MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-08 22:07:31+00:00
> There's no reason to be dogmatic

I absolutely disagree. Some things in programming exist to bring products to market, but many things in programming only exist to bring programmers to market. That is a terrible and striking difference that results ultimately from an absence of ethics. Actions/decisions that exist only to discard ethical considerations serve only two objectives: 1) normalization of lower competence, 2) narcissism. It does not matter which of those two objectives are served, because the conclusions are the same either way.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 22:07:48+00:00
> The logical conclusion to defying a government is people with guns showing up to put you in cuffs and take you to jail. Even over something as piddling as a littering fine or parking ticket . . . watch what eventually happens if you refuse to pay it.

That may be logical, but it doesn't happen. I've had unpaid parking tickets for long periods and nobody showed up at all, much less with guns. Where do you live that they jail you for it, much less go out and find you? Your local government must be very well-funded to have resources for that, not to mention having a fascist attitude - how popular is that with constituents?

> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.

It depends - many times it is the most or only effective way. It has decision-making mechanisms - including elected representatives, hearings, experts - and executive mechanisms including employees, equipment, contract managers, processes, institutional information such as maps of infrastructure, and loads of experience. Imagine some neighbors in NYC trying to put in just a new streetlight.

> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.

It doesn't ignore it, but your prior comment repeats the Internet trope that that's what goverment is - a coercive mechanism with guns. That's only one narrow aspect - the great majority of what government does, and how society works, has nothing to do with that. It's for the outlaws, not for the great majority.
by eru | 2025-05-08 22:07:51+00:00
Though I think it's only strictly true, if the intervals you sample over are the same. Eg they both sample some messages every second, and the all start their second-long intervals on the same nanosecond (or close enough).

I find it easier to reason about reservoir sampling in an alternative formulation: the article talks about flipping a random (biased) coin for each arrival. Instead we can re-interpret reservoir sampling as assigning a random priority to each item, and then keeping the items with the top k priority.

It's fairly easy to see in this reformulation whether specific combinations of algorithms would compose: you only need to think about whether they would still select the top k items by priority.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-08 22:08:09+00:00
Sorry to say but this workflow just isn't great unless you're working on something where AI models aren't that helpful -- obscure language/libraries/etc where they hallucinate or write non-idiomatic solutions if left to run much by themselves. In that case, you want the strong human review loop that comes from crafting the context via copy paste and inspecting the results before copying back.

For well trodden paths that AI is good at, you're wasting a ton of time copying context and lint/typechecking/test results and copying back edits. You could probably double your productivity by having an agentic coding workflow in the background doing stuff that's easy while you manually focus on harder problems, or just managing two agents that are working on easy code.
by RigelKentaurus | 2025-05-08 22:08:10+00:00
I'm not a techie, so perhaps someone can help me understand this: AFAIK, no theoretical computer scientist predicted emergence in AI models. Doesn't that suggest that the field of theoretical computer science (or theoretical AI, if you will) is suspect? It's like Lord Kelvin saying that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible a decade before the Wright brothers' first flight.
by busymom0 | 2025-05-08 22:09:11+00:00
I have been an SO user for 13 years with around 9k karma. I have recently started having similar negative experiences.

I posted this iOS Swift Programming question today:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79612931/ios-custom-oper...

and was instantly downvoted and then voted to closed. I do not think this question was worth downvoting or closing. There's no hits on the warning I was getting.

People on SO nowadays seem way too eager to downvote and close.
by foobarbecue | 2025-05-08 22:09:16+00:00
I'm a rover driver / arm operator for Curiosity and we have several excellent tools that fit your description here at JPL. Chief among them, in my opinion, is RSVP Hyperdrive. See the 5th screenshot on https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/applications/us... . I'm also a developer on RSVP and have contributed bug fixes and features to Hyperdrive. I'm hopeful we can open-source it someday. (This is my opinion, not JPL or Caltech or NASA's opinion)
by lutusp | 2025-05-08 22:09:17+00:00
My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:

"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"

"No, I'm Steve Jobs."

"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"

I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.

Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.

I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.

Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.

First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 22:09:21+00:00
For reference: almost all deletion on Stack Overflow is "soft", and deleted Q&A can be viewed by users with at least 10,000 reputation. These users can vote for undeletion, and the author can edit and submit for undeletion.

