MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-05-17 02:47:25+00:00
It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims about them...

Creativity is much more than the derivative production of artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity is a process of human connection and communication—you can see this most clearly in the art of interpretation. A single literary work has an almost uncountable number of possible interpretations, and a huge element of its existence in the world as a price of art are the discussions and debates that emerge over those interpretations, and how they shape us as individuals, instill morals, etc etc. Quite a lot more than "making elves by adding pointy ears to humans".

Your post stinks of the very gross consumerist mindset the OP called out. The creation and preservation of meaning is about way more than the production of fungible decontextualized objects--it's all about the mediation and maintenance of human relationships through artifacts. The fact that the elves have pointy ears doesn't even begin to scratch at their actual meaning (e.g. they exist in a world with very big real problems that effect you and me too, e.g. race relations, and exaggerated features estrange these relations so as to make them more discernible to us and allow us to finally see the water we swim in).

If humans stop engaging with these processes, it's reasonable to believe that a lot of that semiotic richness, which is much of what, in my opinion, makes us human and not just super smart animals in the first place, will be lost.
by jmogly | 2025-05-17 02:48:37+00:00
Jarring title but 100% agree! You very quickly hit a point building a modern web app where you need advanced functionality. Rolling your own everything in raw javascript is not a sane approach. I think the just use html crowd is composed mainly of backend devs who struggle to comprehend that a web UI is more than just a pretty crud layer on top of their backend. Fight me :)
by cryptonector | 2025-05-17 02:49:20+00:00
> Someone who makes 10 million dollars (or 100 million, or...) a year pays the exact same social security tax as someone who makes $176,100.

Very few people earn that kind of money as taxable _income_. More people earn that kind of money as unrealized _capital gains_. Social security is paid for with a payroll tax and what amounts to an income tax. Once you're earning several times the cap you stop caring about it. If you earn 5x or 10x the cap then you will probably not be counting on social security, so there's no us-vs-them dynamic likely there. The problem is that to make this make a big different you'll have to hit hard those who earn only 1.5x or 2x the cap, and that's how you'd get an us-vs-them dynamic.

Instead you can increase the retirement age, increase the cap, increase the tax rates, lower the COLAs, etc., and that's what we've seen so far.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-17 02:52:15+00:00
Thought here: If I'm reading this right the cache remains valid unless something is done to the world state. Thus how about dumping the cache when the world is altered, the separate thread simply sits there rebuilding the cache. If an object should move one unit but the cache isn't there simply note the movement but don't update it. Next time around when you find the entry in the cache you move it two units. Given the stated calculation times I would think the user would not see this.
by trealira | 2025-05-17 02:52:35+00:00
> Choosing references as your default is insane, honestly. Safe Rust is akin to writing formally verified software in the mental and ergonomic overhead it incurs. That's not coincidental. I've come to the conclusion one of the biggest mistakes of the community is not pushing pointer-only Rust harder, given they want it to be taken seriously as a systems language.

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before, but I think there are a couple problems. One, the culture is really against using unsafe unless it's impossible to write the code using safe Rust. This happened with the Actix web drama in 2020 [1]. And, there is the opinion that unsafe Rust is harder than C [2]. Not just that, but unsafe Rust is really ugly and annoying to use compared to safe Rust. I think that hinders the potential adoption of your idea, too.

[1]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust/

[2]: https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/
by p_ing | 2025-05-17 02:52:59+00:00
Losing air assess is a given. Package Q alone lost two F-16s. We lost an F-117 in Bosnia. But run enough Wild Weasel and eventually we did establish air superiority.

In Ukraine there is no establishing superiority without occupying Russian territory.

I used to draw mushroom clouds against hills in the 80s. I do not want to see NATO in Russia. I only want Russia out of Ukraine.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-17 02:53:42+00:00
Most of the 50 citations are preprint servers (like arXiv) or aggregators (like researchgate). It would be nice to count the number of citations in research papers in peer review journals.

> you will never be made aware of the disputes surrounding the research

ArXiv is not peer review, so it's as confiable as Wordpress or Medium or Blogspot or X/Tweeter or ... The main difference is that the post is in PDF instead of HTML. There is an invitation system to avoid very stupid cases, but it's very week.

