MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-17 16:33:11+00:00
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.

Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)

The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.

We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.

We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.

But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.

So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.

We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
by edmundsauto | 2025-05-17 16:33:19+00:00
Training a 2nd agent as a qualitative evaluator works pretty well "LLM-as-a-judge". You train it with labeled critiques from experts, iterate a few times, then point it to your ground truth human-labelled-data ("golden dataset"). The quantitative output metric is human2ai alignment on the golden dataset, mix that with some expert judgment about the critique output by the ai as well.

Works pretty well for me, where you can typically get within the range of human2human variance.
by theptip | 2025-05-17 16:33:51+00:00
Meta seems to place a pretty high premium on controlling its open source projects, especially dev tooling. I guess dating back at least to the git maintainers telling them they were doing things wrong with their monorepo and refusing to upstream scale fixes, which precipitated their migration to mercurial (who were more than happy to take the contributions).

Given the change velocity of internal tooling you can understand why owning your own project makes sense here.
by avianlyric | 2025-05-17 16:34:19+00:00
> So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it.

Unlikely, most cities transport systems will run into issues with capacity long before they run into issues with ticket gate latency. No point getting people through the gates faster if they’re just gonna pile up on the platform and cause a crush hazard.

At peak hours in London, the inbound gates are often closed periodically to prevent crowding issues in major stations. If you look at normal TfL stations you’ll notice there’s normally a 2:1 ratio of infrastructure for people leaving a station vs entering. Because crowding is by far the biggest most dangerous risk in a major metro system, and also the biggest bottleneck.
by asdf6969 | 2025-05-17 16:34:26+00:00
BBC is great but it is very biased. There’s no such thing as neutral news and the front page is full of pro-western and pro-british articles. You could argue it’s in the middle of the British political spectrum but that’s inherently a bias towards the status quo.

There’s nothing wrong with biased news but it’s important to recognize what their perspective really is. Thinking it’s neutral is dangerous and you’ll never know the truth if you believe that!
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-05-17 16:34:40+00:00
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"

And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.

Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.

And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.

TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
by fidotron | 2025-05-17 16:36:02+00:00
> Depending on the situation, channels can absolutely be higher overhead and not worthwhile.

Like streaming arrays one byte at a time through the channel.

Such devs just aren't very good, and hear "Google internally recommends not using them in many situations" but jump to inferring that means all of their situations qualify.

> but that doesn't mean you would never need unbuffered.

Note that this was never claimed.
by api | 2025-05-17 16:36:05+00:00
True, but why is it that so many people concerned about climate fixate on aviation?

It’s 3% of world carbon emissions. It’s tiny, it’s pivotal to the economy, and it’s hard to change. It’s the worst thing to fixate on, the one you’ll make the least progress toward.

What we should be fixating on is “end coal” because coal burning, largely for power generation, is both the largest single source and one of the easiest to replace. Yet that climate group is called “end oil” not “end coal.” Why?

If we actually think climate change is a problem we need to think like scientists and engineers and prioritize rationally. We also have to be willing to put politics aside and make a broad and wide appeal, arguing that fixing this is in everyone’s long term interest (because it is).
by reify | 2025-05-17 16:36:13+00:00
Upon reading this you may well think that I am some sort of conspiracy theorist.

I am in fact a retired Psychotherapist, in professional practice for over 25 years.

I have seen my fair share of damage to my patients and clients caused by SSRI's.

One of the most dangerous prescribed drugs on the planet.

Its a big con.

chemical imbalance is a myth.

There is no such thing as chemical imbalance, this myth was manufactured by drug companies in the late 1980's to sell SSRI's to the unsuspecting public.

SSRI's create a paradoxical reaction.

meaning that the drug creates the depressive sympsoms experienced by the patient.

Some studies have been published that show that these antidepressants may deteriorate the state of the depression (make it worse) and even cause suicidal ideation or action.

2018 paper https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/21028/1/Thesis-Neurobiol...

paradoxical reaction, a guide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction

It has taken over 30 years for drug companies to accept that SSRI's cause sexual disfunction and has finally been included in the DSM5 as PSSD, post ssri sexual disfunction.

In some unpublished phase 1 trials of the drug, more than 50% of healthy volunteers developed severe sexual problems. but they kept it quiet.

Highlighted in the Guardian just last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/02/ssri-antidep...
by pshirshov | 2025-05-17 16:37:40+00:00
> the Scheme programming language doesn't solve some/all those problems you mention

Yes, the Scheme programming language doesn't solve any those problems I mention.

