MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asciimov | 2025-05-22 23:25:05+00:00
I’ve played a bunch of Catan. The included wooden dice are all terribly biased. Not in the same way, but enough that a sets owner knows, at least subconsciously, what numbers their set favors.

The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to have a bag of assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn’t predictable.

Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or floods, aiding in robber strategy.
by NAHWheatCracker | 2025-05-22 23:25:06+00:00
I don't feel much inspired by the metaphor of garbage collection and AI.

Garbage collection makes thinking about memory irrelevant 99% of the time. Time saved with AI is spent figuring out what the AI did.

The garbage collector rarely makes itself a problem. AI almost always makes itself a problem.

Developers can go years without thinking about memory if they aren't in a complex environment. AI can't go a day without screwing up.

Garbage collection is very predictable. AI isn't.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-22 23:25:42+00:00
> We’d be much better off with a president Vance.

J.D. Vance gave a big speech at the Nationalism Conservatism Conference titled "The Universities are the Enemy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw

Destroying universities has been his schtick since long before he was a VP candidate.

He has stated that he believes 4-year degrees make people dumber.

I'm constantly amazed by how many people don't know that waging wars on Universities has been Vance's thing for years.
by woggy | 2025-05-22 23:26:13+00:00
I think you have your head in the sand.

This Harvard thing is just one example. Just saw a report this morning (Aus time) of an Australian detained, stripped, and held overnight in a US federal prison. She was just coming in to visit her husband.

Who the hell will want to come to the US now? You are going to suffer a massive reverse brain drain. You got a 30% tariff tax, kidnapping of random people off the street including US citizens, blatant and overwhelming corruption at the highest levels, weaponizing of government to target people, institutions and private companies.

Good luck in the midterm 'elections'.
by mrandish | 2025-05-22 23:26:46+00:00
> You can perfectly try things and learn without being embodied.

A brilliant 'brain in a vat' can come up with novel answers to questions but outside of narrow categories like pure mathematics and logic which can be internally validated, the brain can't know how correct or incorrect its novel answers are without some way to objectively test, observe and validate the correctness of its answers in the relevant domain (ie 'the real world'). A model can only be as useful as its parameters correctly reflect the modeled target. Even very complex and detailed simulations tend to quickly de-correlate when they repeatedly run untethered from ground truth. Games like Go have clear rule sets. Reality doesn't.
by magnetic | 2025-05-22 23:27:27+00:00
There are various explanations about the genesis of the sound for T sufferers, and it obviously depends on the kind of T that one has (this chart [1] helps navigate the variants).

But if you are one of the "common kind", which is typically an insult to your hearing apparatus that damaged your cochlea, then the work from Susan Shore [2] is a reasonable explanation of what could actually be going on (genesis by the fusiform cells of the dorsal cochlear nucleus). You may be interested in checking out her publications listed in the wikipedia article quoted.

[1] https://www.tinnitusresearch.net/index.php/for-clinicians/di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Shore
by busyant | 2025-05-22 23:28:23+00:00
> The Republican party is, in fact, a coalition.

It really isn't anymore. I agree that there are many decent "old-time" Republicans, but they've been neutered and/or they've "self-deported" themselves from politics.

Romney might've been able to run and split the vote.

Bush the younger could've put his thumb on the scale, too.

Murkowski says "we are all afraid" [of MAGA].

Many traditional Republican congressmen have simply bowed out and not sought re-election.

McCain is dead.

The only one that I can think of that actually stood up is Liz Cheney.

To use a programming phrase, the country is in an "error state" and has been since 2017.

I don't know what the re-set is.
by leoc | 2025-05-22 23:29:50+00:00
It wasn't that simple: in practice the arrival of the 286 in 1984 was very much only the beginning of the PC's escape from the 640KiB/1MiB limit. It wasn't until some time after the promulgation of the DOS Protected Mode Interface in 1989 that it became routine for PC applications to have unrestricted, straightforward access to all of RAM. (I'm very much relying on resources like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274672 for the details here: I was never a serious DOS user or a DOS developer.) Still it would definitely be overstating things to say that "PC memory maxed out at 640 kilobytes" in 1993 or subsequently. It does seem possible that the author did mean to say "640 kilobytes", but really just as a snarky jab at the PC platform: PC software really was still relying on DOS extenders to make use of "extended memory" in 1993, even if they were by then doing a solid job at it.