I remember a weird cryptography "breakthrough", and they published it in arXiv, and the first 5 pages were an explanation of the rule of 9 for divisibility and then a dubious fast factorization algorithm. [The preprint was linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666501 and I replied to it (s/module/modulo/g)]
by ori_b | 2025-05-17 02:57:09+00:00
My machine is marginally faster for that; I get about 17ms doing that with python, without the print:

time echo "exit()" | python3 real 0m0.017s user 0m0.014s sys 0m0.003s

That's... still pretty slow. Here's a C program, run 100 times:

range=`seq 100` time for i in $range; do ./a.out; done real 0m0.038s user 0m0.024s sys 0m0.016s

And finally, for comparison on Plan 9:

range=`{seq 2000} time rc -c 'for(s in $range){ ./6.nop }' 0.01u 0.09s 0.16r rc -c for(s in $range){ ./6.nop }

the C program used was simply:

int main(void) { return 0; }

Of course, the more real work you do in the program, the less it matters -- but there's a hell of a lot you can do in the time it takes Python to launch.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-17 02:57:18+00:00
Citation?

My groundbreaking implementation passes it RGB bytes, passes em through the image projector, and put the tokens in the prompt.

And I cannot imagine sure why the inference engine would be more concerned with it than that.

Is my implementation a groundbreaking achievement worth rendering llama.cpp a footnote, because I use Dart image-processing libraries?
by kolinko | 2025-05-17 02:58:25+00:00
Not when it comes to math/programming/reasoning. You can generate infinite new problem and solution examples that are based on existing knowledge of course, but build on top of it, not distill it.

A simple example would be chess ai. The core knowledge is rules of the game. We have human generated examples of plays, but we don’t really need them - we can (and we did) synthesize data to train ai.

A similar pattern can be used for all math/physics/programming/reasoning.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-05-17 02:58:41+00:00
Realistically, putting them into trades sooner could almost be a good thing. Kids who don’t want to learn end up dragging down the class and distracting those who do.

But, these are kids… Hard to argue that adults should selectively deny education when it is their responsibility to do otherwise.

We don’t neglect the handicapped because it is inconvenient to provide them with assistance.
by taway20250516 | 2025-05-17 03:00:09+00:00
A legally-uneducated read of 22 CFR 51.62 suggests that the State Department can revoke a passport that was "illegally, fraudulently, or erroneously obtained."

How likely would you consider the idea that the current administration would revoke existing passports for transgender Americans under the pretense that they were "fraudulently or erroneously" obtained under processes put in place by previous administrations?
by Jensson | 2025-05-17 03:00:12+00:00
> You can come up with complicated definitions of "core reasoning" where this doesn't count

Did we read the same response? It did write a lot of reasons, but didn't do any reasoning at all, it just suddenly wrote "5" here

So, I’ll count the 5 occurrences of "i" in the word.

There was no reasoning at all to arrive at 5, so no your example just proves how these models are great at faking reasoning.
by kragen | 2025-05-17 03:01:54+00:00
On a 64-core machine, Python code that uses all the cores will be modestly faster than single-threaded C, even if all the inner loops are in Python. If you can move the inner loops to C, for example with Numpy, you can do much better still. (Python is still harder to get right than something like C or OCaml, of course, especially for larger programs, but often the smaller amount of code and quicker feedback loop can compensate for that.)
by voidhorse | 2025-05-17 03:04:15+00:00
The java ecosystem is great, and the JVM does deserve the appellation of technical marvel, Java the language on the other hand...questionable.

Many of Java's novel language choices have proven unfavorable in the long run (e.g. everything is a class, and even its syntax was needlessly verbose and ceremonious from day one) and all of what makes it a halfway decent language these days are good ideas that originated in other languages, often eons ago, which Java, for some reason, often elects to rebrand with its own terminology.

That said, the maintainers also do a phenomenal job managing the evolution of the language and preserving compatibility, but from a pure programming language design standpoint it's largely a messy amalgam of great ideas from a bunch of other places awkwardly realized. Great, robust ecosystem, great platform, great management, mediocre language design.
by drdaeman | 2025-05-17 03:04:20+00:00
> With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless.

The article you've linked fundamentally relies on the assumption that "the tasks can be done better/faster/cheaper by AIs". (Plus, of course, the idea that AGI would be achieved, but without this one the whole discussion would be pointless as it would lack the subject, so I'm totally fine with this one.)

Nothing about AGI (as in "a machine that can produce intelligent thoughts on a given matter") says that human and non-human knowledge workers would have some obvious leverage over each other. Just like my coworkers' existence doesn't hurt mine, a non-human intelligence is of no inherent threat. Not by definition.

Non-intelligent industrial robotics is well-researched and generally available, yet we have plenty of sweatshops because they turn out to be cheaper than robot factories. Not fun, not great, I'm no fond of this, but I'm merely taking it as a fact, as it is how it currently is. So I really wouldn't dare to unquestionably assume that "cheaper" would be true.

And then "better" isn't obvious either. Intelligence is intelligence, it can think, it can make guesses, it can make logical conclusions, and it can make mistakes too - but we've yet to see even the tiniest hints of "higher levels" of it, something that would make humans out of the league of thinking machines if we're ranking on some "quality" of thinking.

