MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 21:25:38+00:00
Show me where I have at any time argued one system is better than the other, as opposed to precisely that no system is strictly preferable, and I'll answer this point. Until then I can't and thus also won't.

In the meantime your grasp of nuance or lack thereof is no pressing concern of mine. And my entire thesis has been flagrantly subjective throughout, save where the minor matter of relevant history is involved. To attempt to answer this with the charge of subjectivity, as though to do so accomplished other than to recapitulate what has been obvious all day, seems not only pointless but risible.
by belorn | 2025-05-23 21:26:06+00:00
to quote the article (or rather, the 2023 article which is the one mentioning the number 3).

"Somehow, a couple of weeks ago, I found this other site which claimed to be better than LE and which used relatively simple HTTP requests without a bunch of funny data types."

"This is when the fine print finally appeared. This service only lets you mint 90 day certificates on the free tier. Also, you can only do three of them. Then you're done. 270 days for one domain or 3 domains for 90 days, and then you're screwed. Isn't that great? "

She don't mention what this "other site" is.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-23 21:26:43+00:00
I suspect very strongly that we live in a "post-community" world. There are no communities, and haven't been for a very long time, likely since before your grandparents were in their prime. We have any number of entities that function as surrogate communities, but without the benefits the real thing would provide. Quite often though, they have many of the disadvtanges of those, plus a few extra.

The community you're most aligned with, that you rush into hoping to feel as if you fit in, it might be more like an angler fish just waiting for you to jump into its jaws.
by palmotea | 2025-05-23 21:27:53+00:00
> Don't believe what POTUS writes on his own media platform, is the correct interpretation? Is it posturing, or dementia?

Come on, it's 2025: it's been clear for more that 8 years that Trump is not a person who can be trusted to be truthful or consistent in what he says, he's extremely transactional, and he thinks his being "unpredictable" is a huge advantage (which is often is).

It's a mistake to put too much stock in the exact words that he says.
by kiitos | 2025-05-23 21:28:11+00:00
> I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves.

Models have very very very limited capacity for context, it's one of their primary bottlenecks, therefore it's important to optimize (minimize) that information as much as possible, allowing the model to pull what it decides it needs makes that constraint much easier to satisfy.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 21:28:42+00:00
It's not even about the supposedly cheap labor. China has built very advanced automated assembly plants, and has a whole supply chain which provides most of the parts needed. Either we have to, at great expense, replicate that whole supply chain here, or we have to import the parts at great, tariffed, cost anyway and only do final assembly. While this would save money since I guess then the tariff is only on the BOM and not Apple's legendary margin, it would still massively inflate the cost. Why do "Republicans" love high taxes so much now?

This seems so stupid because we don't really need every continent to have a very complex and expensive supply chain for tiny electronic components when boats and money both exist, but let's say you disagree on that.

On what earth does it make sense to tariff smartphones in 2025 with zero warning? It would take ten years to fully construct a completely domestic supply chain for iPhones if you started today. So why not announce a tariff that starts in 10 years, so that that can be built, but we don't burden all Americans with this high tax on something everyone buys?

(Answer: Everybody knows Trump and Navarro will be dead in 10 years and that anyone else would cancel this dumbass idea and replace it with policy that isn't so idiotic and self-defeating.)
by not_maz | 2025-05-23 21:28:55+00:00
I found an absolutely fascinating analysis on precisely this topic by an AI researcher who's also a writer: https://archive.ph/jgam4

LLMs can generate convincing editorial letters that give a real sense of having deeply read the work. The problem is that they're extremely sensitive, as you've noticed, to prompting as well as order bias. Present it with two nearly identical versions of the same text, and it will usually choose based on order. And social proof type biases to which we'd hope for machines to be immune can actually trigger 40+ point swings on a 100-point scale.

If you don't mind technical details and occasional swagger, his work is really interesting.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-23 21:29:10+00:00
I don't know how that is solved by MCP? How would the LLM possibly know where to search? Just making an API (or series of APIs) to slack/jira/airtable available doesn't magically surface the context, or the right search incantation to reveal it. The LLM still has to figure out which tool to search within, what search terms/tools are the right ones to choose, etc. If there are a million documents in your set of data providers and only 1000 fit into the context of the LLM, that filter happens somewhere.