> improvements to the language

Despite of the language, if we speak about Linux distros, I need all those pesky blobs to get my desktop running. And, by the way, is there anything alike to flakes, so I can have an actually reproducible build, not a mess of channels?
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-17 16:37:40+00:00
Indeed, the first stage of the enshittification process requires mollycoddling the customer in a convincing manner.

Looking forward to stage 2 - start serving the advertisers while placating the users, and finally stage 3 - offering it all up to the investors while playing the advertisers off each other and continuing to placate the users.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-05-17 16:38:19+00:00
Important point: The biomedical research that made this sort of study possible where it wasn’t before is under attack by RFK and DOGE. The study used scRNA-seq, CRISPR, and leukemia enriched stem cells to help identify a potential causal pathway. All these technologies were developed with NIH funding. The detailed, quantifiable research shown in this study relied on these technologies and is superior to epidemiology studies that would only show a vague association between energy drink consumption and higher cancer rates.

Trump/RFK has proposed slashing the NIH budget by 40%. Further, DOGE and Trump political appointees are deeply embedded within the NIH and are preventing research grants Notice of Award (NoAs) from going out. This will have disastrous consequences for biomedical research.
by jll29 | 2025-05-17 16:39:33+00:00
It's a great idea to collect open problems, to give them a name and unique number, to collect status updates, and to provide related literature references. It would be good to keep this open for submitting new problems also, and I'd like to see similar activities for all sub-areas of mathematics and computer science.

Mathematicians led by Terence Tao are keen to explore new ways for mathematicians to collaborate remotely and online to tackle all open problems together in an open and technology-supported way. I think problem inventories should be part of that, together with proof collections, existing datasets such as the great On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS, at https://oeis.org), and perhaps Jupyter-type notebooks that utilize symbolic algebra systems, theorem provers etc.
by JadeNB | 2025-05-17 16:39:56+00:00
> is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant

It is relevant, though. If someone who wouldn't otherwise have been dragged into the receiving end of the justice system gets dragged into it, and then has to comply with all its bureaucracy, it matters whether or not that person should have been dragged into it. ("Should" in both a legal sense and a sense of morality or equity.)
by TheRealPomax | 2025-05-17 16:40:44+00:00
note about that await block: "await" will await the _entire_ return, so if "promise" returns another promise ("goodA") which in turn also returns a promise ("goodB"), which in turn returns _another_ promise that ends up resolving as the non-promise value "goodC", then "await promise" just... gets you "goodC", directly.

The "example code" (if we can call it that) just used goodA and goodB because it tried to make things look crazy, by writing complete nonsense: none of that is necessary, we can just use a single, awaiting return:

try { return await promise; } catch(e) { handleYourExceptions(e); }

Done. "await" waits until whatever it's working with is no longer a promise, automatically either resolving the entire chain, or if the chain throws, moving us over to the exception catching part of our code.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-05-17 16:41:01+00:00
> Bark places calls to law enforcement when it receives an alert about a kid threatening to harm themselves or others, he told me, but those alerts are reviewed by a human first. “We’re not swatting kids,” he said.

So any messages your kid sends to their friends could get routed to some random employee at this third-party service? Yikes.
by Qem | 2025-05-17 16:41:07+00:00
IIRC folate also share this property. It helps where tissues have fast growth or replenishment rates (infants still developing in utero, lifelong hair growth, digestive system lining, skin, et cetera), but as a side effect, when cancer happens, it supercharges tumors. Situations like this are probably one contributor for life extension being a difficult problem. When you try to apply a given fix you end increasing the risk of something else in the body breaking.
by shawnz | 2025-05-17 16:41:39+00:00
Is that really achieving OP's goal though, if you're only raising it by creating a new intermediary level to contain the conditional? The conditional is still the same distance from the root of the code, so that seems like it's not in the spirit of what they are saying. Plus you're just introducing the possibility for confusion if people call the unwrapped function when they intended to call the wrapped function
by alyandon | 2025-05-17 16:43:38+00:00
they have a terrible release "process" that seems to not include testing

I wouldn't say they have no testing process at all but it seems to me that they lack discipline when it comes to building releases and testing. I've seen releases that had debug-by-logging type code left in spamming the VM logs as well as breakage in what most would consider very common host + guest combinations.

