MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmos62 | 2025-05-31 12:20:22+00:00
The "kulak" genocide was more widespread than the wiki article implies. For example, these deportations happened in Lithuania in 1940-1953 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lit...

My ancestors went through that. They didn't die during the deportation, but my grandmother's sister (2 mo) had to be left behind, because she couldn't survive the winter trip in cow wagons. The family didn't succeed in getting her sent to them in Siberia until she was around 5 yo. The girl was "feral" when she arrived, she would eat potato peels while hiding in the corner. The family was deported because they were well off, they had some land and housed a school. They later learned that the neighbors that they asked to care for the girl, until she was sent to Siberia, were the ones that requested that my ancestor family be deported. The girl would recover into a functioning child, but would die of alcoholism at around 30 yo.

The deportations targeted those who weren't supportive of Soviet rule and those who were educated or were successful. The regime was fairly inept and relied on he said, she said testimony for information. Similarly to what happened in Afghanistan when US asked villages which of their neighbors are Taliban, unscrupulous people used the naivete of the regime to steal land from their neighbors by getting them deported. Sadly, due to loss of documents, my ancestors didn't get the land back. Many people in similar situations did get compensated in some way after USSR collapsed though.

It is not easy to articulate the effect of having your bloodline uprooted, even when it happened more than 50 years ago.

My grandfather's family went through another version of this, his father was murdered because his brother was a partisan and the remaining family went into hiding, so as to not be deported. He was around 10 yo. Kindest man I ever knew.
by philistine | 2025-05-31 12:20:51+00:00
The case of It's a Wonderful Life has shown that specific parts of a movie can be in the public domain while other parts aren't, even down to the music within a public domain scene.

For the dreaded special editions of Star Wars, only Jabba's stupid face or the specific shot of the Death Star exploding with that ugly-looking ring would have a copyright of 1997. The original scenes cleaned and restored would still have a copyright of 1977.
by ErrantX | 2025-05-31 12:21:03+00:00
There is some parallel here with the message of 1984. In that Orwell saw political entity as the vehicle for mass misinformation.

But in some ways Google AI results, with the trust they have, seem just another vehicle for "we've always been at war with Eurasia".

For me this is the real risk of AI: developing dependence on it's output
by Apreche | 2025-05-31 12:22:50+00:00
I am comfortable making the sweeping generalization that people with obscene wealth are universally evil. It’s based on a very simple principle.

Imagine Superman. Literal Superman like in the comic books. He sees a person falling from a building. Of course in the comics he will save them. What if he didn’t? What if he just watched them fall? He could save them, but he doesn’t. What then? You only have to look at the other comic books, Spider—Man for the answer. With great power comes great responsibility.

When you are that wealthy, you have the power to change society with a word. You could bribe all the US congress and institute universal health care. You could build homes for all the homeless. None of them have done this.

You might say hey, what about Bill Gates and his helping with Malaria and promise to donate everything? Ok, so that’s Superman who saves some people from falling buildings, but also watches plenty of others fall. He sure is taking his sweet time. If he was sincere he would already be middle class because he would have used his vast power as quickly and effectively as possible. If the other billionaires are diarrhea, he is still poop.

In the entire history of humanity not one obscenely wealthy person has used the powers to the fullest to improve society to the maximum of their abilities. Yet, I argue they have the power to do so, therefore they have the moral responsibility to do so. The fact that they don’t makes me comfortable judging them to be evil.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-31 12:22:54+00:00
the rationale for dekulakization is to remove the political influence and leverage of smallholders and other people who can afford the independence to maintain principles. small business owners are a similar target today. in cold political calculus, they form a layer of influentials whose products can promote them to essential power-coalition members and force the leadership to bargain with them. see how political parties have to deal with the tech platforms for political survival today as an example. not even the CCP could survive if they threatened people's iPhones. dekulakization is the political class making sure they aren't subject to being limited by that force of popular desire. we talk about how brutal dekulakization was, but rarely why.

I saw the impact of the internet on the 90's era admin class (gov), and if you can imagine the baby boom generation people who retired instead of "using a computer," the internet was a generational class usurpation where genx smallholders in tech butted out the old establishment.

I'd estimate the main effect of AI will be to accelerate a similar generational turnover, where genx people with sunk costs in broadly moated knowledge fields (law, medicine, teaching, etc) will retire early where they can, and the remainders aren't above organizing to ban and regulate it (see mark andreesen's comments about the biden admin banning NN math the way they classified areas of physics).