This idea that if you don't know where the data is, magically the LLM will, is very confusing to me.
by anishathalye | 2025-05-23 21:29:12+00:00
Looks like the 2023 lectures weren't uploaded to YouTube, but the lectures from earlier iterations of the class, including 2022, are available publicly. For example, see the YouTube links on https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2022/

(6.858 is the old name of the class, it was renamed to 6.5660 recently.)
by constantcrying | 2025-05-23 21:29:48+00:00
I demonstrated to you that the starting salary differs by 18k, at 1:1 exchange rate. I did this with up to date information that is valid RIGHT NOW.

>In 2025, TV-L 13 starts with 4629€ a month and goes up to 6580€ (= 78K€+), depending on experience

Wrong. You do not understand how TVs work. Look at the linked table it as the exact salary the employees get paid at the end of this month.

>depending on experience.

Wrong. Experience is totally irrelevant. It is years in that position.
by cranberryturkey | 2025-05-23 21:29:50+00:00
I've been a software engineer for over 30 years and I have to say using AI and vibe coding has made me a 10x programmer. It's all about prompting and debugging, knowing how to fix issues is still a necessary skill and how to build/architect things from a prompt perspective. I've released 8 npm modules in the past 2 weeks alone just for some silly stuff I was using.
by pulkitsh1234 | 2025-05-23 21:29:57+00:00
The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India.

My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding.

Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you dropped out..That's all I read and see everywhere about America, that you are free to take decisions like this (and often encouraged)

It feels odd to think to that kids in the USA are on a somewhat fixed train track, when there are so many opportunities + freedom + less judgement overall in the society.
by pempem | 2025-05-23 21:30:08+00:00
YES! this is the question.

How are we the homes of the largest economies in the world, cities known not just by name but by brand, around the world and: - day care worker can't make enough to move beyond improverished and day care is expensive - teacher can't make enough to move beyond lower middle class and school (even public once you add in all the trips, certs, childcare for non-school days) don't make enough - your burger is $15! but the person making it apparently should live in a wifi-less shed.

Not very long ago at all, this economy was about finding opportunity. Now it seems to be about aiming to reintroduce feudalism.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-23 21:30:12+00:00
If it’s easy enough to produce creative “content” thanks to AI, and people have enough money and free time, they’ll create without being paid (for themselves, social status, social influence, scientific advancement, etc.)

In the meantime, I think people should focus on attribution, and algorithms to find related work (which may suitably substitute for the former). This will allow us to fund creators and publishers for AI output, maybe by forcing the AI companies, or naturally through patronage (see AI output you like, find who owns the training data that contributed to it, donate to them). Moreover, it will help people discover more interesting things and creators.
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 21:30:27+00:00
Yes, working to US letter size in my book blocks makes for fewer headaches over the guillotine cutter, whose scale is only graduated in 1/16 inches (0.0625", ~1.5mm) and whole millimeters. Oh, the wasted 20 thou would get cleaned up in the face finishing cut, but all the same, half an inch is a much more convenient quantum here than half a millimeter.
by theendisney | 2025-05-23 21:30:34+00:00
An expert told me there are places to earn and places to spend in the world. In the cheap places to spend you might want a fun job with very little pay and few hours. You for example earn 400 and spend 600 per month. In the places to earn you should try not to live at all. Ideal is to work 84 hour weeks for 15-20 bucks, rent a bunk bed with a shared kitchen and bathroom and eat whatever cheap crap you can stomach. 50 for the bed 100 for food, save something like 1400. Every week not living like that buys 6-7 MONTHS in the afordable location. Two weeks is a year. Clearly you dont actually need to live. You do 2 to 12 weeks of pure work, enough to slightly burn out. This will make the 1 to 6 year vacation all the more enjoyable.

You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation but who needs 6 years seriously?
by kiitos | 2025-05-23 21:31:53+00:00
> In my view, we hand craft the context and then the LLM makes the deductions.

We (as in users) provide the source material and our questions, the LLM provides the answers. The entire concept of a context is incidental complexity resulting from technical constraints, it's not anything that users should need to care about, and certainly not something they should need to craft themselves.
by hyperpape | 2025-05-23 21:32:27+00:00
Huh? My in-laws came from industrial maintenance/construction companies in rural North Carolina. They vote for Trump, majority of them go to Southern Baptist churches. I spent two years living out there and working for one of their industrial maintenance companies.

This is not what they aspire to, or what 95% percent of the people living there aspire to.

Sure, the fishing sounds good, and the country living, but living without a car? No TV? Never eating out? That's weird, man.

This guy's life is no more representative of how most people in red states live than any blue state office worker who idly talks about going to live on a commune is representative of how people in NYC live.

