MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aeturnum | 2025-05-23 21:06:46+00:00
Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough:

> there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.

With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) - but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.
by eszed | 2025-05-23 21:06:48+00:00
There's nuance to that, as well. Official Adventist theology is that even after the Judgment there will not be an "ever-burning Hell", with eternal torture and suffering, but rather that the unrighteous (even including Satan and his evil angels) will be burned - body and soul - into non-being in an instant.

Of course, folk belief and desire for retribution being what they are, many SdA folks will tell you that that instant will "feel like eternity".

There's also a weird bit about how after Jesus returns and takes the righteous away with him Satan will rule the world for, like, a thousand years. That's expected to be pretty awful for everyone left behind - so, you know, don't you kids go swimming on Saturday - but it's intended to demonstrate, once and for all, that Jesus' way is the best way. (I admire the fair-minded impulse behind that narrative, like: gotta give Satan a shot!) After that, though (because obviously life with Satan in charge will be awful), God'll annihilate all them, and (if I recall correctly) all of the righteous, along with God and Jesus and all the angels, will move back to live on Earth.

Source: raised SdA.

(No idea what JWs have to say about any of this. I ask them very nicely not to bother me again, and they've always - the odd pamphlet through the letterbox apart - done so.)
by AlexCoventry | 2025-05-23 21:06:51+00:00
No, the words are meaningful to it. It's effectively using the CoT text as a "scratch space" for intermediate steps it can't calculate on one iteration through the transformer. These papers give examples of how it works:

- https://physics.allen-zhu.com/part-2-grade-school-math/part-...

- https://physics.allen-zhu.com/part-3-knowledge/part-3-3
by K0balt | 2025-05-23 21:06:51+00:00
Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that’s true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that, when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic need that puts people under duress. Get your shit together , Americans, you’re getting piped over a barrel six ways to Sunday and you just take it like it was mandatory. What gives?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-23 21:07:43+00:00
Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in — I don't know how long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was younger....

I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area, and now back in the midwest (in Omaha).

Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian restaurants. C'mon Omaha!

Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....
by adonovan | 2025-05-23 21:07:54+00:00
> would it not be more to correct to say we are breathing the same atoms as those in caesers last breath?

You may be right, but according to quantum mechanics, you can't really meaningfully talk about the "same" atoms, or any particles, because they don't have identities. There was a particle here, now there's a particle there, but we can't say exactly where it was at all the times in between, and it may not have been at any particular place: its amplitudes may have passed through two doors at once.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-23 21:08:09+00:00
I think there's more nuance, and the way I read the article is more "beware of these shortcomings", instead of "aren't good". LLM-based evaluation can be good. Several models have by now been trained on previous-gen models used in filtering data and validating RLHF data (pairwise or even more advanced). LLama3 is a good example of this.

My take from this article is that there are plenty of gotchas along the way, and you need to be very careful in how you structure your data, and how you test your pipelines, and how you make sure your tests are keeping up with new models. But, like it or not, LLM based evaluation is here to stay. So explorations into this space are good, IMO.
by therein | 2025-05-23 21:08:46+00:00
Very true and a good social circle consisting of people with ambitions and aspirations helps too. I remember back when we were in college, freshman year we formed a circle of some sort and moved to apartments next to each other for the sophomore year. My roommate in this setup out of the blue got an internship at a big company in the Bay Area, surprised all of us in this group. He was getting paid a really large amount per hour and at that point we didn't even know this was possible. That made us all realize that this is a thing and the job fairs from that point on weren't going to be bullshit like other events before. People were coming in with actual intent to hire, and were ready to pay interns a lot of money. And we saw once these people made friends in these internships and demonstrated themselves, they got hired through internal priority queues. We did the same, applied to places, interviewed, got flown for in person interviews. Got internships, and then those turned into full time offers. Everyone in my friend group had an internship from a well known company and had offers by the time they were graduating.

And then there was the other kind. It's not like we didn't enjoy our college days or go out to party more than we should. It's not like we studied extra. It was just this one guy in our friend group that did what he did, we saw what he did and got the message it was time and anything after that would be unnecessarily risking it.
by dimator | 2025-05-23 21:09:04+00:00
> But yeah, most of the "moonshot factories" just failed to deliver anything interesting. Maybe you need constraints, market pressure?

It's funny you say that because to me it seems like bell labs was the exact opposite. Because of the antitrust ruling, there was a cap on profits, so many monies were instead funneled into green field R&D. The facility was run by people who knew how to manage a large group of capable people: put them in close proximity with other cross discipline stars, get out of their way, let their imaginations dictate the path.
by belter | 2025-05-23 21:09:34+00:00
If you are an Oxford mathematician and biologist, and after 50 years the best you can bring to a discussion are Bible quotes, you failed on your intellectual journey. How elegantly and eloquently you might convey them...