It's a shame that Oracle doesn't seem to care much about the overall quality of that product. I guess we should be happy Oracle cares enough to still develop it. :-/

Edit: And right now - VirtualBox is still not offering v7.1.8 inside the GUI app and there is no mention of this CVE in the 7.1.8 change logs.
by shawnz | 2025-05-17 16:45:15+00:00
Consider a simple example where you're checking if a file exists, or a database object exists, and creating it if not. Imagine your filesystem or database library either doesn't have an upsert function to do this for you, or else you can't use it because you want some special behaviour for new records (like writing the current timestamp or a running total, or adding an entry to a log file, or something). I think this is a simple, common example where you would want to combine a conditional with an action. I don't think it's very "odd" or indicative of "way too much logic".
by vdupras | 2025-05-17 16:46:42+00:00
I'm guessing we call it Oberon-07? The one from "The Programming Language Oberon", written in 2007, revised in 2016. As the documentation states, it's not 100% on specs, for a better fit with Dusk interoperability, but it's very close. 100% specs compliance wouldn't affect implementation size by much.
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-17 16:47:07+00:00
I've been trying to find high quality, open/local controllable LED lights that have beefy enough electronics and heat control to not die in in a couple of years. Unfortunately, quality of construction is even more poorly tested/documented than open source/local control.

And even more unfortunately, price itself is not a very reliable indicator. Low price is usually a sign of poor quality, but high price is not a sign of high quality, but rather more often just an attempt to take advantage of people who don't know better.
by csomar | 2025-05-17 16:47:34+00:00
When you have complex types with complex bounds, the compiler rarely can link these types/bounds and you end up with cryptic error messages. You know there is a missing bound somewhere but it could be anything until you read and fully understand the type structure that the author of the library has put. Sometimes there is a trait to import but the LSP sometimes catches it and in some odd cases does not. Shit really hits the fan if you are using proc-macros.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-17 16:48:34+00:00
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?

If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?

As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
by mmooss | 2025-05-17 16:50:57+00:00
It's not hard to parse my short comment.

> it is somehow NOT nice

Who said that? How could you possibly get that out of my short comment? Are you just making things up? Then what you say also becomes just noise, not a signal.

> existence of negative comments is "not a signal" when it clearly is

It's clearly not and I demonstrated why. What is your argument against my reasoning?

A fundamental of information theory (or decision theory) is that if something gives you the same response every time, it's noise and not signal. If the weather forecaster always predicts it will rain, they aren't 'correct' when it rains; their predictions are just noise. If your coworker criticizes everything you do, their criticisms aren't signals about your work, they are just (annoying) noise. It's no more meaningful than water dripping on a drum.
by toast0 | 2025-05-17 16:51:30+00:00
TLS in X, cryptography from OpenSSL (in C and assembly) is a common, useful pattern for integrating TLS in other languages.

TLS is the protocol generation and parsing, hopefully (but not always) including certificate parsing.

Crypto tends to have clear, fixed buffer sizes, and OpenSSL tends to have good implementations of it with reasonable interfaces.

Protocol parsing and certificate parsing and validation are where many more problems happen that memory safety can reduce. High profile crypto problems are generally information leaks from non-constant time algorithms leaking information; although information leaks also happen from protocol code too.
by interleave | 2025-05-17 16:53:05+00:00
Hey Tanya! Thank you for helping me understand the results better.

I just posted the results of another basic interview analysis (4o vs. Llama4) here: https://x.com/SpringStreetNYC/status/1923774145633849780

To your point: Do I understand correctly that, for example, by running the default model of Llama4 via ollama, the context window is very short even when the model's context is, like 10M. In order to "unlock" the full context version, I need to get the unquantized version.

For reference, here's what `ollama show llama4` returns: - parameters 108.6B # llama4:scount - context length 10485760 # 10M - embedding length 5120 - quantization Q4_K_M
by heraldgeezer | 2025-05-17 16:53:20+00:00
I miss the PS1 and PS2 optimization. Most of them look amazing uprezzed to 1080p or 4k or more with emulation. Halo 2 era graphics in 4k is all we need imo. Yes that one is xbox but try Halo MCC Halo 2 in classic graphics. Still looks incredible.

GT3 heatwave summarizes it well.

"I showed a demo of GT3 that showed the Seattle course at sunset with the heat rising off the ground and shimmering. You can’t re-create that heat haze effect on the PS3 because the read-modify-write just isn’t as fast as when we were using the PS2. There are things like that."

https://old.reddit.com/r/ps2/comments/1cktw88/gran_turismos_...

https://youtu.be/ybi9SdroCTA?t=4103

It's not trying to emulate a real heatwave as new engines like UE5 does, that just tanks fps. It does "tricks" to do it instead. And honestly, looking at RTX tanking frame rates, I would rather have these cheap tricks.

