MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansvm | 2025-05-29 04:46:50+00:00
One of the easier solutions that does the rounds periodically (in many forms above and beyond logic gates, such as symbolic regression) is just densely connecting everything and ensuring that an identity function exists. Anneal a penalty around non-identity nodes, use L1 for the penalty, and you can learn a sparse representation.

There are a number of details to work through, such as making an "identity" for 2 inputs and 1 output (just don't offer those; use gates like a half adder instead of AND or XOR, adding a post-processing step removing extra wires you don't care about), or defining "densely connected" in a way that doesn't explode combinatorially (many solutions, details only matter a little), but it's the brute-force solution, and you only pay the cost during training.

There are lots of other fun ways to handle that problem though. One of my favorites is to represent your circuit as "fields" rather than discrete nodes. Choose your favorite representation for R2->Rn (could be a stack of grids, could be a neural net, who cares), and you conceptually represent the problem as a plane of wire density, a plane of "AND" density, a plane of "XOR" density, etc. Hook up the boundary conditions (inputs and outputs on the left and right side of the planes) and run your favorite differentiable PDE solver, annealing the discreteness of the wires and gates during training.
by jonahx | 2025-05-29 04:47:14+00:00
"Free" in the sense of thought, cleverness, insight. You have an "everything" calculator. That is the sense in which it might be intuitive that it couldn't exist.

> So the blog post's claims that a hypothetical halting algorithm would solve anything "overnight" are exaggerated and naive.

I agree "overnight" is misleading in this context. However, I am fairly sure the author is aware of the point you are making.
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-29 04:48:33+00:00
If anyone wants to know exactly how that would be achieved, just look at how Google does "support" right now. No need to predict the future.

Google's "support" is a robot that sends passive aggressive mocking emails to those who were screwed over by another robot that made up reasons to lock them out of their digital lives [1]. It allows Google to save a ton of money while evading accountability.

It's the same thing with the latest overhyped robots. It won't even matter whether or not it's actually competent at the thing it's supposed to do. It will replace people regardless.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935
by growlNark | 2025-05-29 04:48:53+00:00
Well, let me amend this. An ancap economy is certainly possible. Whether it looks anything like (neo)keynsian macro markets is another story—but economies are always possible. But yes, in general, stable societies should be extremely aggressive at paring down the wealth of successful people, or they will be subsumed by them.

And let me re-emphasize, private markets are generally a terrible thing for most people who aren't already being starved by their state. This does not generally result in efficient processes in the short term, and we're discovering in the long term private markets don't encourage competitiveness either.

...but when we talk about private markets (i.e., public markets of mostly private things), we neglect the real private markets, aka "platforms", aka app stores and subscriptions. These aren't even pretending to provide the benefits of market-driven societies.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-29 04:49:02+00:00
my point is that it’s probably a PR person sending a precrafted email or letter like this and you shouldnt take it seriously for a nonprofit hobby project unless it contains a summons. they’re asking nicely before they escalate, but most companies contract out very expensive lawyers to handle these things that bill by the minute and they aren’t going to waste it on a hobby site with even mild pushback or no response. otherwise they’d just sue.
by worik | 2025-05-29 04:50:10+00:00
Any Canadians here to comment on the milk tariff policies?

I have spent ten days of my life in Canada and I learnt of the tariffs by news reports concerning people driving to USA, loading up on milk, coming home.

Tariffs are not always stupid. But in most cases there is a better alternative.

E.g. Canada could subsidise domestic milk producers. (We used to do that in New Zealand)

There is a lot of nonsense talked about economics ("tariffs always bad" is an example) because there are strong incentives at work for the actors. It makes it very difficult for policy makers to have good, responsive, effective economic policy.

Money and politics? What could go wrong....
by viccis | 2025-05-29 04:52:01+00:00
That's always my problem with these huge lists. I feel like any recommendation is so much more useful if it's accompanied by at least a bit of context about why it's being recommended. Whenever I ask for recommendations on reddit or elsewhere, I prefer 2 or 3 answers with information over one of the 20 item list dumps. This site does actually have some snippets of context, you just have to basically click on one (I guess at random) to get to them. Some categorization or other discovery feature might help greatly I think.

Anyway, I will second the other reply's recommendation of Borges also with the caveat that he didn't write novels. His short stories are phenomenal. They are also a bit more philosophical than "mathematical", but some of them (like The Library of Babylon) deal a bit with the intersection of mathematical ideas (combinatorics and infinity in that one's case) with the way that playing with them would impact people and society.