It looks like the answer you're talking about is now undeleted, with yours among the three necessary votes. (It also looks like you accepted, and awarded a bounty to, a different answer back when you asked, and the answer you're now calling "best" was posted months later. So it goes.)

The explanation for the original deletion is exactly as ayhanfuat says. LLM and other GenAI content is forbidden on Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/), since before that answer was posted, and the author (one of the site's most prolific contributors) got in trouble for a flood of such answers. (It took quite a while for the problem to be noticed and acted upon, in large part because of a moderation strike in June 2023 which ended up creating a large backlog of flags for AI content, and in part because custom flags are required to report this. The strike, in turn, was largely about the company/staff trying to interfere with moderators attempting to detect AI content, with the site owners being unwilling to accept false positives because it would be "unfriendly". So it goes.)
by DennisP | 2025-05-08 22:09:33+00:00
ITER/DEMO is an exceptionally slow fusion project and arguably obsolete since it uses older superconductors. CFS uses the same design, with modern superconductors that can support much stronger magnetic fields. Tokamak output scales with the fourth power of magnetic field strength, so this should let them get results similar to ITER in a reactor a tenth the size. They'll have it running long before ITER is ready.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-08 22:10:02+00:00
I can only recommend a visit to the "Ruhrpott" area of Germany. Probably thousands of mines were dug over the centuries, hundreds alone after WW2 when people dug for coal on their own under horrendous conditions, and none of them documented. Accidents and incidents aboveground happen frequently when old shafts collapse. A lot of former mining sites have been converted to museums, although none of them actually allow access at the old depth. You can spend a month in NRW and not be able to visit all the museum sites!

The entire Ruhrpott settled and sank so much that if the water pumps in the largest mines would cease operating for too long, the entire area would flood. It's literally called "Ewigkeitslasten" (forever burdens) for that reason.
by coldpie | 2025-05-08 22:11:35+00:00
Thanks for your reply. I do want this tech to work, so I keep hoping I'm wrong here. Unfortunately, you haven't convinced me yet.

> some of them may reject Passkeys without certain metadata or attestations. But you will find out quickly on sign up with that key.

I don't think that's applicable to the case I'm talking about. A relying party could change their implementation to ban the client you are using, after you set up the passkey. When you try to log in later using your private key via an implementation they have now banned, they could reject your log in.

The main (though not only) spec compliance at issue is the truth of the "User Verification" boolean when submitting your unlocked private key to the site for authentication. While it's true that your client could lie about this and the RP would not know, the spec authors view this as a violation of the spec, and a valid reason for RPs to reject users using that client. As I linked earlier, they even maintain a list of clients they feel violate the spec for UV.

> the spec doesn't help and can't actually threaten anyone to comply with "my Passkeys are always two factor".

The spec authors are very explicit that clients not meeting their standards are at risk of being blocked by relying parties. See:

>> RP's blocking arbitrary AAGUIDs doesn't seem like a thing that's going to happen or that can even make a difference

> It does happen and will continue to happen because of non-spec compliant implementations and authenticators with poor security posture.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406#iss...

The spec authors' comments on these issues make it very clear that they feel RPs may correctly block users for using clients that do not handle user data in the way the spec authors want them to. This isn't some corner case, it is explicitly built into the spec. I consider that to be incompatible with open source. It's my data and my software. It's my choice what software to use and how to handle my data. If I may be prevented from logging in to my online services because I use software on the naughty list, then that is not an acceptable authentication method to me.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-08 22:11:41+00:00
While GPT-2 didn't show emergent abilities, it did show improved accuracy on various tasks with respect to GPT-1. At that point, it was clear that scaling made sense.

In other words, no one expected GPT-3 to suddenly start solving tasks without training as it did, but it was expected to be useful as an incremental improvement to what GPT-2 did. At the time, GPT-2 was seeing practical use, mainly in text generation from some initial words - at that point the big scare was about massive generation of fake news - and also as a model that one could fine-tune for specific tasks. It made sense to train a larger model that would do all that better. The rest is history.
by danenania | 2025-05-08 22:11:49+00:00
> Is there a good CLI like Claude Code but for Gemini / other models

I built an open source CLI coding agent that is essentially this[1]. It combines Claude/Gemini/OpenAI models in a single agent, using the best/most cost effective model for different steps in the workflow and different context sizes. The models are configurable so you can try out different combinations.

