MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _carbyau_ | 2025-05-26 01:23:59+00:00
I read your link and honestly have NFI what it is trying to say actually IS nihilism. There's a lot of comparisons with various character traits though.

My view is more the existential nihilism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

"""This view suggests that it is not possible to live a genuinely meaningful life, that there is no higher reason to continue living, and that all efforts, achievements, happiness, and suffering are ultimately pointless"""

My first sentence is kind of how I reason that point. There is no "ultimate" reason for being because given sufficient time, any reason you might have, doesn't matter.

Then there is my reaction to that: I'm here. So now what?

Some people may commit suicide.

Some may go on a rampage hurting people.

If there is no higher power then I get to choose my purpose in life and no one can say it is any better or worse than anything else to do. So I figure (reasons not shown which may be the more interesting conversation...); live, be nice, be curious, do cool things.

I acknowledge my upbringing and privileges are a significant influence on my day-to-day choices too. But so what? If there is no higher power to judge...

Hopefully I'll enjoy life - no major complaints so far - which if nothing else, feels nice. I guess you could argue I'm some level of hedonist. But so what if I am?
by slt2021 | 2025-05-26 01:25:32+00:00
you cant generally reuse cookies across domains, because browser controls which domain receive which cookie. Also cookies are not cryptographically signed and thus easily forgeable by the client/browser.

JWTs on the other hand allow to be used across domain, so that you can use JWT issued by your IDP on one domain, to be trusted on another domain. crypto signature helps in verifying integrity of data.

sessions are usually tied to a single backend/application server. Its hard to reuse a session data across different apps.

JWTs on the other hand allow sharing session data across different app servers/microservices.
by skydhash | 2025-05-26 01:27:02+00:00
Not really. It's all about the code you need to write. Instead of wrangling the data structures you get from the ORM which is usually similar to maps and array of maps. You have something that makes the domain logic cleaner and clear. Code for mapping data are simple, so you just pay the time price for writing them in exchange for having maintainable use case logic.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-26 01:28:18+00:00
Cookies are only controlled by the server but obviously can be negotiated for with a secret. JWTs have a mutual secret component built in and far cooler sounding ... stuff. So both ends have to trust the other and prove it with JWT and when cookies are in play, you takes your chances - you can use mutual TLS to get the same trust that JWT gives.

I have a web app that I'm doing sysops for which ended up with both. The web devs insisted on JWT and cough "forgot" about the auth bearer bit in the header because their API didn't use it. I ended up amending and recompiling an Apache module for that but to be fair, they will support it in the next version so I can revert my changes. A few db lookups in the Apache proxy JWT module I'm using and you have your claims.

On the front of that lot you have Apache session cookies generated when auth succeeds against a PrivacyIDEA instance - ie MFA.

I suppose we have cookies for authN and JWT for authZ. Cookies could do both and apart from session I'm not too familiar but it looks like claims would require multiple cookies where JWT does it all in one.
by neilv | 2025-05-26 01:28:25+00:00
> The general form being: why Obscure Thing is better than Popular Thing. And always the justification is purportedly rational and technical. And always, always, it is complete sophistry.

Is the author scoping the piece, to say that this piece is speaking only of the subset of posts claiming obscure-thing-better-than-popular-thing that are sophistry?

Or is the author asserting that all posts claiming obscure-thing-better-than-popular-thing are sophistry?
by neom | 2025-05-26 01:28:41+00:00
To build a house and live sustainably it needs to be somewhat near other community surly? For access to grocery, education and health care, and then also modern opportunities. Barrie is probably the most reasonable area outside of Toronto and land out there is still very expensive. How do you see it working for someone who just graduated from college and has $200k in student debt? I know a lot of people who are stuck, I don't know the solution. If I was them and society wanted me to have a kid for the good of society, I'd say sure, give me a house and $3MM, other wise, why bother...?? Nobody wants to continue this miserable cycle.
by Xss3 | 2025-05-26 01:29:24+00:00
I think the desire to colonise space at some point in the next 1,000 years has always been a yes even when I've asked people that said no to doing it within their lifetimes, I think it's a fairly universal desire we have as a species. Curiosity and the desire to explore new frontiers is pretty baked in as a survival strategy for the species.
by furyofantares | 2025-05-26 01:29:42+00:00
This whole thing is reminiscent of "IT" to me, when the story about this encounter was going around

> Kamen showed it to Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr. Bezos reportedly made his "loud, honking laugh" of appreciation. Jobs said it would cause people to re-architect cities and compared its importance to the PC. Doerr likened IT in magnitude to the Internet and then invested in it.

