MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by consumer451 | 2025-05-28 21:55:28+00:00
Hello Simon, sorry for asking about this tangent here, but have you seen this paper? Is it as important as it appears to be? Should this metric be on all system cards?

> We evaluate 12 popular LLMs that claim to support contexts of at least 128K tokens. While they perform well in short contexts (<1K), performance degrades significantly as context length increases. At 32K, for instance, 10 models drop below 50% of their strong short-length baselines. Even GPT-4o, one of the top-performing exceptions, experiences a reduction from an almost-perfect baseline of 99.3% to 69.7%.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05167
Show HN: An Agent That Resolves Merge Conflicts Automatically
by someguy101010 | 2025-05-28 21:55:59+00:00
Wanted to take a crack at agents so I wrote one for resolving merge conflicts based on this blog post https://sketch.dev/blog/agent-loop. I have found this to be pretty effective on some prs i've thrown at it but I'd run this in a vm because it just runs shell commands locally.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-28 21:56:09+00:00
If your parents and grandparents were able to live better lives as labor sellers, it was because the ratio of supply of labor and demand for labor was more favorable for them. Not because HR used to be known as Personnel or people were inherently “better”.

There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.
by frereubu | 2025-05-28 21:56:26+00:00
I put up a (much less interesting and more nerdily annoyed) site that described how Dannon / Danone was using made-up sciency names for the bacteria in their yoghurt, and their legal department got in touch. I didn't back down: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/legal-action-against-this... I think this example would have been fine if the Waffle House branding had been removed. Then just put a big disclaimer at the top, which also makes clear the silliness of the kinds of legal claims made by these companies.
by xenadu02 | 2025-05-28 21:58:18+00:00
Well Japan's physical address system everywhere except Kyoto is complete insanity. Every level get assigned numbers based on build order so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.

Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.
by joe_the_user | 2025-05-28 21:58:28+00:00
I agree the idea of a formal view of intelligence is appealing. The hurdle that any such view faces is that most intelligence seems to involve rough, approximate reasoning.

I think this approximate nature of intelligence is essentially why neural nets have been more successful than earlier Gofai/logic based system. But I don't think that means formal approaches to intelligence are impossible, just they face challenges.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-28 21:58:46+00:00
I think Copilot made that up.

Notice the seating behind the table in these two images, one of a session with John Berkow prosiding as speaker, I think it is under Cameron's government (noughties [1]); the other of Pitt the Younger addressing the House [2]. Neither shows a vacant seat. Perhaps it is confusing it with the opening of parliament when the Queen wasn't able to attend (2022 [3]) and her throne was left vacant?

The mace represents the king's authority in parliament, you can see it at the front edge of the table in both images ([1], [2]).

The monarch's messenger is Black Rod, they're the one who knocks on the door to call the MPs to go and listen to the "King's" Speech.

[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/25/99525-050-DCC15F00/Chamber-Hou... [2] https://cdn.britannica.com/03/129303-050-05283CEF/William-Pi... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/09/queen-to-mis...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-28 21:58:54+00:00
As children, we loved to partake of Grandma’s supply of Sen-Sen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sen-Sen

It was much later that I learned that it was one of the powerful breath mints which people often used to cover-up after drinking booze.

[Grandma didn't drink! I don't think that Grandpa did, either. Their house never had alcoholic drinks or anything else related.]
by taeric | 2025-05-28 21:59:21+00:00
I'm curious if you could make an analogy to the idea of "underspecified" in FreeCAD. It isn't that the drawing doesn't exist. It is that you still have some freedom in how long certain parts could be. Crucially, not all. It could be that parts of the drawing are indeed fully specified.

Same can go with programs. You can constrain parts of it enough that you can answer some pretty specific questions. And similar to how a drawing with fewer lines is easier to constrain, a program that has restricted constructs can be easier to constrain.
by acureau | 2025-05-28 21:59:24+00:00
I am the kind of person who is very inconsistent. My opinions and identity are fluid, often I learn something new or see something from a different perspective and my framework gets adjusted. So I've come to understand that I don't have a framework. I have a constantly changing state.

There are people such as yourself who live by rigid guidelines, there are people such as myself who live by morphing guidelines, and there must be people who live by nothing at all. I don't think one approach to life is strictly better than the others.

