MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brybry | 2025-05-29 03:16:36+00:00
I think, indirectly, gerrymandering might impact the presidential election because a) redistricting can cause polling location changes[1] and b) the voter's knowledge/sentiment of living in a gerrymandered system.

If either a) or b) impacts voter turnout then it could impact the presidential election even though the districts themselves don't matter.

I found some evidence both for and against voter turnout impacts from redistricting[2] or from gerrymandering[3] but it didn't seem conclusive.

[1] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...

[2] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf

[3] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...
by kj4211cash | 2025-05-29 03:19:21+00:00
I kinda love this idea. I wonder if there would be any additional value to having the AI access the departing employees documents and/or code. Or maybe coming up with a first draft of certain materials for the departing employee to correct, as needed. You could also generalize so that some tool like this becomes the source of institutional knowledge. Confluence but with videos and with AI generated or initiated content. What if you could have a dialogue with the AI version of the departed employee? Or an AI avatar capable of explaining institutional knowledge? But like not clippy, ok?
by itpcc | 2025-05-29 03:19:49+00:00
Thailand have also tried to do Digital ID[0] thing since 2022[1]. Yet, we still have to do it in an traditional way anyway since its service is so limited.

Ref:

[0] https://www.thailandpost.co.th/un/article_detail/article/11/... [1] https://workpointtoday.com/digital-post-id/
by throwaway5752 | 2025-05-29 03:20:22+00:00
"Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation"

This is the biggest reach in your entire essay, that black wholes create new universes. The event horizon is complete cut off from this universe and speculating that generations upon generations of universes are created from black holes is fanciful. Your just shoehorn what is basically a massive anthropic principle onto an interesting cosmology theory unnecessarily.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-05-29 03:22:41+00:00
I believe the reference here is that there are fairly protective trade policies in China, and they are similarly mercurial about what passes. See cases of IP theft, if you’re partial to IP as a concept (I’m not). They’re certainly not a laissez-faire paradise. Granted, merely terking our jerbs isn’t a good argument for slapping massive tariffs on them.

There’s probably a different thread on this but, TACO and the damage of having your own courts nullify the tariffs are a huge strategic L for the orange man.
by TheEggMan | 2025-05-29 03:23:56+00:00
Sometimes you can't trust institutions like the Health and Human Services. They've failed our country repeatedly just like the FDA (who I have the pleasure of working with most days of the week).

The suggestion to "do your own research" opens people to the idea that Science is Science and should be continued to be questioned and discovered outside the bounds of institutions that at times have clear conflicts of interest.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-29 03:24:06+00:00
Well said! I also would like to note that something similar happened during the slow decline of the Roman Empire, where it morphed from a representative republic with a powerful senate to a dictatorial regime with one or at most three men in charge.

The only solace one can take from that historical precedent is that the full collapse took centuries, far longer than our lifetimes.

Our grandchildren may live in a time of the New American Empire that is ruled by an Emperor Trump III. It'll have a strange tradition of emperors painting their faces orange in the same manner as Roman emperors had a tradition of wearing purple robes.
by synergy20 | 2025-05-29 03:24:24+00:00
It's interesting. Nearly all orders from the executive branch are banned by some federal judge/court now(there are about 100 of federal courts, any one will do). While I don't agree with all the orders, the power of a random federal judge who can issue a nationwide ban relatively easily seems a little too much. To the point that the president is pretty much useless.
by muzani | 2025-05-29 03:24:51+00:00
The idea is that unlocked screens are a security liability. If someone can read your Slack or send emails, they can download credentials, drop tables, etc.

Firing is a little extreme. We just embarrass people to remind them. Also if it's a safe place – in an office meeting room or something, we're unlikely to do it, but if it's in a co-working space, it's fair game.
by da_me | 2025-05-29 03:24:51+00:00
dbt Labs has announced Fusion, a complete rewrite of their data transformation engine in Rust that maintains the familiar dbt framework while delivering significant performance improvements. Fusion features native SQL understanding across multiple database dialects and promises faster execution than the Python-based dbt Core. The project uses a hybrid licensing model with open source, source-available, and proprietary components - core code is published on GitHub while some advanced features remain exclusive to paying cloud customers. This represents the latest example of data infrastructure companies leveraging Rust for performance-critical workloads while preserving developer-friendly interfaces.
by malfist | 2025-05-29 03:24:53+00:00
I dare say at Amazon managers are encouraged to promote that sort of thing. Every project is understaffed and too short of a timeline and you bet half your team will get pulled to work on an escalation and the timelines won't change. Capacity planning assumes regretted attrition, mostly though burnout.