Do I miss Christopher Hitchens... https://youtu.be/aF8kz_-Rp-M

https://youtu.be/aF8kz_-Rp-M?t=1843
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-23 21:09:46+00:00
If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the author is, but I'm not, so I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't buy lunch. I don't eat "nice" food. I don't drive nice cars. I don't eat out often and have never in my life run up a bar tab over $30. I have under $20/mo in streaming services, buy used/free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k/mo difference between my "got in early" mortgage and what rent on a shitty 1-2 bedroom costs these days. I live in a 1200sf house (in a post-industrial town with an industry more or less killed by globalization, so not like it's somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of anyone I know under 50. This is not a "people won't settle" problem.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely am "making it" in that I'm hitting milestones like home ownership, retirement contribution, etc (at the expensive of day to day material conditions, of course) but if everyone behaved like I do to do it the economy would collapse.

There's a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc. and how they've done the same things for housing that the same people's regulatory legacy has done for cars.

And to address rural New York specifically, it is a goddamn dump. You think coal country is bad? You think a bad part of Detroit or St. Louis is bad? it ain't got nothing on <shuffles cards> Oneonta. We're talking boarded up to occupied houses ratios one step short of abandoned mining town. You either work on a farm or live off welfare up there. Oh, and the property taxes are pretty crushing in NY, you'll be better off in a comparably crappy town in just about any other state.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-23 21:10:28+00:00
> But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what the heck is going on

Why the hell not? It's not that hard! I think this sounds like laziness, honestly.

It is no harder to understand how your enterprise SaaS software works than it is to understand what makes your retail business or trucking company tick. If you're running a company in a business, I really think you should understand how the important pieces of your business work... Is that really so controversial?
by energywut | 2025-05-23 21:13:07+00:00
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream

If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance, might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you could live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable.

It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
by Xevion | 2025-05-23 21:13:39+00:00
Awesome work, the green terminal style is really cool. And the fact that it's just Vanilla JavaScript, HTML & CSS is a pretty cool touch. I would've produced something a tenth the style with 10x the complexity

Just some ideas/suggestions: - Better colors: maybe genes can influence colors a bit? The random colors aren't that great, they're good though for making all the boids distinct. - Zooming: Scroll the mousewheel to Zoom In/Out, drag to move around - Interactive: Click on a Boid, have it be followed around using zoom! - Time controls: Not just framerate, but a % multiplier on simulation speed. - GPU Refactor: I don't think you're doing any of this yet, so maybe optimizing for a GPU-based speedup would be cool? See if you can reach 10,000 boids! Sebastian Lague's video goes into parallelization, just not in JavaScript: https://youtu.be/bqtqltqcQhw
by mdaniel | 2025-05-23 21:13:40+00:00
> I'd be interested in examples of this. I've worked in offices for all of my adult life and I don't have any examples that come to mind.

Wow, you must have worked in some really mature shops then if you knew instantly which of [Google Drive, Confluence, Airtable, GitHub wiki, ${that one deprecated thing that Alice was using}, ...] contained the reference to Project Frazlebaz mentioned in Slack last.. day? week? Maybe it was today but time is a blur?
by zeppelin101 | 2025-05-23 21:14:00+00:00
With Datagrip, you get all the niceties of a JetBrains IDE: massive customization, numerous plugins (e.g. IdeaVim, GitHub Copilot), lots of documentation. But you also get support for countless Db engines - I haven't seen anything yet which wasn't supported. The only one that was half-baked was Redis support, but it's not exactly a Db, either. Most importantly, it's that the UI doesn't feel clunky, unlike with PgAdmin. Everything feels streamlined and 1 or 2 clicks away, at most.
by orthecreedence | 2025-05-23 21:14:24+00:00
> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal.

No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.

Independence, curiosity, and self-quesitoning and awareness are often not taught because "getting ahead" is more important.
by plataproxima | 2025-05-23 21:14:41+00:00
Quick summary for skimmers:

Over the past year every major AI player has slipped a rules or memory file into its workflow.

Key similarities

- Format: Plain-text - Location: Usually root directory - Semantics: At their core the files carry “always-obey” instructions—style guides, security constraints, onboarding blurbs—plus a thin layer of optional metadata. - Runtime use: The ingestion path is straightforward: the tool reads the file, chunks it to stay under token limits, and prepends the text to each prompt.

Key differences (the ones that actually matter)

- File-discovery rules - Single file vs directory bundle - Metadata schema - Scope controls

Practical advice

Treat “standards” as interfaces, not treaties. Keep experimenting, but converge on a minimal front-matter block—name, scope, version, enabled—that any tool can ignore or honor. The body stays free-form Markdown. When the ecosystem naturally coalesces around a few patterns, formalize the rest. Until then, thin adapters beat thick bureaucracies.

Full article: https://aiagentsexplained.substack.com/p/agent-rule-files-ye...
by foxyv | 2025-05-23 21:15:07+00:00
I have yet to see AI become a boosting board for developers like other tools that are out there. More often than not I see it being used as a crutch or a method to fake competence. Developers using AI will create applications they don't understand and are unable to modify or debug. I'm sure the technology will progress from here, but I've yet to have someone blow me away using AI as a tool.