That's where I imagine the negativity you experience stems from. I don't know anyone who appreciates the imposition of rules on their lifestyle, regardless of how well you think you've profiled their framework. Especially in a casual setting, most people just want to get along.
by GarettWithOneR | 2025-05-28 21:59:29+00:00
I evaluated Flutter for my app before deciding to go with Tauri and wrote about it on my blog: https://arboretum.space/blog/why-arboretum-chose-tauri .

The short version is that Flutter's lack of rich text editing solutions at the time made it a non-starter. It's a common problem in the Flutter ecosystem from what I've seen, there's often 0 or only 1 quality package for many "advanced" desktop use cases.
by 3x14159265 | 2025-05-28 22:00:46+00:00
A practical beginner's guide to using AI in software development. Whether you’re a junior dev, a seasoned engineer who’s been “meaning to check it out”, or just feeling a little behind, this book gives you everything you need to confidently start using AI in your day-to-day work, even if you have no clue where to begin.
by robocat | 2025-05-28 22:01:57+00:00
New Zealand copied it, except employee has to pay 3% (now just increased to 4%) and employer matches.

What happens with contractors in Oz? I know a nurse over there on high hourly rate, and I'm guessing part of the reason is to avoid employer contributions.

Is there a strong push for contractors throughout the Oz economy (not just government)?
by ddtaylor | 2025-05-28 22:02:16+00:00
> Good times, when you were able to restrict information export through airport security... Don't forget Paypal and Wikileaks! Oh my bad, that was Bitcoin talk. That's not a currency anymore, but an asset. Like gold.

All of that is irrelevant to the context at hand. How good, trade-worthy, or the value of a cryptocurrency is not directly tied to the amount of computation work done to mine the coin. All different combinations exist.

> Then why exactly do I need a darknet service for that, instead of running it locally?

For the same reason most people are completely capable of running a modest PostgreSQL server with Nginx or a few docker containers on their hardware, yet they pay for the service of other people doing it. The same is true for backup, storage, and a plethora of other services they gladly fork over a few dollars for.

It being over the darknet is not a techncial requirement, it's an economic / market requirement.

> Yeah, businesses are totally gonna buy tons of crypto to pay for outlawed services from China to stay competitive

They already gladly look the other way and do shady things to procure data.

> Instead of running models locally as you suggested above.

Weird, when they tried to do that the DNS resolution for the domain name failed. Guess they'll fire up their VPN to start grabbing the model, etc. Maybe just by AICoin and move on?

> And of course the government will just fold in face of this crypto enabled libertarian hell.

For about 15 years you have been able to go into a .onion and grab whatever you what on a DNM. Many have been taken down. You can currently go on a .onion domain and grab whatever you want.

> I mean utopia. Can't beat math, amirite?

They seem able to catch a DNM every once in a while, but there are always a dozen or so viable and active alternatives.

> There will be no more taxes, everyone will be free, armed and get as much fentanyl as they want

I'm fairly certain the United States is getting as much fentanyl as it wants already. You can walk to some place in any city and get it in pill form quickly and cheaply. How much involvement the DNMs have in that right now I don't know. In the past some DNMs have policed that and some provided "quality testing" to verify the lack of presence of fentanyl in other substances.
by joe_the_user | 2025-05-28 22:03:00+00:00
I don't either philosophical conceptions of consciousness or theories of computational complexity count as even "efforts to formalize intelligence". They are each focused on something significantly different.

The closest effort I know of as far characterizing intelligence as such is Steven Smale's 18th problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smale%27s_problems
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-28 22:03:10+00:00
This is one of those ideas that great minds have been chewing on for all of recorded history.

In modern thinking, we do certainly recognize different classes of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, spatial reasoning, math, language, music.

I'd say the classes of intelligence are finite. Primarily because different types of intelligence (generally) rely on distinct parts of our finite brains.

As for maximum intelligence, I like the angle taken by several SciFi authors. Generally, when an AI is elevated to the extremes of intelligence, they detach from reality and devolve into infinite naval gazing. Building simulated realities or forever lost in pondering some cosmic mystery. Humans brought to this state usually just die.

For physical, finite entities, there's almost certainly an upper limit. It's probably a lot higher than we think, though. Biological entities have hard limits on energy, nutrients, and physical size beyond which it's just impossible to maintain any organism. Infinities are rarely compatible with biology, and we will always be limited.