I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person.

But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered.

Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again
by coolelectronics | 2025-05-29 03:25:24+00:00
My bad! Switched over to the github pages fallback. Cloudflare pages isn't suitable because the wasm files (100mb+) exceed the 25mb limit. (i could bypass this with service worker jank but that tends to be fragile). Github Pages also isn't suitable because it doesn't have a native way of sending the coi/coep headers that are required for SharedArrayBuffer to be available. Can also bypass that with service worker jank but I would prefer not to
by kelnos | 2025-05-29 03:26:24+00:00
At the risk of committing the appeal-to-authority fallacy, it's also the opinion of Tim Berners-Lee, which I would hope carries at least some weight.

The way I look at it is that yes, the extension can be useful for requesting a particular file format (IMO the Accept header is not particularly accessible, especially if you are just a regular web browser user). But if you have a default/canonical representation, then you should give that representation in response to a URL that has no extension. And when you link to that document in a representation-neutral way, you should link without the extension.

That doesn't stop you from also serving that same content from a URL that includes the extension that describes the default/canonical representation. And people who want to link to you and ensure they get a particular representation can use the extension in their links. But someone who doesn't care, and just wants the document in whatever format the website owner recommends, should be able to get it without needing to know the extension. For those situations, the extension is an implementation detail that is irrelevant to most visitors.
by necovek | 2025-05-29 03:27:01+00:00
The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process all the data in parallel, but result in a single set of actions to perform.

But don't we all know that not to be true? This is clearly evident with training sports, learning to play an instrument, or even forcing yourself to start using your non-natural hand for writing — and really, anything you are doing for the first time.

While we are adapting our brain to perform a certain set of new actions, we build our capability to do those in parallel: eg. imagine when you start playing tennis and you need to focus on your position, posture, grip, observing the ball, observing the opposing player, looking at your surroundings, and then you make decisions on the spot about how hard to run, in what direction, how do you turn the racquet head, how strong is your grip, what follow-through to use, + the conscious strategy that always lags a bit behind.

In a sense, we can't really describe our "stream of consciousness" well with language, but it's anything but single-threaded. I believe the problem comes from the same root cause as any concurrent programming challenge — these are simply hard problems, even if our brains are good at it and the principles are simple.

At the same time, I wouldn't even go so far to say we are unable to think conscious thoughts in parallel either, it's just that we are trained from early age to sanitize our "output". Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking? I am not convinced it's impossible, but we might not have figured out the training for it.
by presentation | 2025-05-29 03:27:04+00:00
I agree this is a real phenomenon, but I also have been finding a lot of truly interesting and great (long-form, deep dive) stuff on the web lately, from podcasts to Youtube videos to Substack blogs and so on, by people who do care. You can scratch the intellectual itch in this age if you curate what you consume. The signal to noise ratio is terrible now, but if you know how to look, you'll find great things.
by chatmasta | 2025-05-29 03:29:40+00:00
I work for a database company and of my ~100 customer meetings last year, only one of the notes mentions Mongo as software they use in production. Maybe it’s a different world or something, idk, but I don’t understand the use case.

If I’m ingesting unstructured data for search or “parse it later” purposes, I’ll choose OpenSearch (elastic). Otherwise I’m going PG by default and if I need analytics I’ll use Parquet or Delta and pick the query engine based on requirements.

I honestly cannot think of a use case where Mongo is the appropriate solution.
by throwaway5752 | 2025-05-29 03:30:22+00:00
It strikes me similar to something that is LLM generated. It relies very much on the relationship between words, like how a non-practitioner in a field might develop a fatuous proof or theory.

I'm not saying it is wrong, either. But it's not quantitative and makes weak predictions with very little work into the roadmap to experimentally validate the ideas.
by godelski | 2025-05-29 03:30:25+00:00
As your first link says, this doesn't give them sweeping immunity. The intent of the policy (again, discussed in the first page but more later) is to protect the government from doing reasonable things.

Sweeping immunity obviously doesn't exist, as evidenced by the court ruling this thread is about. The government gets sued all the time and frequently they have to pay damages.