I can only buy "faster" - and even that requires an assumption that we ignore any transhumanist ideas. But, surely, "faster" alone doesn't cut it?
by zeroq | 2025-05-17 03:04:42+00:00
Every once in a while I've been trying AI, since everyone and their mother told me to, so I comply.

My recent endevour was with Gemini 2.5:

- Write me a simple todo app on cloudflare with auth0 authentication. - Here's a simple todo on cloudflare. We import the @auth0-cloudflare and... - Does that @auth0-cloudflare exists? - Oh, it doesn't. I can give you a walkthrough on how to set up an account on auth0. Would you like me to? - Yes, please. - Here. I'm going to write the walkthrough in a document... (proceed to create an empty document) - That seems to be an empty document. - Oh, my bad. I'll produce it once more. (proceed to create another empty document) - Seems like you're md parsing library is broken, can you write it in chat instead? - Yes... (your gemini trial has expired, would you like to pay $100 to continue?)
by Jensson | 2025-05-17 03:07:31+00:00
> A similar pattern can be used for all math/physics/programming/reasoning.

No it can't, the pattern for chess worked since it was an invented problem where we have a simple outcome checks, we can't do the same for natural problems where we don't have easily judged outcomes.

So you can do it for arithmetics and similar where you can generate tons of questions and answers, but you can't use this for things that are fuzzier like physics or chemistry or math theorem choices. In the end we don't really know what a good math theorem is like, it has to be useful but how do you judge that? Not just any truthy mathematical statement is seen as a theorem, most statements doesn't lead anywhere.

Once we have a universal automated judge that can judge any kind of human research output then sure your statement is true, then we can train research AI that way. But we don't have that, or science would look very different than it does today. But I'd argue that such a judge needs to be AGI on its own, so its circular.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-17 03:07:45+00:00
> That by law can only go to fund social security and nothing else.

Eh, that's partly true. The true statement is that social security tax revenue must eventually go to fund social security.

Before it's needed (i.e. while tax revenue exceeds benefits), it has been used to buy US treasuries -- the funds used to do so then appeared for Congress' general use.

You can see the US treasures the social security trust fund is currently holding here: https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/investheld.html
by jwr | 2025-05-17 03:09:55+00:00
> My surface level understanding is that GCL is a big reason why 3rd party libraries are a huge pain to use in Clojurescript.

This isn't true.

What you might have heard is that the Google Closure Compiler with :advanced optimizations makes external libraries harder to use. This also isn't true if you use good tooling (shadow-cljs makes using npm libraries transparent and totally painless).

It is worth observing that :advanced optimizations result in a significant speed increase, but are considered too difficult to use in the JavaScript world. ClojureScript was designed from the start to be compiled in :advanced mode, so you get the benefits of an impressive whole-program optimizing compiler for free.
by mindslight | 2025-05-17 03:10:51+00:00
What is with this pervasive assumption that the US owing other countries in USD somehow implies that the US might somehow end up wedged trying to pay back debts denominated in USD? These are not household finances - the US is monetarily sovereign. The US can always pay any USD-denominated debt by conjuring new money, meaning politics is the only thing that can actually cause a default.

Your top level comment is basically a huge red herring. The dynamic is not one of the US starting a war to take others' lootable assets to pay off debt denominated in USD. Rather, benefiting from US military hegemony in the future is what other countries are buying into when they choose to store their wealth in USD. They accept the demurrage from holding continually-inflating USD as the cost of moving bulk wealth forward in time, and our spending much of the proceeds of that arrangement on maintaining our global hard and soft power made perfect sense.

Trump's policies have directly made the US an unreliable ally, and therefore made USD less attractive. Monetary inflation has always been acceptable (there isn't a better game in town). But after our allies have trusted buying shares in our economic empire, leaving them high and dry or overtly extorting them for even more is breaking the arrangement.

All of these points about "cutting spending" and "making other countries pay their share" are essentially quack narratives covering for actions aimed at directly undermining the United States and the Dollar. It's even more blatant when you see things like spending is not actually being cut. Presumably if he (they?) succeed at the goal, the plan is to blame the results on purported inevitability when the reality will be that they blew it up.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-17 03:11:14+00:00
> I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

Reducing boilerplate is not a valuable goal in and of itself. The question is, does the boilerplate buy you something? I think that with checked exceptions it does. Having an explicit type signature for what errors a function can raise improves correctness a great deal because the compiler can enforce the contracts of those functions.

I agree that the Rust approach is good too, though I don't agree it has any strong advantages over the way Java does things. Both approaches are equally respectable in my view.
by blululu | 2025-05-17 03:11:43+00:00
>>Show me metrics that move something tangible, like conversion rates. If you can't do that, we both know why.