But there were zero public details about what "IT" was. (IT was the Segway.)

https://www.forbes.com/2001/01/18/0118malone.html

Speaking of Steve Jobs, I think the reason the "sam and jony" page looks like a wedding announcement crossed with an Apple advertising -- down to the url https://openai.com/sam-and-jony (which you should visit if the only thing youve seen is the 'how we met' video TFA is breaking down) -- is because it's trying to frame Sam as Jony's new Steve Jobs.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-26 01:29:56+00:00
Leftists and intellectuals overlap a lot. LLM text must be still full of six fingered hands to many of them.

For Chomsky specifically, the entire existence of LLM, however it's framed, is a massive middle finger to him and a strike-through on a large part of his academic career. As much as I find his UG theory and its supporters irritating, it might be felt a bit unfair to someone his age.
by AIorNot | 2025-05-26 01:29:57+00:00
As much as I think of Chomsky - his linguistics approach is outside looking in, ie observational speculation compared to the last few years of LLM based tokenization semantic spaces, embedding, deep learning and mechanistic interpretation, ie:

Understanding Linguistics before LLMs:

“We think Birds fly by flapping their wings”

Understanding Linguistics Theories after LLMs:

“Understanding the physics of Aerofoils and Bernoulli’s principle mean we can replicate what birds do”
by sndean | 2025-05-26 01:29:57+00:00
> Emacs is a Gnostic cult. And you know what? That’s fine. In fact, it’s great. It makes you happy, what else is needed? You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy. We are all going to die.

There’s a handful of things like Emacs and APL/J/K that HN introduced to me a decade ago that actively reduce my productivity — and I don’t need your explanations for how I’m using them wrong. They’re, to me, like a good book I’ve already read but keep rereading in-place of books I haven’t read. The reduced productivity is fine because we’re some unknown time away from nuclear war or falling down the stairs.
by skissane | 2025-05-26 01:30:11+00:00
> The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%.

Yes, but that’s because the current superannuation system was only introduced in 1992, and when it was first introduced the mandatory contribution rate was only 3% (as opposed to 12% starting this year)-so a lot of current retirees had limited super because it didn’t exist for a big chunk of their working life, and then even when it did the contribution rates were arguably insufficient. Younger workers (20s/30s/40s) generally have had much more money put into their super, so it is expected that by the time they reach retirement age, the pension:super balance will have shifted more in the super direction.

> Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

That period saw significant economic and social disruption due to COVID-19, so I doubt that change is representative of long-term trends. If an economic shock causes a rise in unemployment, that can push people near retirement age into unplanned early retirement-and the people most likely to be impacted by that are likely to be the least well-off, who inevitably are more likely to rely on the government pension than their own retirement funds
by xwolfi | 2025-05-26 01:33:02+00:00
I disagree, I think it's clear in the article that Chomsky thinks a language also should have a human purpose.

The compression we use in languages to not label impossible adjectives against impossible nouns (green ideas is impossible as ideas don't have colors, we could have a suffix on every noun to mark what can be colored and what cannot) is because we need to transfer these over the air, and quickly, before the lion jumps on the hunter. It's one of the many attributes of "languages in the wild" (Chinese doesn't use "tenses" really, can you imagine the compressive value?), and that's what Chomsky says here:

Proceeding further with normal science, we find that the internal processes and elements of the language cannot be detected by inspection of observed phenomena. Often these elements do not even appear in speech (or writing), though their effects, often subtle, can be detected. That is yet another reason why restriction to observed phenomena, as in LLM approaches, sharply limits understanding of the internal processes that are the core objects of inquiry into the nature of language, its acquisition and use. But that is not relevant if concern for science and understanding have been abandoned in favor of other goals.

Understand what he means: you can read a million text through a machine, it will never infer why we don't label adjective and nouns to prevent confusion and "green ideas". But for us it's painfully obvious, we don't have time when we speak to do all that. And I come from a language when we label every noun with a gender, I can see how stupid and painful it is to grasp for foreigners: it doesn't make any sense. Why do we do it ? Ask ChatGPT, will it tell you that it's because we like how beautiful it all sounds, which is the stupid reason why we do that ?
by bialpio | 2025-05-26 01:33:26+00:00
Not sure how it works in Denmark but in Poland you have to work certain amount of years (20-25) to qualify for retirement even though the retirement age is 60-65. The amount you get depends on how much you paid into the system, so you will get less for not working, but it'll not prevent you from receiving the pension. And in the US, you become eligible for pension after just 10 years of paying into the system.
by AIorNot | 2025-05-26 01:33:29+00:00
LLM models are to a large extent neuronal analogs of human neural architecture

- of course they reason

The claim of the “stochastic parrot” needs to go away

Eg see: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

I think the rub is that people think you need consciousness to do reasoning, I’m NOT claiming LLMs have consciousness or awareness
by remram | 2025-05-26 01:33:39+00:00
It sounds like a crazy amount to me. I can run code analyzers/sanitizers/fuzzers on every commit to my repo at virtually no cost. Would they have caught a problem like this? Maybe not, certainly not without some amount of false positives. Still this LLM approach costs many millions of times more than previous tooling, and might still have brought up nothing (we just don't read the blog posts about those attempts).
by wat10000 | 2025-05-26 01:33:51+00:00
You have a really rosy view of life in 1925.

