it at every layer it passes through.

The modern advice to "Use a serialization library" is actually encoding several hard pieces of learning into one. There was a time when save files for most games were just memory dumps of large sections of memory. You dumped raw C-objects, including pointers to other objects, directly. You ended up with a tangled mess of references, but it was simple to write code for, cheap to write to disk, cheap to read from disk, and easy to break. Basically every update to a game broke all of the save files, because the most minor of tweaks could change the object layout generated by the compiler. The first change was to put magic strings at the beginning to inform the version - So at least you displayed an error message rather that executing some unexpected part of the save file as code.

This lesson was hard learned as we entered the networked age, where you couldn't trust the incoming messages weren't malicious - And you certainly couldn't trust, with all of the terribly-behaving middleware, that they were well-formed. Writing serialization/deserialization code is not hard, but it's annoyingly rote, and you would need it for dozens upon dozens of classes. So instead we switched to standardized libraries for serialization and deserialization.

Java and Python both had serialization libraries where whole objects could be serialized - Along with everything they referenced. This lead to massive security holes, because it was easy for them to take a huge chunk of working memory with them, because circular references to root objects allowed them to grab parts of other operations, or even application secrets. Python was worse, as the pickle library allowed serializing whole bytecode; Meaning every load was an arbitrary code execution.

Modern serialization libraries have come to a compromise. They serialize data only in primitives. You have to rebuild the tangled web of cross object references yourself. This often sucks, but it's far better than the alternatives we've found.

GraphQL is popular for precisely this reason. You can avoid most of the serialization and deserialization steps and query what you want directly, allowing you to access deeply-linked properties of deeply linked objects without the expensive round trips and security barriers being checked and rechecked; But the expressiveness comes at a distinct cost in terms of getting those barriers on the server side really right, because the default allow permissions make it easy to leak.
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-05-07 18:30:26+00:00
> If the Americans, in your example, over ate because they produced more of the world's needs, are they abusers?

We know they did it in the past for profit and to flood developing countries with their products so that they wouldn't develop their own economy, because their home made products would cost more, so yes, they are abusers.

But USA stopped manufacturing almost everything 30 years ago. On purpose. Despite that, they are still one of the worst polluters per capita.

By Co2 emissions alone they produce per capita 300% of the global average.

By Co2 emissions alone.

For comparison EU stops at 117%, my country in EU at 100%, 1/3 of the USA per capita, 1/15th in total.

> If China stopped industries that cause global warming, would those industries only be picked up by other countries because they are wanted or needed?

It would immediately halt the world's economy and it would take at least 30 years to go back to a new normal. Some other country would pick those industries up, probably more than one country, each one of them with lesser output and smaller economy of scale, raising prices.

Short answer: because they are needed.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-07 18:30:26+00:00
It's 4 inputs, actually.

1) The culture (active, passive). Example: Germany, where people bike a lot more since gas costs so much; and ironically, their shitty Internet and cell service negatively impacts the phenomenon of everyone being glued to a screen. I think they're actually proud of it, at this point? Anyway, they're WAY fitter (despite, or perhaps partly because of, eating meats for breakfast instead of cereals!)

2) The food environment (preservatives, fructose, hidden carbs, bad artificial sweeteners, salts in everything, big serving portions, or more all-natural stuff)

3) Genes- There are literally over 500 discovered that affect your equilibrium weight. 251 genetic markers have been linked to sport-related traits (though only about half have been replicated in multiple studies). 13 genes have been identified so far that affect how the body responds to different types of exercise, including cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength.

4) And finally, there is willpower/discipline. Which is a finite resource, by the way, that gets resupplied by sleep and downtime, and which often needs to be drawn on for other things (like work and childrearing).

Think of it as a dial. In the middle, you stay the same weight. Tilt it slightly to the right (which is all too easy to do), and you are on a weight-gain schedule. Tilt it slightly to the left, and you will lose over time. If you're working against (1), (2), and (3), then (4) becomes MUCH harder to do.
by cestith | 2025-05-07 18:30:29+00:00
I had a teacher in high school who asked me how secure the data on our lab network was. I asked if I could show her without getting in trouble for knowing how to do something. About fifteen seconds later I asked her if the directory we were looking at had all her tests for the year in it.

It was, and for anything not requiring an essay-style answer it also had the keys. This one really isn’t impressive to any sophisticated user. They removed the shell from the user menu list of programs, but they left the shell-to-DOS functionality enabled in a few programs they left enabled. The shared drive directory structure was straightforward to navigate, and being DOS had no real security once the user was at a prompt.