Sure, lots of folks from any culture have a dream of getting back to the simple life. But it's an idle fantasy for almost everyone.
by chupasaurus | 2025-05-23 21:33:44+00:00
> If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many people can put two fingers together and estimate that on the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?

If you'd grown with a metric system you could eyeball a centimeter with ease. Also comparing orders of magnitude different measures for estimation isn't fair, how precise would be your guess of a barleycorn?
by jackphilson | 2025-05-23 21:33:49+00:00
Well, we have it mildly solved on the internet layer (hackernews). Issue is these bonds aren't very strong because they're not supported by physical space (can't use evolutionary hardwiring). This is why I think network states are good because they're a projection of community on the internet layer onto the physical layer. I think community is very important, and the world will tend more and more towards happiness (generally speaking), so the resurgence of community living I think is inevitable. I think the atomization is a temporary blip caused by increased convenience (tiktok, amazon).

I think the characterization of a community as an angler fish has some merit but might be a little pessimistic. In any case, it's way better than interacting with people who you know are definitely not your community.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-23 21:33:51+00:00
I've seen people use the USSR hammer and sickle for the O in GOP.

It's from people who think horseshoe theory has legs: that wanting to shut down prisons is the same as wanting to build concentration camps or that the people who want to say nationalize the banks are also the people who want to privatize the post office.

It's from centrists being unable to understand this difference
by consumer451 | 2025-05-23 21:34:13+00:00
> (which is often is).

Care to give some examples? As someone living abroad who gets paid in USD, I have less money now.

With the proposed tariffs on foreign shot (mostly in EU) films, POTUS has opened the door to hitherto unknown tariffs on services. The US is a service economy. The EU could start adding tariffs on US SaaS products, in return, as one example.

What exactly are the wins? Genuine question, would love to be talked down.
by jonplackett | 2025-05-23 21:34:24+00:00
I feel like LLMs have a bit of the Clever Hans effect. It takes a lot of my cues as to what it thinks I want it to say or opinion it thinks I want it to have.

Clever Hans was a horse who people thought could do maths by tapping his hoof. But actually he was just reading the body language of the person asking the question. Noticing them tense up as he got to the right number of stamps and stopping - still pretty smart for a horse, but the human was still doing the maths!
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-23 21:34:49+00:00
> This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability.

You cannot effectively disclaim certain liability for uses of a product you supply, even with an as-is presentation (exactly what liability depends on jurisdiction and often other context). Merely claiming to have no liability does not make it so (what it will usually do is disclaim all yhe liability you can disclaim, except for particular liabilities that may require separate explicit specific waivers to be effective.)

OTOH, if the product you provide is a software license that doesn't cover specific uses, using the software for the excluded uses may not be seen as a use of the product provided at all, and may not trigger the non-disclaimable liabilities, and even it doesn't avoid those liabilities, in the event someone sues over them, it also enabled the product supplier to countersue for infringement damages and mitigate the liabilities.
by thr0waway001 | 2025-05-23 21:35:28+00:00
Next huge wildfire after Alberta secedes will be very very interesting.

Heck just last year, the most prominent city in Alberta, Calgary, needed help just dealing with breaking a huge water main breaking.

With drought becoming more of a real threat every year Alberta will be in a shitty place being landlocked.

We are gonna need the rest of Canada’s help. Unfortunately, we can’t drink the oil.
by eximius | 2025-05-23 21:35:44+00:00
For you, perhaps. For me, the former is denser, but crossing into a "too dense" region. The JSON has indentation which is easy on my poor brain. Also, it's nice to differentiate between lists and objects.

But, I mean, they're basically isomorphic with like 2 things exchanges ({} and [] instead of (); implicit vs explicit keys/types).
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-23 21:35:44+00:00
An OS may be too much but, as a proof of concept, there are people who have been running Emacs as PID 1. And I don't mean in an OCI container (we're used to have only one process there): I mean on the bare metal, with Emacs being PID 1. A bit radical but it's been done.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 21:35:56+00:00
It's true that Trump is laughably cheap to bribe when you compare the magnitude of the many bribes compared to the damage caused to whoever isn't bribing him (In his first term he put a big tariff on bauxite that cost billions to an entire industry who imports it to produce aluminum metal, for a small windfall for the only domestic bauxite producer (friend/donor of Trump), it was orders of magnitude less money)

That said, I think current Trump wants to get his beak more wet. If Tim isn't an idiot, he's looking into joint ventures where Apple brokers and finances a couple of Trump Hotels in China or something. Not a million bucks.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-23 21:35:59+00:00
My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.
by ianferrel | 2025-05-23 21:36:36+00:00
I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However:

>often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.