Only half of US households had electricity. I imagine many of the ones that were electrified didn’t have washing machines.

Likewise, about half of US households had indoor plumbing. So we’re not talking about giving up multiple bathrooms, we’re potentially talking about giving up bathrooms, period. Do you enjoy outhouses? I don’t.

Only one spouse working? That’s a myth. Who do you think was making those tailored clothes, washing the dishes, washing clothes by hand, and all that? Maybe you mean only one spouse getting paid to work, which is quite different.

You’re looking at a life in a small, drafty house that’s very cold in the winter and excessively hot in the summer (my houses were like that in the 1980s, even), crapping in an outhouse, and washing clothes by hand. But you won’t be washing a lot of clothes, because you’ll probably only have one or two sets.

If this lifestyle sounds attractive to you, you can have it right now for quite cheap.
by verdverm | 2025-05-26 01:33:54+00:00
TFG talks about trade debts as being ripped off, but these are only on goods, not the broader services industry the US has largely transitioned to, which if accounted for, change the numbers drastically. It also doesn't account for the vast rise in global living standards that freer trade and specialization brought. Nor do the tariffs reflect the reality of what is possible and the timelines needed to reshore.

If you import more from the US than you export, you're still seeing a 10% tariff. These things are being used by a bully to bully, nothing more, the way he ran things as a landlord. They lack coherence and strategy, and are often portrayed in conflicting terms (the are to reshore vs they are temporary negotiation tactics... hint, they are actually for extorting praise and bribes)

The only way out so far is to pay tribute, largely by American companies who don't want to pay tariffs on their imports.

More recently it seems TFG is once again dialing back the tariffs because the economic fallout is being voiced by more parties.

It's not bad just because TFG does it, but because he doesn't understand economics and many other things the leader of America ought to have some basic understanding of. It's clear he's too old for the job
by DennisP | 2025-05-26 01:33:59+00:00
It can have a sensible conversation with you, follow your instructions, do math and physics, and write code that performs the task you described in English. Some models can create pictures and videos matching the description you gave them, or write descriptions of a video from you.

In 2023, Microsoft released a paper saying GPT4 could do things like tell you how to stack a random collection of unrelated variously-shaped objects so they don't fall over. Things have come a long way since then.

Try out one of the advanced models, and see whether you think it understands concepts.
by fmstephe | 2025-05-26 01:34:34+00:00
I've been working on an offheap allocator for Go.

In contrast to the popular arena based allocators (which target quickly allocating/freeing short lived per-request allocations), I am targeting an allocator for build very large in-memory dbs or caches with almost no garbage collection cost.

There's a little no-gc string interner package in there as well.

https://github.com/fmstephe/memorymanager

It's somewhat on pause right now as I have just started a new job. (but it has been a very fun project, nerdy joy).

Related to the memorymanager, as in intending to support it are

https://github.com/fmstephe/fuzzhelper A library for setting up fuzz tests for complex data structures.

https://github.com/fmstephe/gossert A library for adding runtime assertions to Go code. It's developed so that when the assertions are switched off the compiler should be able to completely eliminate the assertions. But this requires build tags to switch the assertions on.
by michtzik | 2025-05-26 01:35:06+00:00
The page I linked to has a top-level section called "Infertility". It has a table with a column called "1 or more births". The data in the table say that a positive proportion of those women are infertile.

As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.
by beeflet | 2025-05-26 01:35:24+00:00
If crypto transactions were reversible, then the person accepting cryptocurrency from thieves couldn't be confident that the chain of transactions would not be reversed. So it's a necessary condition of fungibility. Similar to physical cash or gold.

Also, cryptocurrency transactions are reversible, it just takes a hard fork or a 51% attack in order to do so. See the etherium DAO hack and resulting fork. I would argue this is a bad thing, as it goes against the principles of cryptocurrency.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-26 01:35:42+00:00
"Also cookies are not cryptographically signed and thus easily forgeable by the client/browser."

My Apache webby thingies quite happily dole out encrypted cookies:

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_session_crypto.htm...

Your notes on cross site issues are also described there.