It uses OpenRouter for the API layer to simplify use of APIs from multiple providers, though I'm also working on direct integration of model provider API keys.

It doesn't have a Neovim plugin, but I'd imagine it would be one of the easier IDEs to integrate with given that it's also terminal-based. I will look into it—also would be happy to accept a PR if someone wants to take a crack at it.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
by foobahhhhh | 2025-05-08 22:11:52+00:00
I think if PhDs are bad at code it is because they ain't coding in a team 7.6 hours a day. It is not the PhDness rather than not being a coder. (Sone PhDs might code a lot as a hobby and be good).

You can also write a medical PhD without knowing how to do first aid on a snake bite.
by ben_w | 2025-05-08 22:12:03+00:00
> Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

No, that isn't the easiest way.

The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.

If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.

Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-08 22:12:18+00:00
There are plenty of such organisations. Some are legal, some are not.

The government is the only one with a legal monopoly on violence; it redistributes resources in the society and it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.

It's a recipe for disaster.
by eru | 2025-05-08 22:13:22+00:00
> However, I'm not sure I understand the statistical soundness of this approach. I get that every log during a given period has the same chance to be included, but doesn't that mean that logs that happen during "slow periods" are disproportionately overrepresented in overall metrics?

Yes, of course.

You can fix this problem, however. There are (at least) two ways:

You can do an alternative interpretation and implementation of reservoir sampling: for each item you generate and store a random priority as it comes into the system. For each interval (eg each second) you keep the top k items by priority. If you want to aggregate multiple intervals, you keep the top k (or less) items over the intervals.

This will automatically deal with dealing all items the same, whether they arrived during busy or non-busy periods.

An alternative view of the same approach doesn't store any priorities, but stores the number of dropped items each interval. You can then do some arithmetic to tell you how to combine samples from different intervals; very similar to what's in the article.

> What are the use-cases that reservoir sampling are good for? What kind of statistical analysis can you do on the data that's returned by it?

Anything you can do on any unbiased sample? Or are you talking about the specific variant in the article where you do reservoir sampling afresh each second?
by exogen | 2025-05-08 22:13:41+00:00
This is also how I build most of my static sites, usually deployed to GitHub Pages. For example, here’s the demo page for a library I recently developed: https://exogen.github.io/turbo-colormap/

Or a more complicated app: https://exogen.github.io/t2-model-skinner/

Are all of Next.js’ features overkill for such sites? Sure, but the convenience such frameworks provide is worth it. And the reason to prefer it over something like Vite is simply routing, which Vite doesn’t cover out of the box, so as soon as I want to add a second page, I now have another problem to solve.

Next.js’ best feature is simply that you’re up and running with `npm i react react-dom next` and step two is just writing the pages.
by vkou | 2025-05-08 22:13:50+00:00
People are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy.

And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.

'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-08 22:14:07+00:00
> Also we call English Channel 'La Manche' - even if we do not understand French

Do we? I've literally never heard it called anything other than the English Channel. After some quick googling and gpting, I can't find any reference to it being referred to as "La Manche" outside of France. The closest I got was "Canal de la Mancha" in Spain.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-08 22:14:34+00:00
As a general rule, I'm not going to take the time to donate free content to a site where moderators just delete it. This goes for S.O., Wikipedia, Reddit, Social Media, OSM, even HN. If my posts ever start getting flag-killed here, I'm not going to complain--I'm just going to leave, assuming the feelings are mutual. I used to habitually post to Fark.com, and when their moderators started going out of control and deleting my (and others') posts, I just canceled my subscription and went away. Who needs that grief?

If S.O. believes that deleting everything users post there is somehow improving their site and going to make it relevant again, more power to them. It's their site. Let's see how that goes for them.
by anon373839 | 2025-05-08 22:16:07+00:00
I remain skeptical of emergent properties in LLMs in the way that people have used that term. There was a belief 3-4 years ago that if you just make the models big enough, they magically acquire intelligence. But since then, we’ve seen that the models are actually still pretty limited by the training data: like other ML models, they interpolate well between the data they’ve been trained on, but they don’t generalize well beyond it. Also, we have seen models that are 50-100x smaller now exhibit the same “emergent” capabilities that were once thought to require hundreds of billions of parameters. I personally think the emergent properties really belong to the data instead.
by ghuntley | 2025-05-08 22:16:40+00:00
the new Claude code “max plan” would last me all of [1] 5mins… I don’t get why people are excited about this. High powered tools aren’t cheap and aren’t for the consumer…

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/khr-cIc7zjc?si=oI9Fj33JBeDlQEYG
by mdrachuk | 2025-05-08 22:16:44+00:00
> You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens. That’s a lot of tokens.