Even an AI is still beholden to the practicalities of moving energy and resources around. Your processor can only get so large and energy/information can only move so fast. Intelligence in AI is probably also bounded by physical constraints, same as biological entities.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-28 22:03:47+00:00
You’re roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia’s workers’ self-management. This is in contrast to what the Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the capitalist system where someone with enough capital establishes and runs the factory themselves while employing the workers.

And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
by jchw | 2025-05-28 22:05:49+00:00
Not 100% familiar with exactly what this is but I am familiar with run-ahead, which is basically also the same idea as GGPO, but for eliminating lag:

- Run the emulator one frame normally, using real polled input. Somehow snapshot the state.

- Then, run the emulator n frames (usually just one) with the same input. Present the video + audio from the last frame.

- Synchronize. (Some emulators can get very fancy; instead of just waiting for vsync, they'll also delay until the end of the window minus estimated processing time, to poll input at the last possible moment.)

- Roll back to the saved snapshot. (I believe you can also optimize if you know the inputs really didn't change, avoiding a lot of rollbacks at the cost of less predictable frame times.)

The main reason this is even a good idea is because most games will have some of their own processing latency by design, so jumping a frame or two ahead usually doesn't have any noticeable side-effects. This is a pretty cool idea since obviously modern computers with LCD screens have a lot more latency basically everywhere versus older simpler machines connected to CRTs.

Unfortunately, this sort of approach only works when your emulator's state is small enough and fast enough to restore.

I actually have been dying to experiment with designing an emulator to have fast incremental snapshots from the ground up to see if you could manage to make this feasible for more modern consoles. You could, for example, track dirty memory pages with userfaultfd/MEM_WRITE_WATCH, and design structures like JIT caches to be able to handle rewinding without having to drop the entire cache. I'm actually not sure that all emulators clear their caches upon loading state, but you know, more generally, I would like to know how fast and small you could get save states to be if you were designing for that from the ground up.
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 22:05:50+00:00
I don't think so. You can still teach to a good test badly. For example: reading a variety of books and letting people do more on their own would be would be better overall than reading just things on the level of the test, asking just the test style questions and spending time learning the answering style to get 100%.

It's kind of like those articles about young kids passing IT certifications. Those tests are reasonably good, but those kids just memorised lots of material and never actually worked as, for example, a networking engineer.

Or like in IELTS style language test you can easily score higher (even than a native English speaker) if you learn the format enough.
by godshatter | 2025-05-28 22:05:51+00:00
When trying to figure out what to code or how to solve a problem, pen and paper is too "concrete" for me for some reason. If I'm waiting for inspiration I would rather just go for a walk or pace back and forth or just stare at something (monitor, wall, whatever) and think it through. When I write something down (or especially when I type it into a document) it becomes too set in stone for me, and if I do it too much I get way too "close" to it to see the solution.

Pen and paper is more helpful when I'm trying to see how the solution I came up with fits into the code, at least for me. I can't visualize at all, so even basic things about how data flows will be helpful if I write them down. The more concrete I'm getting, the more I use pen and paper or text documents. Otherwise it's just give myself time to work through the code as I know it, thinking of things and discarding them quickly, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
by thicktarget | 2025-05-28 22:06:04+00:00
>Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters.

That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.
by distances | 2025-05-28 22:06:08+00:00
What ads is Telegram showing? I can't think of any, except a peristent birthday reminder.

I also agree with the sibling comment that Telegram is sadly the best chat app I've used not only for group chats but also for 1-to-1 chats.

Edit: there are paid emojis or stickers too, now that I think about it.
by ansgri | 2025-05-28 22:06:19+00:00
This is a very good analogy. And this interest rate can probably be significantly reduced by applying TDD and reducing the size of isolated subsystems. That may start to look like microservices. I generally don’t like both for traditional development, but current LLMs both make them easier and more useful.

And the “rule of three” basically ceases to be applicable between components — either the code has localized impact, or is a part of rock-solid foundational library. Intermediate cases just explode the refactoring complexity.
by mrkeen | 2025-05-28 22:07:30+00:00
I think it would be much more fruitful to flip it around the other way.

Start with small pieces which halt, and see how far you can get by combining them into larger programs. Compiler-help is available: https://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/tutorial/theorems.html...

A down-side of a yes/no/maybe halting checker is that it wouldn't tell you why. You'd get your "doesn't halt" result and then have to debug the algorithm.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-28 22:08:15+00:00
I think you could just try to be a little kinder, humbler, less assuming and open-minded. You're setting yourself up to not consider new information about certain topics, or review previously encountered information without bias.