Remember, the US was explicitly set up to see itself as an adversary. You can read this in practically any of the federalist papers. The founders saw government as a necessary evil and even talked about how democracies often become autocracies by autocrats being freely elected.

It's 250 years into that so yeah, things have changed a lot since then. But it's worth noting that a fair amount of this got embedded into the constitution. So it gets upheld as long as at least one party is adversarial to the other. Interestingly, in many ways this can be maintained even if both parties are adversaries to be people. Clearly something we don't want (cough) but that was by design. 250 years is a pretty good run
by isaacimagine | 2025-05-29 03:31:44+00:00
z3 has good python bindings, which I've messed around with before. My manual solution uses 42 gates, I would be interested to see how close to being optimal it is. I didn't ask the compiler to vectorize anything, doing that explicitly might yield a better speedup.

Re:neurosymbolics, I'm sympathetic to wake-sleep program synthesis and that branch of research; in a draft of this blog post, I had an aside about the possibility of extracting circuits and reusing them, and another about the possibility of doing student-teacher training to replace stable subnets of standard e.g. dense relu networks with optimized DLGNs during training, to free up parameters for other things.
by phantomathkg | 2025-05-29 03:31:46+00:00
Sorry to say this is not the same. According to [0], the eircode is tied to the address, which Japan has already implemented a 7 digit postal code system. What this new way is trying to do instead is you can get a new digital address, in 7 character alphanumeric character, that uniquely addressed to you. So today you maybe in Tokyo, maybe a year later in Osaka. The postal code of your address changes, but the digital address will still be the same.

[0] https://www.eircode.ie/getting-an-eircode [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Japan
by kragen | 2025-05-29 03:35:33+00:00
This is a great recommendation, thanks! I've found a lot of interesting old radio hobbyist magazines on the Archive, whose copyright has expired. While it's great to see how people could get stuff done with the very limited electrical resources available in the 01910s and 01920s, many of the designs depend on materials that are now hard to find, while materials that are now easy to find (like PN2222s) didn't exist.
by Aziell | 2025-05-29 03:38:16+00:00
The first time I encountered the halting problem, I was honestly confused. I kept thinking there had to be another solution. But over time, I came to realize it wasn’t a technical issue ,it was about the limits of computation itself. This article explains the concept of undecidability really well. It breaks things down in a very practical way. That last part, about the limits of how we think, really hit me.
by necovek | 2025-05-29 03:39:19+00:00
I don't see this implied assumption anywhere: smarter simply means smarter.

But, I have to counter your claim anyway :)

Now, "good" is, IMHO, a derivation of smart behaviour that benefits survival of the largest population of humans — by definition. This is most evident when we compare natural, animal behaviour with what we consider moral and good (from females eating males after conception, territoriality fights, hoarding of female/male partners, different levels of promiscuity, eating of one's own children/eggs...).

As such, while the definition of "good" is also obviously transient in humans, I believe it has served us better to achieve the same survival goals as any other natural principle, and ultimately it depends on us being "smart" in how we define it. This is also why it's nowadays changing to include environmental awareness because that's threatening our survival — we can argue it's slow to get all the 8B people to act in a coordinated newly "good" manner, but it still is a symptom of smartness defining what's "good", and not evolutionary pressure.
by tfsh | 2025-05-29 03:40:08+00:00
I see this as addressing a symptom rather than the cause.

A direct result of technical staff leaving is the loss of siloed knowledge, instead of trying to address it at the final juncture, my opinion is that this type of knowledge should be proactively documented and shared with the rest of the team as the domain expert learns/works on it. That way, they're around to mentor other members, reduces the bus factor and when said person leaves, the rest of the team naturally continues their work rather than spending time on ramp up tasks.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-29 03:41:02+00:00
I agree with this. It's a slight shift in perspective from the article: it's not just "Who cares" but "Nothing matters". It's not so much about people not caring as about people feeling that caring is pointless because everything that happens is outside their control. Even quite local dimensions of life that used to be more controllable are becoming corrupted by giant corporations, rampaging politicians, etc.

In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.

I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.
by breuleux | 2025-05-29 03:42:24+00:00
> predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor

I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from ablating the complexity of the world to make it more predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that it's going to revert to the mean at some point.