How is your usage so low! Every time i do anything with claude code i spend couple of bucks, for a day of coding it's about $20. Is there a way to save on tokens on a mid-sized Python project or people are just using it less?
by hereonout2 | 2025-05-08 22:17:05+00:00
Back in the day when I used to make "webapps" - our integration tests were an epic faff.

Often times using things like cucumber to describe a set of interactions, in the days before headless chrome it'd drive selenium which would literally open Firefox on your desktop and start navigating the site.

It did it's job but the feedback loop was slow.

Today I mainly write libraries, cli tools and the occasional small HTTP API. I still have unit and integration tests but they are all just standard pytest functions. I can run each type individually, my definition of an "integration" test is either something that talks to the outside world in some capacity, or something that is really slow (mostly running an ml model these days).

I much prefer today's approach, but admittedly I work on things with far fewer points of interaction which I think greatly simplifies the work.
by boshalfoshal | 2025-05-08 22:17:09+00:00
The way I think about it, DNA is just a metaprogram. The "programs" this metaprogram create (brain, gut, other organs, etc). can be far more information dense and complex than the actual metaprogram that initially created them.

The real interesting part is _how_ this small metaprogram can generate something like a brain, which is ostensibly multiples more complex than the DNA that produced it, since obviously DNA cannot possibly encode the data for every possible synaptic connection or protein or whatever losslessly. I think this is more of a testament to how complex the human body is, that it has such complex seemingly emergent behavior from a very sparse set of initial conditions.
by tenpies | 2025-05-08 22:18:06+00:00
Yes, it's very much anathema to put ketchup on a hot dog, at least among Chicago hot dog enthusiasts.

For those unfamiliar, Chicago is also one of those American cities with its own style hotdog, so it's something of the local culture:

> All-beef frankfurter, on a steamed poppy seed bun, topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, bright green sweet pickle relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices, and a dash of celery salt.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog

Obviously, this is only as serious as you take hot dogs, but they are very good and compared to deep-dish pizza, the Chicago-style hot dog feels almost healthy.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-08 22:19:01+00:00
This assumes you are moving into an area fresh. But what about someone that's been there, potentially for generations?

It's one thing to say "don't buy beach front property in the Florida everglades" but what do you do with the millions who already own such property?

This came up with hurricane Katrina and Louisiana. Multigenerational communities were completely obliterated. I really don't find "the market said you should move" to be a compelling response.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-08 22:19:09+00:00
> I'm a Catholic

Does it make sense to call yourself that if you fail to hold to beliefs of the Catholic Church on central issues like “Who is a Catholic”?

I mean, if we are accepting your argument that neither your belief that you are Catholic nor the Church’s beloef that you are Catholic matters and you are not Catholic despite both of those if you disagree on important matters with the teachings of the Church, what is the natural conclusion?
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-08 22:19:12+00:00
GP is right, he is not "completely" American in the sense that he is both American and Peruvian because of his dual citizenship. He also spent most of his life outside of the USA.

Which I think is a great thing as the representative of a worldwide religion. Born in the US, an English-speaking country in North America, lived in Peru, a Spanish-speaking country in the South America, then in Italy, an Italian-speaking country in Europe.
by tremon | 2025-05-08 22:19:14+00:00
I certainly enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel, but I remember it more as an absurdist exposition rather than a gripping drama. I may be misremembering though. The only other movie I have seen from him is Moonrise Kingdom, so there's a lot left to explore. Thanks for the recommendation!

Maybe you're right that my request is quite narrow. I didn't mean it to be, but it occurred to me that many stories seem to fall back on the rather formulaic "one person's struggle against the world", so my intention was to specifically ask for movies outside of that formula. I could probably have phrased it better than I did.