Many of us would spend our in-class lab time playing Scorched Earth or other games installed into hidden directories the students had created.
by mNovak | 2025-05-07 18:31:08+00:00
I'm getting mixed results with the co-drawing demo, in terms of understanding what stick figures are, which seems pretty important for the 99% of us who can't draw a realistic human. I was hoping to sketch a scene, and let the model "inflate" it, but I ended up with 3D rendered stick figures.

Seems to help if you explicitly describe the scene, but then the drawing-along aspect seem relatively pointless.
by divan | 2025-05-07 18:31:08+00:00
I can understand that, and it's great if it fits your needs. It's annoying when apps that just have to do one thing and do it well instead are focusing on hype features. My recent rant is about Warp terminal that has a "different font size for different tabs" issue open for years, but silently integrated all sorts of AI into the terminal.

And yet, it's hard to ignore the fact that coding practices are undergoing a one-in-a-generation shift, and experienced programmers are benefiting most from it. Many of us had to ditch the comfort of terminal editors and switch to Microsoft's VSCode clones just to have these new incredible powers and productivity boosts.

Having AI code assistants built into the fast terminal editor sounds like a dream. And editors like Helix could totally deliver here if the authors were a bit more open to the idea.
by thenewwazoo | 2025-05-07 18:31:14+00:00
> 90% error rate, meaning nine of 10 appealed denials were ultimately reversed.

This is a fantastic illustration of selection bias. It stands to reason that truly-unjustified (some hidden variable) denials would be appealed at a higher rate and therefore the true value is something less than 90%.

That's not to say UHG are without blame, I just thought this was really interesting.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 18:31:19+00:00
I'm "only" 40 and strongly prefer films made when they still shot and edited on film. The peak as far as visual quality and overall effect of film, for me, was probably the 60s through early 90s, though I love a bunch of films older or newer than that.

The constraints of not being able to color-grade the whole film with a slider or two, of every cut in the edit taking time to do, and of effects that weren't in-camera being relatively expensive, tended to lead to better and more-interesting filmmaking, even in middling films.

I appreciate what the right people can do with modern tools—I enjoy and even love plenty of newer films, and it's undeniably brought some cool stuff within reach of smaller, cheaper productions—but overall I see it as making cinema worse.

"We did it in a computer" being the answer to every "how'd they do that?" isn't movie magic, it's boring as hell. It's why even a film that tries to avoid that to some degree, like the new Dune duology, is in some important respects—though setting aside overall quality of the film on some other dimensions—just less interesting than broadly similar films like Lawrence of Arabia or Star Wars (or even, if I may be so bold, David Lynch's Dune).

I think this sort of opinion is fairly common among film-fans of all ages, due to interest in film making itself as much as output of the process per se. Not sure most movie watchers care, and they may well prefer the newer stuff because of the ultra-fast editing and tuned-to-be-cotton-candy-appealing color schemes and unconstrained video-game camera of fully CGI scenes and all that.

> I prefer 1970s music. Autotune is for whippersnappers.

Hard agree. I can't friggin' believe the heavy-handed autotune in children's media, especially (Daniel Tiger! Fred Rogers would be so unhappy with it). Let's teach them that natural human singing voices, like their own, sound wrong and bad. WTF.
by dsr_ | 2025-05-07 18:31:50+00:00
There are lots of speaker manufacturers; I'm not too concerned about Polk and B&W.

But! There are relatively few home theater receiver makers, and the Denon/Marantz siblings have been a big chunk of them for decades.

(Sony, Yamaha, Onkyo, Denon. Nobody else covers the low and mid cost market.)
by bglusman | 2025-05-07 18:31:51+00:00
Protobuf does support JSON encoding[0], which I like as the .proto definition is quite readable, and then you can encode/decode either human readably or efficiently. It's even quite easy to have your consumer support both since the two are pretty easy to tell apart and if you know its either one or the other, you can just failover trying one to the other, possibly at some small cost... the guide also does point out some significant downsides to relying on the JSON version, but it can be useful in development and/or debugging in some cases, especially if you control both sides sending and receiving and can just toggle to use it when you want temporarily.

[0]https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/json/
by mannyv | 2025-05-07 18:31:51+00:00
Actually, this is wrong depending on the company and what the specific situation is.

Look at DEC, a classic engineering company failure. DEC failed because they were led by engineers who didn't understand the market. It apparently was a great place to work, because they were so NIH that they built everything from scratch.

Then look at Intel, a company that is in the process of failing because they listened to their customers too much. None of their customers wanted GPUs, or mobile chips, or power savings - until they did. By that time Intel was already behind the curve.