Another possibility: apparently https://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-nt-3-1-and-os2-memory-d... all x86 machines released before maybe 1993 are restricted to 64MiB, even under Windows NT and other fully 32-bit OSes, because the BIOS simply can't report having any more RAM than that. By early 1993 the first "service" allowing the reporting of more than 64MiB of system RAM (up to the full 4GiB supported by x86) was starting to appear on some BIOSes.

Apparently the effective memory limit for Windows 3.1 is 256MiB https://web.archive.org/web/20150518111050/https://support.m... while for Windows 95 it's approximately 480MiB https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030814-00/?p=42... . So it's plausible that Rosenthal had one of those in mind, even if 640MiB is not exactly the right number (and even if you'd actually hit BIOS or wallet limitations first).
by chneu | 2025-05-22 23:30:15+00:00
Newt Gingrich dropped the famous "feels over reals" line on CNN.

"You have your facts on the left and we have our facts on the right" is basically what he said. Along with "If people feel one way then that's real." He isn't wrong, but he openly admitted to manipulating people to get them to feel certain ways.

https://youtu.be/xnhJWusyj4I
by nradov | 2025-05-22 23:30:17+00:00
You seem to be mixing up providers and payers (insurers). Providers don't deny claims, but sometimes payers sent claims because the providers coded them incorrectly. There's nothing wrong with coding a claim with all services rendered and charging the maximum agreed rate. If the payers want a lower rate then they can negotiate it next time the contract is up for renewal.

Obviously it would be wrong for providers to bill for things they didn't actually do. That would be fraud. This part isn't in dispute.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-05-22 23:30:36+00:00
You could of course do that, but the main reason to use SQLite in a server application is for the performance characteristics of staying in-process for accessing the database. This makes it cheap to make queries in response to a previous query, which would need to somehow be batched for good latency with a client/server database. Re-adding the client server model defeats almost all of the PROs of SQLite, leaving you with only the CONs.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-05-22 23:30:57+00:00
100% sure. Tested in the Anthropic workbench[0] to double check and got the same result.

The web interface has a prompt that defines a cutoff date and who's president[1].

[0] https://console.anthropic.com/workbench

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#c...
by tveita | 2025-05-22 23:31:19+00:00
Disregarding whatever surface-level motivations Trump might have, let's look at some things attacking Harvard accomplishes.

1. Maybe most importantly, attacking academic institutions is part of the fascist coup playbook. [1] That could really be enough motivation on its own - these steps have lead to the desired outcome before, if you follow them closely enough they will probably work again. Just like the seemingly out-of-the-left-field framing of DEI, of all things, as the big Enemy that is corrupting art, science and the American people itself. It seems crazy, but notice how well it's working.

2. It's another vase to throw in the air, forcing you to catch it, cartoon-style. People who care and believe in process will spend time and energy going through the court system to limit the damage done, but the defenders will lag behind, their focus divided, while the attackers can just keep breaking bigger and bigger things, since they not care much what damage they do to people or their country.

3. It lets them target pro-Palestine protesters gradually starting from the most extreme. The genocide in Gaza can go a lot further. It is mutually beneficial for Trump, Netanyahu and Putin to divide both domestic and international outrage between them (see point 2.) By the time the full scale of the atrocities are clear, arresting and prosecuting protesters for "antisemitism" will be routine. And if you're not willing to stand up and protest, and therefore be removed, chances are you won't stick your neck out when they instate "temporary" changes to federal elections - only out of some extreme necessity, of course.

[1] https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/higher-education-i...
by theodric | 2025-05-22 23:31:30+00:00
I worked majority remote 2007-2018 and unsurprisingly entirely remote 2020-2023. Never once did I miss people as a result. Now I farm, and I leave the farm once every 2-3 weeks, and see no-one but my wife and possibly the neighbors on occasion. I can't speak for all introverts, but I can speak for myself: interaction via the Internet is more than sufficient.
by bigiain | 2025-05-22 23:31:47+00:00
I think it's a combination of both scale and people's expectations.

As the size of your music library goes up, the UX changes. The original iPod UX was (at least for me) genuinely awesome. It became less awesome as iPods got 40, 60, and larger storage, and it was pretty much unusable when I modded one to have 1TB of storage.