If you're tired of discussing something, maybe it's fine to just let it go and let someone else handle it. But you come off a bit unapproachable when you bring negative energy into the conversation. This is a place where we can learn from each other, a forum, not a battlefield. Positivity opens minds, negativity shuts them. It's not any one person's fault if you've encountered their ideas before, and besides, you might be wrong sometimes, as we all are.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-28 22:08:29+00:00
I agree with a comment, which appears now to be deleted, effectively that monarch's have no place in democracy.

The presence of Charles Windsor in the HoL is an affront to democracy that we should do away with. These chairs represent a fraction of the baggage of tradition that IMO should be carefully unpicked and dispensed with; parliament really needs to continue the slow progression towards sovereignty of the demos and away from the trappings of imperial oppulence and monarchic power. The mace should be smashed, melted down and used to fund a memorial to the Crown.

Even if, as some argue, it is "only symbolic", the kowtowing of the demos to a person of inherited title is a symbolism that we should be rid of.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-05-28 22:08:42+00:00
> the brain’s wiring and complexity also evolved, which in turn drove advances in language, culture, and technology

Fun thought: to the extent that it really happened this way, our intelligence is minimum viable for globe-spanning civilization (or whatever other accomplishment you want to index on). Not average, not median. Minimum viable.

I don't think this is exactly correct -- there is probably some critical mass / exponential takeoff dynamic that allowed us to get slightly above the minimum intelligence threshold before actually taking off -- but I still think we are closer to it than not.
by the_d3f4ult | 2025-05-28 22:08:46+00:00
This is an interesting perspective, but your view seems very narrow for some reason. If you’re arguing that there are many forms of computation or ‘intelligence’ that are emergent with collections of sentient or non-sentient beings then you have to include tribes of early humans, families, city-states and modern republics, ant and mold colonies, the stock market and the entire earths biosphere etc.
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-28 22:08:59+00:00
How about you just don't listen to those sounds? Even in small apartments the bathroom tends to be separated from the living room/kitchen/bedroom/etc_room so it tends to be quite easy to ignore those sounds by just not hanging around the bathroom door.

Nope, this is taking social sensitivity far too far. By all means keep those farts out of polite company but once you're in the loo feel free to let it fly without feeling ashamed. Everyone farts, everyone pees, everyone does it.
by ryoshoe | 2025-05-28 22:11:55+00:00
The reason these qualities aren't rewarded isn't because of capitalism itself, it's due to the enforcement of laws and regulations against them. The profit motive incentives owners to adopt practices like employing children because they will work for less than an adult, or suppressing research harmful to their core business like how tobacco companies were aware of the harm of smoking long before they publicly acknowledged them
by Retric | 2025-05-28 22:12:09+00:00
> Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents <

Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.

Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-28 22:12:19+00:00
"But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does."

I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.
by roskelld | 2025-05-28 22:12:24+00:00
I find that using ways to step away from code help think things through in ways to overcome roadblocks. One recent trick I've found is rubber duck my issue into ChatGPT, which I used to do in a notepad (either digital or physical), the added advantage of ChatGPT is I can hit Enter once I'm done with my thoughts and get a response, which might have a solution in it.
by dotancohen | 2025-05-28 22:13:01+00:00
There are two specific places where Python is not performant. I ran some tests in a few languages and Rust and C++ came out on top, by far. I could write Rust components and access them via Python. I could also use C++ and stick with Qt. Or I could take the plunge with Rust. As this is a personal app with no other users, this is a good place to keep sharpening my skills.
by SpaceL10n | 2025-05-28 22:13:03+00:00
That's part of it, but also Tauri uses Rust on the backend while Electron uses Node. Electron is way more mature with a larger developer community, but Tauri keeps gaining momentum. If memory safety, bundle size, and performance are important to you, Tauri is a nice choice. Electron is not bad but there's a reason there are so many new players.
by skydhash | 2025-05-28 22:13:29+00:00
Intelligence is often a measure how quickly we can embrace a new model and how effectively we can use it. Building such a model can be done haphazardly or be guided with skill transfer methodology. Once that done, intelligence is how well we can select the correct model, filter the relevant parameters out and then produce a correct answer.

There's a lot of factors there and more that I haven't specified. But one thing that I believe is essential is the belief that an answer is correct or uncertain.