Personally, I'm pretty cynical on metrics like CTR as well. I think people in this discussion have presented plenty of reasonable criticism on the metrics used in the article, and I don't really disagree. But Google's culture of design by metrics at originates with metrics like conversion rates. I am personally fond of Material 1 but I don't think that the extensive A/B testing really made any real improvements to the design system. What's more, design by testing can really make a mess of things. You can easily end up chasing noise, creating irrelevant p-hacks, pursuing local optima, and tanking the long term experience in favor of short term gains. And you are blinding yourself to these problems with a very precise number.

In market research the concept of the NPS score is instructive: a 100 question survey tells you very little for a variety of methodological issues. Instead just ask the basic question "would you recommend this product to a friend - yes, no maybe?". It's about as precise as the thing it is trying to measure. Something in that style is probably the best way to quantitatively evaluate UX design. More practically though, qualitative research is probably going to be telling you a lot more than a simple number (unless you are actually making ads, in which case, get the CRT as high as possible).
by pianopatrick | 2025-05-17 03:12:47+00:00
I have a hypothesis that at some point someone will do a study of "which language do LLMs work best with?" and we will find out some languages and frameworks are better for LLMs than others. If we stick with LLMs for a while we may even develop languages and frameworks specifically to be easy for LLMs to generate code with. And then people will architect their software to use the approach that is easy for LLMs
by exikyut | 2025-05-17 03:13:44+00:00
I just had a hunch, opened http://sheets.new, opened the developer tools and did a CTRL+SHIFT+F search for "trix".

There were a bunch of CSS and JS hits. 791.

I think Trix is the internal codename for Sheets, like "Kix" is the codename for Docs (similar pile of matches for the term in devtools).
by codedokode | 2025-05-17 03:16:24+00:00
FP principle is that functions are first-class objects and one can pass a function to a function. I don't see how it helps programming the UI. Maybe you meant using immutable data structures? I mentioned that and noted that they have their own issues and generally are a pain to use.

> If your whole tree is recalculating on every mousemove event

If you update a variable in the root component, that will happen. Am I wrong?
by jack_h | 2025-05-17 03:17:20+00:00
It does have an impact on intergovernmental debt. Here's a good explanation from GAO[1]:

> Intragovernmental debt holdings represent federal debt owed by Treasury to federal government accounts—primarily federal trust funds such as those established for Social Security and Medicare—that typically have an obligation to invest their excess annual receipts (including interest earnings) over disbursements in federal securities.

> Debt held by the public represents a claim on today’s taxpayers and absorbs resources from today’s economy, meaning that when an investor buys Treasury securities it is not investing that money elsewhere in the economy.

> Intragovernmental debt holdings reflect a claim on taxpayers and the economy in the future. Specifically, when federal government accounts redeem Treasury securities to obtain cash to fund expenditures, Treasury usually borrows from the public to finance these redemptions.

From memory I believe we're at ~100% publicly held debt to GDP and ~122% gross debt to GDP.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107138.pdf
by noisy_boy | 2025-05-17 03:17:24+00:00
> I personally don’t care for Java, but I have bills so it’s always in my back pocket. Things happen , sometimes you need to write Java to eat.

I write Java to pay bills and my eyes and fingers thank me everyday for sparing them from a sea of if err != nil. I won't even go(!) into the iota stupidly compared to Java's enums.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-17 03:18:28+00:00
Succinct data structures such as wavelet trees are widely used in bioinformatics. There you often have strings that cannot be tokenized or parsed meaningfully, so you just have to deal with sequences of symbols. And because the strings are often very long and/or there can be a huge number of them, the data structures have to be space-efficient.

A wavelet tree is best seen as an intermediate data structure. It doesn't do anything particularly interesting on its own, but it can be used as a building block for higher-level data structures. For example, you can create an FM-index by storing the Burrows–Wheeler transform in a wavelet tree. (Though there are better options when the alphabet is small.) And then you can use the FM-index to find exact matches of any length between the pattern and the indexed strings.

People working with succinct data structures often talk about bitvectors rather than bitmaps. The difference is that bitmaps tend to focus on set operations, while bitvectors are more about random access with rank, select, and related queries. Then you could see wavelet trees as a generalization of bitvectors from a binary alphabet to larger alphabets. And then you have people talking about wavelet trees, when they really mean a wider class of conceptually and functionally similar data structures, regardless of the actual implementation.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-17 03:18:39+00:00
Go with 99.9%. But not 100%.

Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric. That was new.

In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or exploration of things in new combinations or from a previously untapped viewpoint.

Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what they know. So not likely to find anything new.

But many people try new things, or try to improve or vary something in a direction that is not easy, and learning something nonobvious and new is the “price” they must pay to succeed. Or a bonus they are paid for pushing through a thicket, even if they don’t succeed at what they set out to do.