That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent. It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a pretty small section of the solution space. In some situations it's going to be very effective, but what are the odds that the most effective resource consumption machines would happen to be organized just like that?
by muzani | 2025-05-29 03:42:53+00:00
Integrating LLMs and guardrailing the API outputs used to be an interview question. It's one of the ways you could tell if someone actually built a sufficiently complex AI tool in production.

1. LLMs hallucinate and often forget to close a bracket or leave a field out. This still happens in JSON mode like Gemini when it's a feature.

2. JSON formatting uses a lot of unnecessary tokens. Comma, quotes, brackets, etc.

3. Extra tokens also mean extra "cognitive effort" for the LLMs. We changed to YAML from JSON and saw a 30% or so increase in output quality back with GPT-3.5.

4. The above can be fixed with more and more training, but why train for REST when you can build something better for it?
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-29 03:44:16+00:00
It’s a different time scale. The microbreweries of the 90s were an upstart.

In the 70s and early 80s, you probably had a half dozen SKUs account for 90% of volume. My grandfather ran a busy bar in Brooklyn and had like 4 beers on tap. The other thing was post prohibition ABC laws usually gave distributors a lot of power. They had exclusivity agreements and would stuff the channel or segment the market as they saw fit. Grandpa’s bar was Reingold and Schaeffer.

Microbrews went crazy in the 90s, and the big brewers bought and created brands to regain share. Then cheap capital led to M&A by bigger fish.
by davchana | 2025-05-29 03:44:16+00:00
Since years I have yearned that USPS lets you rent a PO Box. Maybe divide the country in 5 to 10 parts, and allocate a special zip code for these. The po box is nothing but just a forwarding address. You as a user control its final destination in usps.com account. It is like a link shortener.

Somebody sends a letter to that address. Regular mail system forwards it to machines. There, machines stick a yellow or some color strip on it with its actual destination, then it comes to you. You could move and simply update usps.com address.
by davorak | 2025-05-29 03:44:26+00:00
> id the President make a finding? Here, the President did make a finding. At that point, the courts' jurisdiction gives way to the President's discretion.

This seems incorrect

> cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion

In this case though the laws wording would determine where the discretion starts and ends. "... whenever he shall find as a fact that such country—" so the president is limited by a.1 and a.2[1], the president was only granted discretion in under those proscribed limits.

So a find that says ~"neither a.1 or a.2 is occurring therefore I impose a tariff as president"(claiming no conditions to impose a tariff under the law are met but declaring a tariff anyway) seems reviewable by the court from your sources. Only having a finding is not enough, the finding has to follow the limits of discretion put forth by the law in question.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1338

edit to remove double negative
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-29 03:44:55+00:00
It's precisely because of the VC backup startup thing that capitalism isn't delivering. VC startups only exist if there's a bunch of people with a lot of money who don't care about anything except making more money. What we need is lots of businesses succeeding on a small scale rather than failing on a small scale while burning VC cash in the hope that they can become big enough to succeed.
by Elaris | 2025-05-29 03:44:56+00:00
After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if our brains were bigger? Sure, it's tempting to imagine being able to process more information, or better understand the mysteries of the universe. But I also began to wonder, would we really be happier and more fulfilled?

Would a bigger brain make us better problem solvers, or would it just make us more lonely and less able to connect with others? Would allowing us to understand everything also make us less able to truly experience the world as we do now?
by JimDabell | 2025-05-29 03:44:57+00:00
I think this is a great idea for a product, but in my experience, the pain associated with handover is something that is earned over a long period of time. Knowledge starts to centralise in one person and they don’t do enough to disperse it. Maybe they are too busy, maybe they don’t value documentation, maybe it’s an oversight, there are lots of reasons. But that problem starts to build up and you only discover the full extent of it when they leave and it hits you all at once.

A better solution to this problem would be to improve detecting this problem so you can address it in its early stages instead of when it gets bad. One way of doing this is mandatory time off. I don’t recall who said it first, but time off is chaos monkey for people. It’s common in some industries for employees to be forced to take time off to intentionally cause their normal tasks to be performed without them. For instance, banks use it to detect fraud, because the same person doing the same task all the time can make it easy for them to cover crimes up.

If your team is stuck in a rut and the same person is always responsible for doing important tasks every time, this is a risk. If they took some time off, this would help you figure out what knowledge is centralised with them. Don’t put their tasks off and wait until they get back. Figure out how to do it without them. If you struggle, that’s a clear sign you’ll be in for pain when they eventually leave for good and shows you what knowledge they need to disperse.