The thing that will convince me that AI has arrived is when I can plug in a 100k line legacy codebase, describe a bug, and then have it find the cause of the bug for me.
by st3fan | 2025-05-23 21:15:43+00:00
First line in your instructions.txt for JS/TS files:

"Never use for in, instead use for of. If you think for in is the only option, explain in a comment why that is."

Sometimes you are lucky with a "naked" coding agent. But my experience is that most of the time you need to spend some proper time to teach it how you prefer to write code, unlearn some bad habits, explain it the style you prefer, the packages you prefer, etc.

> When did the default option become copy-pasting into an agent vs. looking at library documentation, or gasp the source code for the project?

For many people in this industry this became the default when Google and StackOverflow appeared. Is AI really so much different there if you look at the root cause? I feel AI is just another tool for quick answers without investing time in understanding the problem. That mentality is not new and has not changed in decades with previous knowledge bases. Sadly.
by palmotea | 2025-05-23 21:15:45+00:00
> Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the median salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] ... It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan.

It would be interesting to use wage and salary controls to drive talented workers out of certain industries and into more productive ones. For instance, cap total compensation and benefits for people working in advertising (including adtech) at say, $130k/year. People working on cryptocurrency could be capped at 2x minimum wage. It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported, but it seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-23 21:15:46+00:00
You really shouldn't need CN (but it's convenient for humans) however there are a bunch of other interesting things in the X.509 certificate, lets look at the one for this site:

Issuer: We need to know who issued this cert, then we can check whether we trust them and whether the signature on the certificate is indeed from them, and potentially repeat this process - this cert was issued by Let's Encrypt's E5 intermediate

Validity: We need to know when this cert was or will be valid, a perfectly good certificate for 2019 ain't much good now, this one is valid from early May until early August

Now we get a public key, in this case a nice modern elliptic curve P-256 key

We need to know how the signature works, in this case it's ECDSA with SHA-384

And we need a serial number for the certificate, this unique number helps sidestep some nasty problems and also gives us an easy shorthand if reporting problems, 05:6B:9D:B0:A1:AE:BB:6D:CA:0B:1A:F0:61:FF:B5:68:4F:5A will never be any other cert only this one.

We get a mandatory notice that this particular certificate is NOT a CA certificate, it's just for a web server, and we get the "Extended key use" which says it's for either servers or for clients (Let's Encrypt intends to cease offering "for client" certificates in the next year or so, today they're the default)

Then we get a URL for the CRL where you can find out if this certificate (or others like it) were revoked since issuance, info with a URL for OCSP (also going away soon) and a URL where you can get your own copy of the issuer's certificate if you somehow do not have that.

We get a policy OID, this is effectively a complicated way to say "If you check Let's Encrypt's formal policy documents, this certificate was specifically issued under the policy identified with this OID", these do change but not often.

Finally we get two embedded SCTs, these are proof that two named Certificate Transparency Log services have seen this certificate, or rather, the raw data in the certificate, although they might also have the actual certificate.

So, quite a lot more than you listed.

[A correct decoder also needs to actually verify the signature, I did not list that part, obviously ignoring the signature would be a bad idea for a live system as then anybody can lie about anything]
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-23 21:16:31+00:00
>that cut originates from New England and is used for "higher end" foods like lobster rolls.

Yeah. Because it would suck if your hand-picked lobster fell out of your bun onto the ground (It also allows you to pour melted butter over the top, something you can't do on a sidecut bun).

If you like hot dogs I would hope you feel the same way about your hot dog.
by timmg | 2025-05-23 21:16:37+00:00
(If you know) how does that work?

Are the audio/video/images tokenized the same way as text and then fed in as a stream? Or is the training objective different than "predict next token"?

If the former, do you think there are limitations to "stream of tokens"? Or is that essentially how humans work? (Like I think of our input as many-dimensional. But maybe it is compressed to a stream of tokens in part of our perception layer.)
by fzeroracer | 2025-05-23 21:16:39+00:00
There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs of living in declining rural areas (poor health services, vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.
by thisisnotauser | 2025-05-23 21:16:59+00:00
Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize:

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …

Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
by eadmund | 2025-05-23 21:17:00+00:00
> I feel like not understanding why JSON won out is being intentionally obtuse.

I didn’t feel like my comment was the right place to shill for an alternative, but rather to complain about JSON. But since you raise it.

> JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data.

So can canonical S-expressions!

> Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand; having to prefix every atom with a length makes is very tedious to write by hand.

Which is why the advanced representation exists. I contend that this:

(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected") (subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"") (identifier (dns _example.org))) (urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier (detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"") (identifier (dns example.net))))))

is far easier to read than this (the first JSON in RFC 8555):

{ "type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed", "detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected", "subproblems": [ { "type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed", "detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"", "identifier": { "type": "dns", "value": "_example.org" } }, { "type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier", "detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"", "identifier": { "type": "dns", "value": "example.net" } } ] }

> for an Canonical S-expression, you have to count how many characters you are typing/deleting, and then update the prefix.

As you can see, no you do not.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 21:17:25+00:00
That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr. You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340 then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings, the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give you $416 so you could just not work at all.