And related but different, everybody's expectation of what "a large music collection" is varies wildly.

I don't necessarily think this is intentional enshittification, I lean more towards "there's no right solution for everybody, and there's probably not even a dozen different right solutions that encompass most people".
by tptacek | 2025-05-22 23:31:54+00:00
Hold on a sec. "HBD" is not a field of study; it's a meme ecosystem. There are (at least) two fields of actual scientific study that intersect with HBD: psychometrics, the subspecialty of psychology that deals in IQ measurement and twin studies, and molecular genetics, the quantitative subspecialty of genetics that studies correlations in the genome across large populations with marked traits (which can include things educational attainment).

Neither of these fields does "IQ maps", which are an article of faith in HBD circles. As soon as someone breaks out the Lynn IQ maps, they lose the "we're just doing science" card. Alexander did a whole recent article about them. We are past the point where anybody gets to high-horse criticism of his HBD stuff as un-rigorous.
by karagenit | 2025-05-22 23:33:14+00:00
Yeah, I'd probably go that route if I wanted to scrape more than the handful of pages I needed for this project. I wonder if it would work on Zillow or not. Even my simple workflow of "click the next button, save the request in devtools, repeat" was suspicious enough to trigger a captcha-type "are you a bot?" challenge. Maybe it was just too many requests quickly like you mentioned, or maybe they're doing something more advanced like mouse movement tracking.
by amy_petrik | 2025-05-22 23:33:18+00:00
>They are driven by young, dumbass children or inbred rednecks who bought the libertarian/fascist line about needing to own some libs or the line about the government needing to get out of people's lives and let everyone do whatever they want.

americans are individualistic. you wont get very far by saying "do things this way I passionately believe in OR ELSE, you inbred redneck". they then do this to spite you "own the libs". better to say, "do things however you want, it's not for me to say how you live your life, but that would be cool if you did X because Y and I'm passionate about this because Z. both sides of the aisle are guilty of painfully enforcing their beliefs on the other.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-22 23:33:45+00:00
I'm sorry, but I think you are just wrong about convolutions and cumulative distribution functions.

Let's take the simplest possible case: a "random" variable that's always equal to 0. Its cdf is a step function: 0 for negative values, 1 for positive values. (Use whatever convention you prefer for the value at 0.)

The sum of two such random variables is another with the same distribution, of course. So, what's the convolution of the cdfs?

Answer: it's not even well defined.

The convolution of functions f and g is a function such that h(x) = integral over t of f(t) g(x-t) dt. The integral is over the whole of (in this case) the real numbers.

In this case f and g are both step functions as described above, so (using the convenient Iverson bracket notation for indicator functions) this is the integral over t of [t>0] [x-t>0] dt, i.e., of [0<t<x] dt, whose value is 0 for negative x and x for positive x.

This is not the cdf of any probability distribution since it doesn't -> 1 as x -> oo. In particular, it isn't the cdf of the right probability distribution which, as mentioned above, would be the same step function as f and g.

If X,Y are independent with pdfs f,g and cdfs F,G then the cdf of X+Y is (not F conv G but) f conv G = F conv g.
by fidotron | 2025-05-22 23:34:06+00:00
There's a very simple trick to dealing with these sort of recursive fractals: use logo/turtle graphics.

The reason is the angles stay the same, and you're making local decisions based on scale as to if you skip over something because it's too small, in order to avoid the problem of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox#Measuring_a_...
by fumeux_fume | 2025-05-22 23:34:32+00:00
Aside from the fact that you seem to be demanding a lot from someone who's informally sharing their experience online, I think the effectiveness really depends on what you're writing code for. With straightforward use cases that have ample documented examples, you can generally expect decent or even excellent results. However, the more novel the task or the more esoteric the software library, the likelier you are to encounter issues and feel dissatisfied with the outcomes. Additionally, some people are simply pickier about code quality and won't accept suboptimal results. Where I work, I regularly encounter wildly enthusiastic opinions about GenAI that lack any supporting evidence. Dissenting from the mainstream belief that AI is transforming every industry is treated as heresy, so such skepticism is best kept close to the chest—or better yet, completely to oneself.
by iambateman | 2025-05-22 23:35:44+00:00
I think where we agree is that we need to reduce the social costs of college, one way or another.