JWTs are mutually shared secret passable with nobs on - you can store loads of data in them. Cookies are more one shot and one piece of data.
by unsoldbanana | 2025-05-26 01:35:53+00:00
I'm working on Finzz; I like investing but was struggling with doom-scrolling across various platforms to find things that were relevant to me. So I created Finzz which on-demand creates a multi host audio podcasts focused specifically on my stock portfolio and investment goals. I tell it the reasons behind why I hold these stocks and it tries to keep me honest to these goals and suggest rough actions from time to time.

https://finzz.xyz

Here's a sample if you are wondering what its like: https://finzz.xyz/shared/rnl-oO955IPZN6Ux78E-l8DC
by lisper | 2025-05-26 01:36:05+00:00
Type declarations in ANSI CL are promises you make to the compiler in order to allow it to generate faster code. The compiler can also use this information to generate compile-time warnings and errors, but it is not required to. This makes CL's native compile-time type system good for making your code fast, not so much for making it reliable. But it's straightforward to layer a proper modern type checker on top of CL, and in fact this has been done. It's called Coalton:

https://coalton-lang.github.io/

IMHO this is the Right Answer: types when you want/need them, dynamism when you don't. It seems like a no-brainer to me. I've never understood why so many people think it has to be one or the other. It seems to me like arguing over whether the window on the bike shed should be on the left or the right. If there is disagreement over this, just put in two windows!
by zetalyrae | 2025-05-26 01:36:10+00:00
I'm describing the set of posts that jointly satisfy:

- The thesis is "tool X is superior to (Y, Z, ...)" or "X is a modern/practical choice".

- The argument is purported to be technical and rational.

- The arguments are fallacious and do not stand to rational scrutiny.

Where you can reasonably think that the author's actual reasons are affective, and they are trying to make rational arguments by backward-chaining from the conclusion and failing.
by what-the-grump | 2025-05-26 01:36:12+00:00
I’ve seen ChatGPT generate bad English and I’ve seen the layer or logic / UI re-render the page as I think there is a simple spell checker that kicks in and tells the api to re-render and recheck.

I don’t believe for one second that LLMs reason, understand, know, anything.

There are plenty of times LLMs fail to generate correct sentences, and plenty of times they fail to generate correct words.

Around the time ChatGPT rolled out web search inside actions, you’d get really funky stuff back and watch other code clearly try to catch the run away.

o3 can be hot garbage if you ask it expand a specific point inside a 3 paragraph memo, the reasoning models perform very, very poorly when they are not summarizing.

There are times where the thing works like magic, other times, asking it to write me a PowerShell script that gets users by first and last name has it inventing commands that flags that don’t exist.

If the model ‘understood’, ‘followed, some sort of structure outside parroting stuff it already knows about it would be easy to spot and guide it via prompts. That is not the case even with the most advanced models today.

It’s clear that LLMs work best at specific small tasks that have a well established pattern defined in a strict language or api.

I’ve broken o3 trying to have it lift working python code, into formal python code, how? The person that wrote the code didn’t exactly code it how a developer would code a program. 140 lines of basic grab some data generate a table broke the AI and it had the ‘informal’ solution in the prompt. So no there is zero chance LMMs do more than predict.

And to be clear, it one shot a whole thing for me last night, using the GitHub/Codex/agent thing in VS code, probably saved me 30 minutes but god forbid you start from a bad / edge / poorly structured thing that doesn’t fit the mould.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-26 01:36:43+00:00
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism.

As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.

Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-05-26 01:36:50+00:00
Far more relaxed. They have their own times and those are based on the region you work on. They are very respectful of the job/project. Tunisians are very amicable people.

Depending on the zone, they do have shut downs that overlap with American and European times, with 50 Celsius at times, they have to stop for hours.
by patcon | 2025-05-26 01:37:40+00:00
> > Could we institute a corporation death penalty?

> That's what bankruptcy is.

No bankruptcy is the invention of gentler death, or maybe euthanasia.

A death penalty would be about killing an otherwise "healthy" (aka "resourced") company due to a transgression. Maybe a death penalty is more like fines and penalties that might be impossible for a company to bear.
by skribanto | 2025-05-26 01:37:47+00:00
My interpretation is that as engineers, we attempt to justify all of our choices through purely rational means. However, as humans, we cannot really make said choices without also being at least somewhat influenced by our subjective affections.

Perhaps I'm stretching the author's message, but at least I believe that the argument extends to all engineering conclusions. The author's call is that we acknowledge this subjective side.

Essentially, true engineering is about tradeoffs, there is no X that is objectively better than Y in all circumstances and contexts.
by skydhash | 2025-05-26 01:38:34+00:00
I just like to use simple tools I understand where I can extend anytimes I like instead of tools that's complex and always morphing whether I like it to or not. Most tools brings in a new thing I may like, while reinventing 95% of things I already use. A truly lateral tool that just bring in something new and useful is rare (LSP in text editors). And most of these are protocol based instead of feature based.