>They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers

The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-23 21:37:17+00:00
I am saying being a merchant in the field of software and supply software opens you up to liabilities, and saying “Not my responsibility” does not, in most jurisdictions, actially completely shield you from all of them, correct.

This may also, to a lesser extent, be true of people who are not merchants in the field of the product supplied.

It’s not the license creating the liability, in either case.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-23 21:37:18+00:00
> You don't need to "deal with" case except in the sense that you ignore it, DNS doesn't handle case

The DNS is case-insensitive, though only for ASCII. So you have to compare names case-insensitively (again, for ASCII). It _is_ possible to have DNS servers return non-lowercase names! E.g., way back when sun.com's DNS servers would return Sun.COM if I remember correctly. So you do have to be careful about this, though if you do a case-sensitive, memcmp()-like comparison, 999 times out of 1,000 everything will work, and you won't fail open when it doesn't.
by foxglacier | 2025-05-23 21:37:20+00:00
They're not necessary, just a complicated way of doing what SI prefixes already do. Chemists don't notice this because they're intertwined with a whole network of conventions that would all have to be discarded at the same time. That's the legacy effect - it's too hard to untangle all at once.

Inches are a relatively decent size for measuring lengths too, but people manage without.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-23 21:37:52+00:00
Interesting observation. I've been kinda hyped about XML/XSLT lately because I was working on a JSON macro expansion language (just four different macro tags that replace themselves with the macro's expansion, #= #& #? #! assignment, substitution, conditional branch like cond, and call for custom functions) and realised I was re-inventing XSLT, but what I really wanted was xpath, a way to describe traversal over graphs, back and forth along different axes, it's actually an amazing spec. Then I found basex [0] which pulls arbitrary XML documents into a queryable database that can be have queries described in XPATH or XQUERY.

In my mind the best way to create a reliable natural language interface to a dataset without hallucination would be to hand over XML schemas to the system prompt and have it write the queries to retrieve the data.

[0] https://basex.org/
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-23 21:37:58+00:00
there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.
by timewizard | 2025-05-23 21:38:03+00:00
Yet the picture at the top of the article is incomprehensible to me. Why is the "session_speakers" table positioned there? It relates speakers and sessions and then has a geometric layout that completely fails to convey that.

You put too many bezier curves on a page on my eyes go cross. They don't even bother to make the lines different colors. Just a bunch of white curves against a fixed grid layout. Wut?

It's taking well structured data and then destructuring it into an inaccurate sloppy picture. I don't get it.
by pvg | 2025-05-23 21:38:11+00:00
Will the United States exist for the remainder of human history simply because "there is no handy 'process'" by which states can secede? The idea is silly.

I'm not sure why you're telling me your silly idea, I didn't say that.

Canada has had a reasonably recent, nearly successful political secessionist movement and two effectively failed efforts at constitutional reform to address it. Secession is not a settled issue in Canada the way it is in the US which is why it has a different valence in that context.
by Alupis | 2025-05-23 21:38:12+00:00
> The EU is nothing like the US. It is not a nation and does not have a central government. The whole construction depends on the member-states approving it indefinitely. It is a club of countries, not a federation.

I addressed most of your comment in my down-thread comment - but I'd like to point out here that this is almost exactly how the US was started via it's Articles of Confederation[1].

Over time, the loosely formed "club" of states were determined to be too weak, which in order to address growing problems (simplifying a bit) led to the birth of a much stronger centralized government. Over time, even a war was fought to compel states to remain in the union (another simplification but you get the gist).

Prior to the Constitution being ratified, each state was it's own nation state, complete with it's own culture, customs, way of life, etc - hence the name "The United States".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 21:38:19+00:00
No it isn't. Our speedos are denominated both ways, it's cheaper, and I drive a Nissan with a V6 and paddle shifters. Not that that's much in any real sense! But neither is a Piper Archer, and those also have enough power to make 100kph feel extremely tame. It's not a high bar, is what I'm saying.
by jagger27 | 2025-05-23 21:38:29+00:00
Alberta _had_ a sovereign wealth fund. What happened to it? Equalization payments don’t explain of the collapse of the once huge fund. It sure didn’t buy much local diversification!

You’d think Alberta would be more like Norway already then. Instead you have lifted pickup trucks and tailings ponds. Even more wealth won’t solve the cultural bankruptcy that’s making the province upset enough to consider separation to begin with.

To answer your original question, that’s why I think it’ll be more like Russia.