But we don’t agree on how that should happen.

The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.

We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.
by LeFantome | 2025-05-22 23:36:17+00:00
You do not believe that what happened from 1991 to 1995 explains anything about how we got here?

Red Hat was founded in 1993. When do you think they got the idea? When do you think companies like Red Hat decided to bet on Linux instead of BSD? Debian was founded in 1993 as well. When was that lawsuit settled again?

An awful lot of the Linux momentum that carries us to this very day appeared after the BSD lawsuit was filed and before it was settled.

What about the other “big and professional” competitor to Linux?

GNU HURD was started in 1990. The original plan was to base it off the BSD kernel. The Linux kernel appeared in 1991. BSD fell under legal threat in 1992. Debian appeared in 1993. RMS lost interest in HURD. None of these dates had much impact you don’t think?
by skissane | 2025-05-22 23:37:29+00:00
> not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah)

Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.

That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle
by ekianjo | 2025-05-22 23:37:55+00:00
> What's different is intention

intention is what exactly? It's the set of options you imagine you have based on your belief system, and ultimately you make a choice from there. That can also be replicated in LLMs with a well described system prompt. Sure, I will admit that humans are more complex than the context of a system prompt, but the idea is not too far.
by starkparker | 2025-05-22 23:39:07+00:00
An interesting counterpoint by a games narrative writer at https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-deprofessionalizatio..., which suggests possible ramifications of an industry of small teams for those who aren't programmers or designers:

> My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion.

> All three risk compartmentalization as "asset creators," their work treated as products you can purchase off the store shelf.

> Every artist in games knows how hard it is to make a living doing what you love. In-house artist positions have faded away as companies look overseas to produce as many assets as humanly possible at the lowest living wage. Enthusiasm for AI-generated assets (that look like dogshit) are nudging this trend along. In the "gun for hire" mindset, working artists aren't worth anything to game development because they're producing goods to be used, not participants in the process. Art directors are in a slightly more stable position, but only by virtue of knowing "what looks good" and telling someone else what they want to do.

Biggest downside of the piece is that the author only talks to someone at a16z, of all places, about it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-22 23:39:15+00:00
Uh, we're talking about the AI getting itself so intertwined into the fabric of industry that the consequences of shutting it off are that society is dropped back to 1700s level.

Yes, regardless of the technology level that the people who do that are left with, one of the consequences of disabling the computer is that the computer is disabled. That's a given.
by inhumantsar | 2025-05-22 23:40:08+00:00
can confirm that readability seems to be on life support. I used it slurp, an obsidian plugin which serves the same basic purpose as web clipper, and always had a hard time getting PRs reviewed and merged.

i started working on my own alternative but life (and web clipper) derailed the work.

it's funny. somehow slurp keeps gaining new users even though web clipper exists. so i might have to refactor it to use your library sometime soon even though I don't use slurp myself anymore.
by paradox460 | 2025-05-22 23:41:15+00:00
A few years ago it was Safari that was the new IE, the one browser you had to go out of your way to support all its dumb little quirks. Firefox and Chrome+friends more or less "just worked"

Now Firefox is moving into that role. Except Firefox has no killer captive audience. Safari was pushed because of iOS Mobile users. Firefox doesn't have that.

So when you're a frontend dev at big corp, and you have to get stuff done now, targeting the quirks of a browser used by less than a tenthbof a percent of your userbase doesn't factor into the equation
by latexr | 2025-05-22 23:41:39+00:00
> "cult leaders" are, by definition, "great leaders"

Not as defined, and I did define them.

What matters is the explained distinction between the two types of leader, arguing exact semantics of individual words in the shorthand term isn’t productive.

Since the original poster I replied to used the word “amazing” (plus the context of the conversation), I used “great” to mean “Very good; excellent; wonderful; fantastic”, not “effective”.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/great
by jonhohle | 2025-05-22 23:41:47+00:00
It’s amazing to me that iPod syncing still works. I use a 2ᴺᴰ gen nano and my son uses a, 6ᵀᴴ gen. I preferred managing in iTunes to finder, but it’s crazy that a 20 year old player with a proprietary software interface still works.

Apple is so quick to drop support for some things and keep other things around seemingly indefinitely.