The best advice for reading him would be, assuming you are reading in English, to pick up Penguin's Collected Fictions edition, containing a good translation of a lot of his short stories (and poetry as well). Skip past the first collection of short stories ("A Universal History of Iniquity") as it's pretty good but not his best. Start with the collection called "Fictions". Its first story is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which gives you a good taste of how he writes.
by muzani | 2025-05-29 04:52:04+00:00
I would, but more as a discovery platform. I wouldn't trust OpenRouter for something in production, but it's a good place to plug stuff in. It's also popular for NSFW purposes, and those models are harder to get API keys for.

I expect the killer feature for MCPs would be note taking and management. Say I want to read a book, but I'd like a synopsis to go deeper or search something in a book it references. Obsidian would be great for this, as well as some book MCP.

Piotr Wozniak discovered spaced repetition and incremental learning, but the tools for incremental learning were never good enough – it was internet explorer hacked to take notes. Obsidian made a good attempt. MCPs might just be the missing bit to get there.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-29 04:53:42+00:00
anything can be a legal notice if you say it’s a legal notice. what makes a cease and desist lawyer a legal notice? a lawyer signing it? you can find lawyer services online to send these. you can use chatgpt to send a letterhead that looks convincing. It’s not “legal” by any means until it enters a court of law, which is not guaranteed and in the disinterest of both parties usually. which is why these letters are sent.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-29 04:53:44+00:00
Yes, it has always been like this.

We elect Presidents to faithfully execute the law, not Dictators to ignore it. The courts have always ruled against executive for disobeying the law. Preventing any one branch from amassing too much power is the whole reason the system of checks and balances exists.

The system, while sometimes aggravatingly slow to change, has allowed us as a country to continually operate under the same system of government with peaceful transfers of power for nearly 250 years.
by cavisne | 2025-05-29 04:54:10+00:00
"knowing why a model refuses to answer something matters"

The companies that create these models cant answer that question! Models get jailbroken all the time to ignore alignment instructions. The robust refusal logic normally sits on top of the model, ie looking at the responses and flagging anything that they don't want to show to users.

The best tool we have for understanding if a model is refusing to answer a problem or actually doesn't know is mechanistic interp, which you only need the weights for.

This whole debate is weird, even with traditional open source code you cant tell the intent of a programmer, what sources they used to write that code etc.
by cyberax | 2025-05-29 04:54:32+00:00
Plenty of cases. For example, I have an AI service that runs some expensive operations, for example, creates a video with interpretive dance for a given email.

In the normal case, the app running on the device just makes a request to that service, and gets the result back. The service does all the accounting for the request quotas, etc.

Now I want to run the same process for the user's emails in advance, from a service that runs on my server. You can't do this easily with existing S2S auth providers.
by skissane | 2025-05-29 04:54:45+00:00
That was stupid but also practically irrelevant-if an uninhabited territory has zero exports, you can set the tariff as high as you like, with no exports nobody is going to pay it. To be clear, I don’t agree with these tariffs and think they are a mistake, but I think we should focus on their real world harms not a silly administrative error

We know how it happened: Heard and McDonald Islands is an uninhabited Australian territory off the coast of Antarctica. In the 19th century, it was inhabited by sealers for an extended period (mostly Americans, some Australians too)-but they left after hunting the seals to extinction. In the 20th century it became a nature reserve, although it saw multi-year occupation by scientific research bases. Since the 1990s, no humans have been there except for brief visits; apparently nobody has been there in person for over a decade. It is illegal to come ashore without permission from the Australian government, and their policy is to almost always refuse permission (with rare exceptions for scientific research).

Yet despite all this, ISO 3166-1 gave it a country code, HM. And US government databases ended up showing imports from it, almost certainly due to data entry errors, the imports having really come from somewhere else. But it appears nobody was paying attention, so it ended up as a tiny trade deficit in official US trade statistics. And then the Trump administration mindlessly applied the rule “IF official US trade statistics show a deficit THEN impose tariff”. And still nobody noticed. And then after they publicised it, somebody did, and they were widely mocked for the mistake, and I believe this specific tariff has since been rescinded.

Most likely HM was actually a typo for Hong Kong (HK) or Honduras (HN)-adjacent keys on the keyboard. Or maybe the M is correct and the H is the typo, in which case it could easily have been The Gambia (GM) or Bermuda (BM) or Jamaica (JM)-also adjacent keys

Australia has another uninhabited territory (Ashmore and Cartier Islands), and another near uninhabited (Coral Sea Islands, staffed by a tiny rotating crew of government employees)-but, for whatever reason, ISO never gave either its own country code, [0] so this couldn’t have happened to them. (Likewise, Australia claims a big chunk of Antarctica, a claim which most countries-US included-don’t recognise-so the Australian Antarctic Territory doesn’t get its own ISO code, it gets subsumed under Antarctica’s, AQ.)