A 299MHz MIPS runs this:

Shadow of the Colossus... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMKtYM8AzC8

GoW2 https://youtu.be/IpKLwIIdvuk?si=TjifKmlYsUuvhk0F&t=970

FFXII https://youtu.be/NytHoYOs_4M?si=jE1Fxy40khEvV6Bn&t=51

GT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6lZIxk_h9g (THE BOOTSCREEN crying)

Black (Renderware was a crazy engine) https://youtu.be/bZBjcwyq7fQ?si=Pev5ifpksJm4X6Oi&t=356

Valkyrie profile 2 https://youtu.be/9ScjO4NuUtA?si=Z29cR-hLsT2pnP2I&t=38

Rouge Galaxy https://youtu.be/iR1evzyl-7Q?si=fldm3-NnuFxOITMn&t=624

Burnout 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r5r0nE1sA4

Jak and Daxter, Ratchet.

For GC - RE4, Metroid, The Zeldas... ofc. Looks crazy good.

I kneel.
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-17 16:53:37+00:00
Weird that a post like this wouldn't mention Arch Linux. There are declarative package managers for Arch, an Arch package is just a single file. But yeah, having a magic distro is a pipe dream. It's personal knowledge that makes you powerful, not other people's work.

My current project to move from my personal metapac-managed Arch distro to one based on Obarun Linux, to get away from systemd. Trying to bolt declarative package management onto RPM doesn't sound like a good time, and I'd do this with Debian before trying it with Red Hat.

https://github.com/ripytide/metapac
by ta1243 | 2025-05-17 16:53:37+00:00
> I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works

So you think that it should just be privatised like netflix. If you don't think public service broadcasting has a place, just don't try to hide it.
by defaultcompany | 2025-05-17 16:53:58+00:00
One confusing thing to me was the word "server". An "MCP server" is a server to the LLM "client". But the MCP server itself is a client to the thing it's connecting the LLM to. So it's more like an adapter or proxy. Also I was confused because often this server runs on your local system (although it doesn't have to). In my mind I thought if they're calling it a server it must be run in the cloud somewhere but that's often not the case.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-17 16:54:21+00:00
I'm happy to accept your contest, but you should be aware that both of our opinions are only beliefs at this point and science will have an answer at some point in the future when the effects of LLMs on humans are understood better.

I do have to ask though, who do you think will pay the electricity bill for disenfranchised groups lacking wealth the most strongly to use LLMs? Some things might be free right now, but what do you think will happen when some of e.g. OpenAI's $300bn valuation is being collected?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-17 16:55:17+00:00
It is so strange to think that there are places where the trains have gates that close if you can't pay your fare somehow. I've never lived in such a place.

The light rail here in Phoenix was established in 2008. Since then it's been on an "honor system" fare payment regime. There are bright orange lines painted on the ground and you must not cross the line until you've paid your fare! Then, in the station or on the train, you may be approached by a Fare Inspector (these are specialized jobs) who wears blue and wields an electronic scanner box.

If you haven't paid your fare then you may receive a warning, and you're usually expelled at the next station. Personally, I've never seen anyone receive more than a verbal warning, such as a citation or a police visit.

Recently the entire transit system underwent "fare modernization" and now most riders are on the mobile app or an NFC card. The app uses QR codes only, much to my chagrin. The little kiosks that are supposed to scan QRs are very, very reluctant to accept mine, for some reason.

Therefore it may take me 30 seconds up to 4-5 minutes before the kiosk beeps green and takes my fare. (The fare is prepaid in an account, but scanning/tapping will deduct it from that account and acknowledge your presence in the station/bus.)

It is 100% operator discretion whether you can board a bus. So every time I try with my mobile app, there is a rigmarole where the operator shares their favorite troubleshooting steps for scanning (which never work because it's not my fault) and then they wave me aboard, whether paid or not. Because the other passengers hate waiting behind a dude who's fiddling with his phone.

I often see passengers just walk into a train station without tapping/scanning. I have no idea how they do that. I think they're just not bothering to pay their fare. But again, we don't have gates or turnstiles, only some menacing orange lines on the ground, and we're all still on the "honor system", so anything goes.

Honestly it does not seem to me like the stations could be redesigned to have any sort of barrier gates. People would just jaywalk and cross the tracks anyway. I suppose the taxpayer subsidies are so significant that they don't really care about collecting all the fares they could.