MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-23 23:19:30+00:00
> One of my favourite features of Dired is the ability to mark or unmark multiple files in a variety of ways: manually, using repetition counts, or with regular expressions. This can be done fluidly and spontaneously as we browse and inspect files. Once we're satisfied with our selection, we can perform bulk operations on them such as copying, moving, deleting, changing permission bits, compressing the marked files, etc.

That does sound cool. Emacs sounds like the type of app I would have loved back when DOS was still a thing, but now after using linux for 20 something years, the fact that it can do everything just seems so antithetical to the unix way...even if I could see myself using it, the idea of being so dependent on one app for so much seems so weird to me these days. Guess I'll be sticking with vim and various cli tools until the end of time.
by tuatoru | 2025-05-23 23:20:08+00:00
In my childhood in the 1960s there were also many men in their seventies leading active lives as you describe - golfing, sailing, hiking and so on.

What there were not, was lots of people on oxygen or in wheelchairs or on dialysis or taking insulin daily. Lifespan is going up because we are keeping sick people alive for longer.
by titanomachy | 2025-05-23 23:20:24+00:00
> Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date.

It sounds like they’d find a way to be miserable anywhere. I live in a medium-density neighborhood of a large US city. I have multiple close friends within a five-minute walk, and I’m constantly meeting new people who share my interests. The music venues, restaurants, and yoga studios are nice too, but having so many potential friends in close proximity is what really makes the city great for me.

It’s not necessarily easy to start making friends though, it definitely doesn’t happen automatically. Maybe in small towns, people are more likely to notice you and spend time with you, because they also have fewer people to choose from.

When I’ve lived in small towns I found dating almost impossible, though.

> if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper

Bro. Please go make some friends, or find a hobby or vocation you like, or get religion, or something! You don’t have to be miserable, at least not all the time. Renouncing society will probably just make things worse.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-23 23:20:33+00:00
They were two viral web apps that blew up on twitter. They had approx 25,000 users at their peak.

Originally they were built on Postgres, so we helped move over to us. Their graph had about 50,000 user nodes and 25 million edges (follower connections). This then made it a lot more optimised to handle the highly interconnected users to find shortest paths between one user and Elon Must / Donald Trump.

So to sum it up, they stored clones of all the users and how they were interconnected by follower relationships, and then used our query language to super easily calculate the shortest paths.
by Aeolun | 2025-05-23 23:20:57+00:00
Just because I wouldn’t have an issue with random people generating porn of me, doesn’t mean I want to seek it out, see it, or facilitate it.

It’s fundamentally no different from acknowledging that there may be a fanclub on the other side of the country with a stash of aeolun porn. As long as they’re not using it to advertise their services, and don’t tell me what kind of degenerate things they’re doing with it, what does that hurt me?

Now that you’ve said it I’m actually mildly curious what would happen if I fine-tune a model purely on myself. But what would I do with it even if I made it? I can’t post it on Civit any more can I?
by ahartmetz | 2025-05-23 23:21:08+00:00
I don't believe that all business is "just business". You have tobacco companies and Purdue Pharma on one end of the spectrum and, let's say, Mozilla Corporation and Valve (debatable but I think they're cool) on the other end. And, of course, large companies are kinda many different entities, really. Microsoft has a long history of dishonest behavior, some of it pretty sophisticated and with a long-term view. That makes it very hard to trust them, generally. Why is part of VS Code not FOSS anyway?
by fencepost | 2025-05-23 23:21:15+00:00
So, it's a stationary alternative to the "van life" trend that floats around sometimes.

Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive.

I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like going back and living like your grandparents or great-grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
by godelski | 2025-05-23 23:22:09+00:00
> I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like...

I apologize for not being clear. But we are talking about the same thing.

> The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits.

Winger's paper was written in 1960. I do not think such claims need have been said. Those arguments were prolific and had been made for centuries. He did not need to convince anyone in the scientific community that the laws of nature were not driven by gods and spirits. By the 1960s the scientific age was already mature and it was well established in the community that the laws of nature are not the domain of gospel.

| "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

The point is made here. It is surprising that math describes reality. It is surprising that a circle has anything to do with a population.

I really did mean it when I said "about something that would sound silly today". We take this for granted now, with 60 years of working under this framework, but this wasn't always so. It seems silly now because much of the math we learn is in science classes and even outside we have a particular focus of teaching math most relating to science, but this is a small portion of a much larger field. Fwiw, I am not saying this as a complete outsider, I have a degree in physics.

It is also worth paying attention to the fact that Wigner helped create Mathematical Physics[0]. "Mathematical Physics" is not a pleonasm.

Don't take it just on my word! The Wiki page says something extremely similar!

| In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to empirical predictions. Mathematical theories often have predictive power in describing nature. [1] | Wigner argues that mathematical concepts have applicability far beyond the context in which they were originally developed[1] > The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation.

I should make sure this is clear though (unsure which interpretation you intend). Math and science aren't interchangeable. Physics uses the language of math as its main method for developing theories and logic. But it is also important to stress that it doesn't use the same mathematical language throughout. The frameworks that those working in relativity use are not useful for those that work in quantum mechanics. If the math was uniform, we would not be dedicating so much time to bridge these. Nor is math absolute here, as it is a map, and we still rely heavily on the language of experimental evidence.

Yes, he was saying "use maths". Yes, it sounds silly today, but so do a lot of things that needed be said in the past. I see no reason that the (now) obvious claim by Copernicus would make him any less famous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
by Jackson__ | 2025-05-23 23:22:29+00:00
>Taxes: $41

>Electric: ~$30

>Water: $0

>Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there

>Food: ~$300/mo.

>Telephone: $8/mo

>Entertainment: Fishing and library, free

>Internet: Use library

>Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000

Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-23 23:22:56+00:00
I have learned to take these kinds of papers with a grain of salt, though. They often rest on carefully selected examples that make the behavior seem much more consistent and reliable than it is. For example, the famous "king - man + woman = queen" example from Word2Vec is in some ways more misleading than helpful, because while it worked fine for that case it doesn't necessarily work nearly so well for [emperor, man, woman, empress] or [husband, man, woman, wife].

You get a similar thing with convolutional neural networks. Sometimes they automatically learn image features in a way that yields hidden layers that easy and intuitive to interpret. But not every time. A lot of the time you get a seemingly random garble that belies any parsimonious interpretation.

This Anthropic paper is at least kind enough to acknowledge this fact when they poke at the level of representation sharing and find that, according to their metrics, peak feature-sharing among languages is only about 30% for English and French, two languages that are very closely aligned. Also note that this was done using two cherry-picked languages and a training set that was generated by starting with an English language corpus and then translating it using a different language model. It's entirely plausible that the level of feature-sharing would not be nearly so great if they had used human-generated translations. (edit: Or a more realistic training corpus that doesn't entirely consist of matched translations of very short snippets of text.)

Just to throw even more cold water on it, this also doesn't necessarily mean that the models are building a true semantic model and not just finding correlations upon which humans impose semantic interpretations. This general kind of behavior when training models on cross-lingual corpora generated using direct translations was first observed in the 1990s, and the model in question was singular value decomposition.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 23:23:17+00:00
I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one:

Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.

The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.

And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.
by seabird | 2025-05-23 23:23:50+00:00
Where in my comment did you get that I think culture is a barren plain of consumerism?

Some styles of dance and music, which are a component of an overall culture, are totally centered in large cities. Music is a bizarre thing to bring up -- bumfuck nowhere Midwest smalltown is the origin and inspiration for plenty of music that is listened to well outside of the geographical region it's from. Hardcore punk has plenty of representation from gutted Rust Belt locales, and Midwest emo is straight-up named after it. They do arise and perpetuate themselves in isolated locations, all around the world.

Of course there are cultural aspects that large cities will have and more rural areas won't, as well as the other way around. Neither are lacking culture by virtue of lacking the other's culture.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-23 23:24:36+00:00
They have a comparison page: https://undo.io/resources/undo-vs-rr/

I was in talks with them recently because I kept running into limitations with rr. The main advantages for my use case were that undo doesn't have the same dependency on hardware timers, which means the ARM support is much better, you can run it in a VM (e.g. a cloud machine) and you can do replays on different systems.
by delichon | 2025-05-23 23:25:18+00:00
"The Dragon has been born again, and it's one of you. But we don't know whether they were born as a girl or a boy." -- Moiraine, in the series opening

That seems to throw out the gender determinism of the books. Do they walk that back? Is it an isolated exception? It's like starting The Fellowship of the Ring with a scene of Smeagol getting a great deal on the one ring at Diamonds Direct.
by healsdata | 2025-05-23 23:26:28+00:00
Yeah, one of their former eng managers said the same

> The post carefully avoids calling this an “Our Incredible Journey” moment, but removing project hosting and user profiles is the end of Glitch as a platform. What’s left is essentially a redirect service with some backlinks (hosted on the Fastly Edge Compute Platform™, naturally). You can’t spin the removal of the core product as anything other than what it is: a shutdown.

https://keith.is/blog/the-end-of-glitch-even-though-they-say...
by gagege | 2025-05-23 23:28:05+00:00
In my experience, this kind of thing is exactly what LLMs are good at, and fast at.

Here's a real example from my job as a BI dev. I needed to figure out how to get counts of incoming products from an ERP with a 1000+ table database schema in a data lake with 0 actual foreign keys. I sorta knew the data would need to come from the large set of "stock movements" tables, which I didn't know how to join, and I had no idea which rows from that table would be relevant to incoming product or even which fields to look at to even begin to determine that. I simultaneously asked a consultant for the ERP how to do it and asked Cursor a very basic "add the count of incoming units to this query" request.

Cursor gave me a plausible answer instantly, but I wasn't sure it was correct. When the consultant got back to be a few days later, the answer he gave was identical to Cursor's code. Cursor even thought of an edge case that the consultant hadn't.

It blew my mind! I don't know if Cursor just knows about this ERP's code or what, or if it ran enough research queries to figure it out. But it got it right. The only context I provided was the query I wanted to add the count to and the name of the ERP.

So, I 100% believe that, especially with something like MCP, the pull model is the right way. Let the LLM do the hard work of finding all the context.
by benlivengood | 2025-05-23 23:29:34+00:00
After Google ditched Domains I moved to Route53. I guess the only downside is that it doesn't handle some TLDs?

What you want from a registrar is to keep existing for many years and resilience to social engineering, and AWS seems like the next best thing to Google which you famously can't even talk to for a social engineering attempt. I expect AWS account management to be almost as good as Gaia, but don't really know how hard social engineering is.
by api | 2025-05-23 23:29:42+00:00
The Yudkowskiites are all about coherent fantasies untested by reality, as are… really… a lot of philosophers throughout history. Maybe most.

I fundamentally do not believe in knowing without sensing or learning without experiencing. Of course it need not be direct experience. You can “download” information. But that information had to be gathered somehow at some point. There is only so much training data.

As I said — I don’t dismiss the idea of AI challenging human intellect or replacing human jobs. An AI “merely” as smart as a human but tireless and faster could seem superhuman. I am just intensely skeptical of the idea of something learning to self improve and then magically taking off into some godlike superintelligence realm far beyond what is latent in or implied by its training data. That would be an informatic perpetual motion machine. It would, in fact, be magic, in the fantasy sense.
by bradlys | 2025-05-23 23:29:45+00:00
Small towns can be great if you fit the mold.

They’re terrible if you don’t. There’s inherently less diversity within a smaller population.

I grew up in a small town. (4000 people, largest nearby was about 15 miles away and 20k. The nearest “city” was 100k and 80+ miles away. Maybe visited that city region once a year. Major city (500k) that was 180 mi away I never even saw growing up.) Even being a straight cismale nerd was considered the bane of my existence. There wasn’t anyone else I met who shared my level of interests. I saw how people who were gay were treated and it was quite grim. Imagine now you’re adding in multiple facets like race, politics, etc.

These small places work well for those who fit a certain mold. You’re not gonna have an easier time dating either if you have any modest requirements either like education, income, beliefs, etc.

The main issues with cities is that they’re very competitive. If you’re not a competitive person or don’t have whatever attributes the market rewards, it will be very challenging. Especially with dating as the pool to most people feels “unlimited” and therefore people will keep looking than settle for someone who is ugly or whatever issue you have.
by mmh0000 | 2025-05-23 23:30:41+00:00
Why do you care about "work" data? They're selling your data[1][2]. You should sell theirs, it's only fair.

[1] https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/blogroll/fortune-500-com...

[2] https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/blogroll/examining-data-...
by rconti | 2025-05-23 23:31:08+00:00
> These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.

It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).

Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.

I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 23:32:26+00:00
> remote jobs

> a recession hits and you can’t find another job.

Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness.

I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent at every price point.

I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.
by davidcbc | 2025-05-23 23:33:13+00:00
I mean, Rand is still the dragon reborn, Saidin is still tainted, men who channel still go crazy. Channeling saidin and saidar are still treated as fundamentally different.

Adding a couple other people to the candidate pool for TDR didn't change much except leave new viewers guessing who TDR was for the first season whereas in The Eye of the World it was very obvious from the start
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 23:33:31+00:00
The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2.

It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle.

The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.
by SeaScythes | 2025-05-23 23:33:34+00:00
Hey there--pentester, security researcher, and bug bounty hunter here.

"Demonstrating impact" is common practice. The presence (or non-presence) of rate limiting controls, such as those alluded to by the commenter above, can play into the risk assigned to a vulnerability, and may be difficult to ascertain without actually attempting an otherwise theoretical attack. This also has the effect of indicating whether the target has adequate detection capabilities, which is important information.

Demonstrating impact is also just sometimes necessary to convey urgency to leadership; hand waving is common. Alternatively, some organizations may silently patch without performing a responsible disclosure, such as was the case with this article. Having hard proof that the attack was 1) viable and 2) not detected is critical information in the event that you must disclose to the public.

As an aside, from your history:

> My one gripe with HN is that people say incorrect things with complete confidence pretty regularly and you can only Detect it if you know the subject matter.

Welcome to being part of the problem. Remember the feeling.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-23 23:34:02+00:00
77% percent of young Americans aren't fit for service.

2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less.

And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.
by tapeo | 2025-05-23 23:34:46+00:00
Yes actually that it's not a trivial topic.

What I can do is to make it very transparent on how data is managed.

The files content are appended to the context builder, then the context and messages are processed through OpenRouter, which is a provider that offers APIs to all the AI models, and the output generated (and the account data) is stored on a secured database on Mongodb platform.

It’s all defined in the privacy policy here: https://contextch.at/docs/privacy-policy/index.html