I'd watch the doyennes of the EU in Brussels closely, as they have become the intl representatives of the administrative class who coordinate the reaction to any tech change that forces them to come to terms with popular desire before imposing policy. Classicide is a blunt category of ideas, but when it enters the discourse, it's worth noticing- and getting ahead of.
by geraneum | 2025-05-31 12:23:22+00:00
I believe he's talking to money, to investors. He does it through Axios, CNN, BBC, etc. Their company is not sustainable at this rate. None of the LLM service providers are. They need money for now and that's why they talk like this.

50% of a group of workers losing their jobs to this tech is not a worrisome future for him. It's a pitch!
by maqp | 2025-05-31 12:23:24+00:00
>So I wonder if there are some areas in which this document is lacking or which aren't holding up as well?

Ring oscillators have been embedded into Intel/AMD CPUs, and they're accessible via RDRAND/RDSEED. Blum-Blum-Shub has been phased out, these days you see AES-based CSRPNGs and Linux uses ChaCha20. The RNG in Linux has been overhauled at least once and so the /dev/random section is outdated.

Interestingly the key size recommendations were at around 90 bit range already 20 years ago, and they haven't changed that much. That's still quite close to the password minimum recommendation. Makes you wonder whether it should be closer to the 103 bits now.

Triple DES has been deprecated.

All in all, the guidance has changed. These days you should not be concerning yourself with any userland CSPRNG, just use the OS syscalls like GETRANDOM. Nothing you do above a kernel module RNG will make it more secure.
by Havoc | 2025-05-31 12:23:31+00:00
Fast response battery systems largely solve the frequency issue. Unfortunately there is a lot of incentive to put solar on the grid by individual players, while the cost to do the frequency response is collectivized so tends to lag behind what is needed.

Bit surprised countries aren't just legislating this away. For every MW you put on the grid that doesn't have rotational inertia you need to contribute X money to a fund that builds stabilization capacity.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-31 12:24:04+00:00
As someone that has been around C and C++ communities since 1990's, I also expect that in the long term Rust won't be able to escape this phenomenon, even with editions.

Like any other programming language that has made it into the top 10 over several decades of production code.

The happy path will get fuzzier, as more humans have their own opinion on what means to write code on the ecosystem, with various kinds of backgrounds and their own agendas, companies whose IT refuses to upgrade, the amount of implementations in the industry increases, teachers not bothering to keep up to date,...
by chongli | 2025-05-31 12:24:25+00:00
Small, modular reactors [1] have been the dream of nuclear energy for a long time. The technology was proven a long time ago with nuclear submarines which have an outstanding safety track record. What’s stopping them from entering full scale production is a horrible mix of regulatory red tape and political opposition. Chief among the issues is a regulatory framework which is not designed to certify mass-produced reactors.

No one wants to invest the capital to get a manufacturing plant up and running if regulators aren’t willing to allow completed reactors to be commissioned and begin producing energy at a rate that matches the manufacturing rate. The insistence on treating every nuclear site as a unique project subject to years of environmental surveys and extensive, bespoke planning makes modular reactor designs moot as a technology. This is why every reactor gets a new design: they have to go through the process anyway so they might as well try to max out the production they can achieve at that site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-31 12:26:18+00:00
pretty sure the only response you'll get out of elmu's chatbot is one alleging a "white genocide", which he forced it to say due to his personal and political bias [0][1]

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

1: to clarify, this was after elmu hitler-saluted usa republicans on stage multiple times, not before elmu hitler-saluted usa republicans on stage multiple times
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-05-31 12:26:28+00:00
OpenAI spent several years prior to ChatGPT getting AI to play Dota 2 well. They got some good results out of that, but it was a subset of the game: only a handful or two of characters. I’m not sure why they stopped; maybe that was when they pivoted to something more general?

Regardless, software dev I consider way more dimensional (eg nuanced) than Dota 2, even if a lot of patterns recur on a smaller scale in the code itself. If they weren’t able to crack Dota 2, why should I believe that software eng is just around the corner?
by K0balt | 2025-05-31 12:28:15+00:00
The “bloodbath” will be slow but is quite likely to be significant.

AI / GP robotic labor will not penetrate the market so much in existing companies, which will have huge inertial buffers, but more in new companies that arise in specific segments where the technology proves most useful.

The layoffs will come not as companies replace workers with AI, but as AI companies displace non-AI companies in the market, followed by panicked restructuring and layoffs in those companies as they try to react, probably mostly unsuccessfully.

Existing companies don’t have the luxury of buying market share with investor money, they have to make a profit. A tech darling AI startup powered by unicorn farts and inference can burn through billions of SoftBank money buying market share.
by shakna | 2025-05-31 12:28:37+00:00
Here's hoping someone can actually reach out to Microsoft on this, because I have no idea how to actually get their attention.

JAWS has worked around this. NVDA have not yet, and Microsoft's own Narrator is broken by these changes.