[0] I guess the reason may be land area - Ashmore and Cartier Islands have a land area of slightly over a square kilometre, less than a square mile; Coral Sea Islands have a land area of 3 km^2, which is slightly over one square mile; by contrast, Heard Island is 368 km^2 (142 sq mi). ISO generally resists giving codes to uninhabited territories unless they contain significant land
by marci | 2025-05-29 04:56:18+00:00
When you're trully open source, you can make ethings like this:

Today we introduce OLMoTrace, a one-of-a-kind feature in the Ai2 Playground that lets you trace the outputs of language models back to their full, multi-trillion-token training data in real time. OLMoTrace is a manifestation of Ai2’s commitment to an open ecosystem – open models, open data, and beyond.

https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace
by bruce511 | 2025-05-29 04:56:28+00:00
I know you jest, but its really interesting to see how people approach documentation. And I hypothesize that how you consume it informs if you create it.

When I was young, documentation came in one form (only). Books. Getting a good reference book was the key to progress. I still have my 3-inch thick C and C++ reference books on my desk today. (They're under the monitors lifting them up 3 inches.) I remember reading them cover to cover multiple times, and using them regularly every day looking up details.

Then came MAN pages, which are hard to read, harder to digest. Quality varies from good to rubbish. Early F1-Help much the same.

Then we got Google, and Stack overflow, and now AI. All of which make for better reference (quick answers to quick questions) but Discoverability harder. (I've started asking AI foe "tell me something I don't know".)

99% of the programmers I encounter don't write docs at all. Programing is Math not English. For my sins I likely write more docs than code. But I've also discovered a hidden truth. Writing docs makes my code better.

When you document you formalize something. If the docs are clumsy that means the thing is clumsy. I cannot count how many times, while writing the docs, I discover "this is harder / uglier / more confusing / inconsistent than it needs to be." Which is a cue to improving the code.

Even the documentation becomes elegant, then the solution is elegant. Not before.
by necovek | 2025-05-29 04:58:15+00:00
I agree, but I am not sure how it relates to the article's claim of us only ever doing one action, which I feel is grossly incorrect.

Are you referring to our language capabilities? Even there, I have my doubts about our capabilities in the brain (we are limited by our speech apparatus) which might be unrealized (and while so, it's going to be hard to objectively measure, though likely possible in simpler scenarios).

Do you have any pointers about any measurement of what happens in a brain when you simultaneously communicate different thoughts (thumbs up to one person, while talking on a different topic to another)?
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-29 04:58:36+00:00
> 8 of the top 10 universities by global research output are Chinese.

Having been in academia before, I don't see this as meaningful (quantity vs quality). But it is just as much as not meaningful for American universities.

The biggest problem with Chinese universities is that they mostly teach classes in Chinese, so you have to become fluent in Chinese first, which takes around one or two years of intensive Chinese study.

And branch campuses...you need to avoid those. Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen is probably not going to be the same thing as studying at HIT in Harbin (and aren't all of the institute of tech universities run by the PLA?). Focus on top schools only: Guangdong, Zhongshan (sun yat-sen) University is pretty good, Shanghai Jiaotong and Fudan in Shanghai, PKU/Tsinghua in Beijing, the science and tech one in Hefei, etc...if you are a foreign student and work your way up from their language program your chances should be OK (but my experience is 20+ years out of date so who knows).
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-29 04:59:42+00:00
Exactly. Getting DDD to be implemented and followed in past orgs has been difficult but it pays in spades. It's hard enough to push startup engineering teams to use consistent terminology, much less adopt DDD.

I do find it sometimes can lead to less verbose code even in OOP, because it makes logic more focused and DRY. It certainly can greatly reduce the amount of bugs in large codebases.
by Groxx | 2025-05-29 04:59:44+00:00
This is true in a "technically correct" way, but not in a meaningful way.

It's like developing sophisticated websites for IE6-era web, with ActiveX and Java applets and this new "ajax" thing on the horizon that sure sounds nice but it'll be a decade before you can actually use it for most of your users.

The very core basics are essentially the same because yea - it's just a web browser. An <h1> will be bigger than a <p>. But they are regularly multiple years out of date, have WILDLY different security and native-access models, version specific bugs, initialization and threading requirements, performance tradeoffs, styling quirks, and you might have hundreds or thousands of versions to test against which you cannot reasonably test against because they are frequently tied to specific operating system versions that you can no longer download and install, or require hardware you do not have.

So yea. IE6-era stuff. Not an exaggeration at all.

For simple stuff they work just fine, performance is generally more than good enough, and they start up faster, use fewer resources, and lead to a much smaller install. They're entirely reasonable choices. But once you push the edges of the envelope they're an absolute nightmare, and that is the entire reason Electron exists. That is what caused Electron to become the giga-powerhouse that it is now. It solved that problem, at relatively high cost, but it is incredibly obviously worth it to anyone who has dealt with native webviews in complicated ways.