Then look at Microsoft under Ballmer - a company that probably illustrates the point you're trying to make. But then they won with Nadella, luckily.

Apple is a bit different and a bad example because unlike other companies they attempt to define the future. Most companies aren't in a position to try, much less succeed, at this.
by mlin4589 | 2025-05-07 18:32:08+00:00
The reality, I suspect is that internally models are likely modeling these alignment features such as refusals as a secondary filter.

In fact, for many models you can remove refusals rather trivially with linear steering vectors through SAEs.

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refus...

Additionally, you can often jailbreak these models by fine-tuning the model on a handful of curated samples.
by klank | 2025-05-07 18:32:25+00:00
I don't think it's as easy as hand waving it away as "your competitor's labor". Your competitors labor is your community, it's people. I believe we all have an ethical responsibility to that.

For the points you brought up, why is stagnation for the purposes of upholding an ethical position a bad thing?

And yes, by definition, worrying about ethical responsibility would lead to ethical issues. That's the whole point.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-05-07 18:32:28+00:00
Think beyond software and current models

The moment after human birth the human agent starts a massive information gathering process - that no other system really expects much output from in a coherent way - for 5-10 years. Aka “data dump” some of that data is good, and some of it is bad. This in turn leads to biases, it leads to poor thinking models; everything that you described, is also applicable to every intelligent system - including humans. So again you presupposing that there’s some kind of perfect information benchmark that couldn’t exist.

When that system comes out of the birth canal it already has embedded in it millions of years of encoded expectations predictability systems and functional capabilities that are going to grow independent of what the environment does (but will be certainly shaped in its interactions by the environment).

So no matter what, you have a structured system of interaction that must be loaded with previously encoded data (experience, transfer learning etc) with and it doesn’t matter what type of intelligent system you’re talking about there are foundational assumptions at the physical interaction layer that encode all previous times steps of evolution.

Said an easier way: a lobster, because of the encoded DNA that created it, will never have the same capabilities as a human, because it is structured to process information completely differently and their actuators don’t have the same type and level of granularity as human actuators.

Now assume that you are a lobster compared to a theoretical AGI in sensor-effector combination. Most likely it would be structured entirely differently than you are as a biological thing - but the mere design itself carries with it an encoding of structural information of all previous systems that made it possible.

So by your definition you’re describing something that has never been seen in any system and includes a lot of assumptions about how alternative intelligent systems could work - which is fair because I asked your opinion.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-05-07 18:32:31+00:00
Complex thing to analyze, no?

Most Americans use freeways, and most do not use motorcycles. It's always hard to compare a rare thing to a common thing, it always has surprising problems. It's like when people on Reddit worry about radon in their basement, but the incidence rate of whatever cancer it was associated with is so low anyway.

What about agency? "Don't worry about kids choking on Legos, kids don't die from choking on Legos" - but that's because parents well informed and really vigilant about it, compared to say batteries. Motor riders avoid freeways.
by creer | 2025-05-07 18:33:12+00:00
> perhaps getting free tutoring from LLMs is a good thing?

Yes it is, and I have seen it work. A friend has a hard time reading through long material. They have showed me a log of step by step questions they asked their LLM AI. That was impressive. In essence a long private teacher interview going on and on on the general topic they needed help with. With each answer manageable for them, and the long succession fitting their research style. Well done. There was still a risk of garbage coming from the LLM, but mitigated by the long sequence of step by step advancement (and space for further progress as the tech continues to improve.)

Definitely for them a better teacher and fitting their style of attention.
by verall | 2025-05-07 18:33:13+00:00
I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance:

> You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation
by RankingMember | 2025-05-07 18:33:15+00:00
I agree, it's moralizing. The dependence on pharma is a real concern, particularly in a country (US obv) where they've got us all by the balls, but it's no less/more a problem here than for any other ailment requiring maintenance meds. We're still learning how the American diet and other environmental factors can literally change peoples' metabolism and it makes complete sense to me to treat the symptoms if we have the means to do so.
by Animats | 2025-05-07 18:33:25+00:00
Better social AI companions might help. They would be a step up from, say, the 30th percentile parent.

SF versions:

"I Always Do what Teddy Says" (1964), by Harry Harrison.[1]

"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

[1] https://archive.org/details/bestofharryharri0000harr_z2p6
by doright | 2025-05-07 18:33:31+00:00
I've wondered why, and what societal shifts in the world led us here. Maybe the "violent video games cause harm" narrative didn't work out in practice because the types of console video games that tend to become popular don't have the harmful engagement elements being talked about now? Propaganda as a concept has existed far longer than video games. But mere depictions of violence don't incite behavioral change in the way that "social optimization" elements do?