In short, the start menu sometimes works with a screenreader. Sometimes it can crash the screenreader. Sometimes it goes silent, sometimes it freezes. Dependable behaviour has vanished.
by derbOac | 2025-05-31 12:28:43+00:00
I wondered about that too.

When I was an undergrad first learning statistics I asked my stats instructor (a grad student) about this issue and they responded with something like "the population size doesn't matter because for the assumptions of the test to be met... such and such..." I kind of accepted that answer — we were talking about asymptotic inferences — but it never seemed quite right to me.

The example I gave was actually motivated in part by a sort of real-world problem I was dealing with: let's say you only want to make inferences about a population of 20 individuals. Certainly if you have a sample of 19, the confidence about the population will be much stronger than if your population is 100 million.

One thing he did say which is probably right, is that that 1/20 you didn't sample might throw things off, so it's more influential in a sense than a single member of a population of 100 million.

At the time I hadn't learned about exact and Jaynesian-permutation statistics, but that's probably the right way to think about finite populations. That is, something like "what are all the outcomes you could observe, and what proportion of those does my observed result represent?"

It's just that usually our population is so large that the exact test approach becomes infeasible to deal with without approximations, and you end up with the typical classical asymptotic statistics.

It's all maybe a moot point but it's always a good idea to think about the population you're trying to make inferences about. I think that probably includes the population size, and I think population size is probably bigger than you might initially think sometimes.

As for your last question, obtaining an unbiased sample is kind of harder as the number of attributes you're being unbiased with regard to increases. It's a permutation problem again, probably implicit usually with regard to sampling representativeness.
by jackb4040 | 2025-05-31 12:29:04+00:00
I have a node app that has one-off scheduled tasks. Between node-cron and real Linux cron, I went with real cron because node-cron just polls every second, which is extremely inefficient and I'm on a free tier.

How does your library work in this regard? If my node server is down, will my scheduled tasks still execute? I notice you have a .start() method, what does that do? Is it polling periodically?
by krzyk | 2025-05-31 12:29:28+00:00
(all below - IANAL)

Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software.

So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void.

Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer.

I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.
by wtcactus | 2025-05-31 12:29:29+00:00
Well, it’s interesting how your sense of sarcasms didn’t detect the obvious need for it when talking about all the subsides solar farms have compared to all the extra taxes gas/oil/coal get. Isn’t it?

The thing is, you will be one of the first complaining about how undemocratic our governments are, when the Western world turns completely right.

Now, that is be good sarcasm. People like you explaining that the the will of the majority is undemocratic.
by vanderZwan | 2025-05-31 12:29:56+00:00
> These tell the compiler to assume for optimization purposes that floats are associative and so on (ie. algebraic), even when in reality they aren't.

I wonder if it is possible to add an additional constraint that guarantees the transformation has equal or fewer numerical rounding errors. E.g. for floating point doubles (0.2 + 0.1) - 0.1 results in 0.20000000000000004, so I would expect that transforming some (A + B) - B to just A would always reduce numerical error. OTOH, it's floating point maths, there's probably some kind of weird gotcha here as well.
by blablabla123 | 2025-05-31 12:30:29+00:00
Yeah I mean Solar itself seems to be generally considered low tech by now.

Also the failure modes of Nuclear involve some sort of "real time response". In a classic reactor when the power goes off unexpectedly, one needs to make sure that it receives cooling to not risk a meltdown.

The only open problem is storage but I guess there are also reasonably low complexity options like hydrogen or water pumps.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-31 12:31:31+00:00
The thing about those systems is you'd have to forgo the entire notion about private property and wealth as we currently know it for it to work out. Even then, there would be people who wouldn't want to work/contribute and the majority who would contribute the bare minimum (like you're saying). The percentage of people who'd work because they like it wouldn't be much higher than it is now. Or it might be even lower, as money wouldn't be as much of a factor in one's life.
by rovr138 | 2025-05-31 12:31:32+00:00
We ended up writing similar rules to the article. It was just based on frequency.

While we were rate limiting bots based on UA, we ended up also having to apply wider rules because traffic started spiking from other places.

I can't say if it's the traffic shifting, but there's definitely a big amount of automated traffic not identifying itself properly.

If you look at all your web properties, look at historic traffic to calculate <hits per IP> in <time period>. Then look at the new data and see how it's shifting. You should be able to identify the real traffic and the automated very quickly.
by pydry | 2025-05-31 12:31:33+00:00
Nobody would, but the nuclear and carbon lobbies like to use straw men models - combining things like laptop batteries with solar to "prove that you cant live without them" and these models leak into public discourse.