Modern browsers are a completely different game, in comparison - far more consistent and up to date in aggregate. They're utterly incomparable.
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-29 05:00:21+00:00
It depends on what you're passionate about helping fix or solve within the cyber security industry.

Do you want to develop a product to solve a particular issue you've seen? Do you want to provide advice and consult on best practices? Do you want to help companies implement existing technologies to fix issues?

There's the question of how to start a company in general, but also a question of what do you actually want to do for other people? If you created a company what value would it bring to people that competes with other companies, how do you differentiate yourself.
by usefulcat | 2025-05-29 05:01:07+00:00
In theory, sure. In practice, it's only true when there is broad based respect for the law as a whole. I'm really not seeing evidence of that from this administration or its supporters. To put it very mildly.

For example, according to the highest law in the land, the Constitution, he can't be elected again. Do you really believe that's going to prevent him from running, much less remaining in office should he win, having previously tried to overturn a legitimate election?

The real question is, when he ignores the courts, what then? Normally that would be when Congress steps in. But even if Republicans didn't have a majority, impeachment would still require support from a decent number of them. Based on their behavior to date, how likely is that?

Strict partisanship appears to be a serious failure mode for this particular form of government. As Congress has become more partisan, they've gotten less and less done, both legislatively and in terms of serving as a check on the executive branch.
by eimrine | 2025-05-29 05:01:16+00:00
That math books are mostly not a real math books. When I want to have a math book I go to torrents and download hundreds of them. They do not have so rich annotation as books on your website, but too rich annotations means you have only 10 or less books per page. The biggest flaw of your math book collection is that it was collected by not a mathematician. When I am looking a math book I typically looking for a book with some tasks after each topic.

Same about philosophy - those are not a philosophy books. All attemts to mark some math or philosophy books as "best" do not work here, because I do not interested about what most people appreciated. I am interested in all books per field. For example, I am interested in Stoicism, but you have only "stoicism from a psychiatrist and philosopher" (what was the stupid reason to prohibit me from selecting and copying this line) - but I hate psychiatrists as scientific freaks.

Another rebuke is that your webpage takes too much memory, I would like to see not so rich and colorful interface which should take less than 50MB per page.
by nine_k | 2025-05-29 05:01:22+00:00
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.

Apparently he new system works a bit like DNS: the physical location may change, but the symbolic name stays. The resolution is done at the order time, not at the delivery time.

I suppose it's because the numerous e-commerce sites already support the physical address system. With the post office resolving the 7-character symbolic address to a physical address requires approximately zero changes in their existing systems, it's just an extra API call on the frontend. Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

Also, the 7-character address resolved to a physical address right before the customer's eyes works as an extra sanity check, and should limit the number of orders to a wrong address.
by NaOH | 2025-05-29 05:01:28+00:00
Previous discussions:

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41012854 - July 2024 (10 comments)

Lunar Surface Journal – One Small Step, Transcript and Commentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18873253 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
by CurtMonash | 2025-05-29 05:02:59+00:00
I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical.

Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-29 05:03:17+00:00
Executive orders are shot down by courts all the time. And it always starts in lower courts, with appeals going up to higher courts (both sides can appeal!). This is true for any president, Democrat or Republican, the judicial system is a check on executive power, with the understanding that the executive gets to nominate judges and congress gets to approve them.

It is really weird how many people don't get this, and think Trump is getting special treatment! And an executive order with lofty legal reasoning will always be challenged. And judges on either side...they actually have some idealistic notion that law matters, not who nominated, so the 3 judges who unanimously decided against trump: one was a Trump appointee, one was an Obama appointee, and one was a Bush appointee. In an idea system, judges try to be impartial to law (they don't have to, and their only check is that they can be impeached by congress).
by echelon | 2025-05-29 05:03:37+00:00
Most of those items map to a job description.

If you think the data story isn't a complicated beast, then consider:

If you wanted an "open" dataset, would you want it before or after it was processed? There are a lot of cleaning, categorizing, feature extraction steps. The data typically undergoes a lot of analysis, extra annotation, bucketing, and transformation.

If the pre-train was done in stages, and the training process was complicated, how much hand-holding do you need to replicate that process?

Do you need all of the scripts to assist with these processes? All of the infra and MLOps pieces? There's a lot of infrastructure to just move the data around and poke it.

Where are you going to host those terabytes or petabytes of data? Who is going to download it? How often? Do you expect it to be downloaded as frequently as the Linux kernel sources?

Did you scrub it of PII? Are you sure?

And to clarify, we're not even talking about trained models at this point.