(Example: treating lootbox items not as bits of fictional lore the player's hero character finds in mythical dungeons, but as a set of items the person playing has invested their real-world shillings into according to predefined economic rules set by the designers, such that their livelihood becomes enmeshed with the game world)
by nine_k | 2025-05-07 18:33:36+00:00
JS is also "stringly typed" in a sense that you can access object's properties by just string names, foo.bar and foo["bar"] is the same thing.

It lead to a really nice Typescript feature, where you can declare something like type FooProp = "bar" | "baz", and the typechecker is smart enough to only allow these literal strings where you use values of FooProp type (e.g. when accessing properties by name, like above). This collapsed the whole crowd of strings, enums, and symbolic constants to just strings, without any loss of type safety, which I find a cognitive win.
by pstuart | 2025-05-07 18:34:09+00:00
> whoever has money that company will hold ruling rights for some years

And that's better? That's what we have now, effectively, but 2 simple changes could "fix" the system significantly:

1. Campaign finance reform 2. Ranked choice voting (or similar, as RCV is not without its issues).

I'd also like to see some sort of "understanding test" so that you can only vote if you can demonstrate that you understand the arguments of the proposition in question. There's no way to do that, but it makes me happy to wish it were so.
by nitwit005 | 2025-05-07 18:34:27+00:00
> What happens to the incentives of terror groups in response to such a policy?

You're imagining these people to be some sort of loyalists, rather than something closer to anarchists. Triggering military responses is going to be viewed as a bonus.

I'll note people rather frequently claimed Bin Laden wanted the US to be tied up in the military quagmire that their terror attacks produced. There's certainly some logic to that idea. His organization was too small to do much direct damage.
by titzer | 2025-05-07 18:34:49+00:00
> JavaScript is a weakly typed language without much type safety

This is a little inaccurate. JavaScript is dynamically typed. Values carry strong, unforgeable type information (tags), though tags for numbers are extremely cheap and optimized away whenever possible. It is not possible that JavaScript "forgets" that 1.0 is a number and allows a program to use it as a "pointer".
by fallinditch | 2025-05-07 18:34:50+00:00
> James [...] sent along work at the last minute with no connection to the artist involved (a random tape of gabba from his studio was handed over to an Atlantic rep for a Lemonheads remix)

Not available on streaming platforms afaik, except yt - https://youtu.be/VJSCMu21unQ?feature=shared
by notpeter | 2025-05-07 18:35:03+00:00
1. You can specify your terminal font via terminal.font_family in zed settings.json

2. Not sure.

3. For most languages, the default is to use prettier for formatting. You can disable `format_on_save` globally, per-language and per project depending on your needs. If you ever need to save without triggering format ("workspace: save without formatting").

Prettier is /opinionated/ -- and its default is `singleQuote` = false which can be quite jarring if unexpected. Prettier will look for and respect various configuration files (.prettierrc, .editorconfig, via package.json, etc) so projects can set their own defaults (e.g. `singleQuote = true`). Zed can also be configured to further override prettier config zed settings, but I usually find that's more trouble than it's worth.

If you have another formatter you prefer (a language server or an external cli that will format files piped to stdin) you can easily have zed use those instead. Note, you can always manually reformat with `editor: format` and leave `format_on_save` off by default if that's more your code style.

- https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#terminal-font-family

- https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#format-on-save

- https://prettier.io/docs/configuration

- https://zed.dev/docs/languages/yaml#prettier-formatting

- https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#formatter
by yodsanklai | 2025-05-07 18:35:13+00:00
We weren't in the meeting, but if the person cried, there's a possibility that the person was actually bullied. If the work sucks, it can be discussed outside of the meeting with the person's manager for instance. It's not because the person works for McKinsey and is an inexperienced ivy league graduate that it's ok to be mean.
by inanutshellus | 2025-05-07 18:35:36+00:00
That's not a counter-argument. If your child spends his entire childhood primarily knowing folks that share your religious views, he's going to be better at honoring those views as an adult. Ergo, as a parent that knows that, religious school promises a curated "who your children know" even if that "who"'s attributes are "my kind of religious" rather than "my kind of wealth".

...

but at least in my local area those two things overlap nigh-identically.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-07 18:35:45+00:00
I wouldn’t say they are all poorly made, but they became poorly made as they became more Bayhem. Like how Tim Burton leaned too far into his style (and his love of Depp in everything) and lost the balance. The Rock, The Island, Bad Boys, and Armageddon are very fun, exciting, and visually interesting movies. Then he leaned into Bayhem and now his movies are barely comprehensible.

Every Frame a Painting is a great channel.