A fully green energy grid would most cost effectively comprise of:

* Solar (generally strongest when wind is low, ~5x cheaper per kwh than nuclear power)

* Wind (generally strongest when sun is low, ~5x cheaper than nuclear power)

* Large scale interconnected grids to offset intermittency.

* Batteries and pumped storage for short term storage (~90% roundtrip efficiency but expensive to store long term)

* Syngas for seasonal storage (~50% roundtrip efficiency but cheap to store long term).
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-31 12:32:02+00:00
Yes, the warnings were there for more than a decade. And yet these websites were still kowtowing to Google !

I doubt that the USA will do anything to rein in their platforms though : they're too convenient as a form of soft power. (Of course, you never know with Trump.)

So it's probably time to cut off the USA from the Internet. Let them stew in the bed they made. The timing is good too, with Trump having even managed to piss of Canada !!

----

However, this won't solve an issue with search engines : just yesterday I was using Kagi, and it was still a miserable experience.

Blocking the likes of YouTube and Reddit is easy enough.

It's much harder to deal with all the spam consisting of pseudo-guide websites, each with very specific names, seemingly a lot of them using LLMs to generate them, which I guess make money from either ads and/or referrals ?

And anyone can scrap the web and train LLMs, so even limiting the size of infocoms by law (and banning foreign ones) wouldn't solve this issue.
by fatboy | 2025-05-31 12:32:55+00:00
I remember around 25 years ago being in the big music hall in Philadelphia and feeling a bit like I was inside a giant cello.

The cheapest seats were in the coolest place architecturally because you were right up at the back, closest to the ceiling, which really was a bit like in these instrument photos.

Some pictures here from a quick search: https://voithandmactavish.com/projects/the-kimmel-center/
by cgio | 2025-05-31 12:33:08+00:00
Practically no one is herded by what is actually going to happen, hardly even by what is expected to happen. Business pretends that it is driven by expectations, but is mostly driven by the past, as in financial statements. What is the bonus we can get this year? There is of course the strategic thinking, I don't want to discount that part of business, but it is not the thing that will drive most of these, AI as a cost saving measure, decisions. This is the unimaginative part of AI application and as such relegated to the unimaginative managers.
by glkindlmann | 2025-05-31 12:33:22+00:00
Forgive them. That kind of educational failure is common: floating point is just not covered in basic intro classes, or covered hurriedly. There are enough subtleties to how floating point code works that even when an elective class covers it, it is still peripheral to the focus of the class (e.g. intro computer graphics). So students can get by without really coming to terms with the ubiquity of rounding error, or the relationship between denormalized and normalized values. Understanding those fundamentals is a pre-req to understanding how corners are being cut with fast-math.
by bgnn | 2025-05-31 12:34:45+00:00
I second this. I've worked for several early stage HW start-ups (ASIC development). VC backed ones ended up in a weird state of not being able to move from proof of concept to production because at that point the VCs were out of patience and wanted returns for their money. Having spent 10s if millions and now, 2-3 years later, requiring even more didn't align with what they were used to. This ended badly for these companies, all with great potential. Lucky ones could get acquired for a meaningful amount.

Bootstrapped companies were much better but they lacked the capital to develop their own products, so they were often reliant on one big customer. Growth was slow but more organic.
by egirlcatnip | 2025-05-31 12:36:06+00:00
Greatly misinformative article, readers take caution.

Facts: Imane was assigned female at birth.

We refer to people like her as AFAB. identifying as a woman makes her therefore cisgender.

cis [latin -> same] cisgender [matching gender assigned at birth]

the opposite of cisgender is transgender

trans [latin -> opposite] transgender [opposite to assigned gender at birth]

Trans women are also allowed to compete, but may only do so after extensive checks of their hormone balance - which affects their physical characteristics to an extent. These hormone levels must be in the allowed range for competition, which is not applied to cis people.

source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif

Following Khelif's victory over Italy's Angela Carini during the 2024 Olympic Games, misinformation surfaced on social media about her gender and eligibility to compete. False claims that Khelif is male were fueled by Khelif's disqualification from the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships, organised by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA) after she allegedly failed unspecified gender eligibility tests. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its Paris Boxing Unit stated Khelif was eligible to compete in the Olympics and criticized the IBA's previous disqualification as "sudden and arbitrary" and taken "without any due process". Khelif was born female, and there is no evidence that she has XY chromosomes or elevated levels of testosterone.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-31 12:36:36+00:00
The article spoke of it like so:

> By contrast, solar energy and electricity grid transmission projects have the best construction track record and are often completed ahead of schedule or below expected cost

That doesn't seem to comport with your post, so maybe you can elaborate? Intuitively, a redundant, resilient, distributed grid is far better than a centralized one. For an example of why, see how usa's texas has fared in adverse conditions [0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis