MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gxonatano | 2025-05-16 23:51:52+00:00
After getting frustrated with how unusual and convoluted BASH syntax tends to be, especially with involved scripts, I've tried almost all of the alternative shells: Elvish, Fish, Oil, Xonsh (Python!), Emacs's eshell, and even the Haskell-based shell repls like Turtle and Shelly. The only one I really stuck with was Nushell. It's friendly, pretty, intuitive, easy to read, heavy on pipes, and super powerful for data analysis. Plus it's modern replacement for a lot of tools, like `ls`, `jq`, `curl`, and so on. Writing a little command-line program is a joy in Nushell.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-16 23:52:46+00:00
to be trite, we've been promised a world where AI will help to alleviate the menial necessities so that we're free to pursue our passions. in reality, what we're getting is AI that replaces the human component of passion projects (art, music, engineering as craft), leaving the "actually-hard-to-replace" "low-class" roles (cashiering, trash collection, housekeeping, farming, etc) to humans who generally have few other economic options.

without a dramatic shift in wealth distribution (no less than the elimination of private wealth and the profit motive), we can't have a post-scarcity society. capitalism depends entirely upon scarcity, artificial or not.
by runarberg | 2025-05-16 23:53:17+00:00
If you are an expert on international law you can correct me, but I was under the impression that jurisdiction applies to where the crime is committed, not where the perpetrator resides. So when an Israeli commits a war crime in Palestine, Palestinian laws apply, and if the Palestinian courts are unwilling, or unable to prosecute said crimes, ICC steps in and takes on the case. This is no different to how Putin is being charged for crimes he is committing in Ukraine, despite Russia not being a member of the ICC.

I think there is an exception if the Israeli (or Russia in the case of Putin) justice system would prosecute the crimes fairly, then the ICC passes on jurisdiction, but as we clearly see, there is no indication that that will happen.

> The people who literally go out and demonstrate against Netanyahu and his government every day.

That is fine and dandy, but completely irrelevant while he is not being charged for war crimes by the Israeli justice system. If he goes to prison for corruption that isn’t exactly justice for the war crimes he has ordered committed.
by BirAdam | 2025-05-16 23:53:43+00:00
No one is insulated. If it isn’t taken from people directly, then people feel the spending in price inflation. Every time the government spends, they issue a treasury. That treasury is then used as the backing for loans from the FedRes to members banks. Those banks then lend a multiple of that.

The real issue with spending cuts is that the public will not accept any reductions to entitlements, the poor won’t accept cuts to welfare programs, and the donor class won’t accept cuts to military spending. This means there’s zero political will to fix the situation.
by wuj | 2025-05-16 23:53:49+00:00
A good analogy is lifting. We lift to build strength, not because we need that extra strength to lift things in real life. There are plenty machinery to do that for us. But we do so for the sense of accomplishment of hitting our goals when we least expect it, seeing physical changes, and the feeling that we are getting healthier rather than chasing the utility benefits. If we perceive lifting as an utility, we realize its futile and meaningless. Instead, if we see it as a routine with positive externalities sprinkled on top, we feel a lot less pressured to do so.

As kelseyfrog commented already, the key is to focus on the action, not the target. Lifting is not just about hitting a number or getting bigger muscles (though they are great extrinsic motivators), its more of an action that we derive growth from. I have internalized the act of working out that those targets are baked into the unconscious. I don't overthink when I'm lifting. My unconscious take the lead, and I just follow. I enjoy seeing the results show up unexpectedly. It lets me grow without feeling the constant pressure of my conscious mind.

The lifting analogy can be applied to writing and other effortful pursuits. We write for the pleasure of reconciling internal conflicts and restoring order to our chaotic mind. Writing is the lifting of our mind. If we do it for comparison, then there's no point in lifting, or writing, or many other things we do after all our technological breakthroughs. Doing what we do is a means to an end, not the other way around.
by Groxx | 2025-05-16 23:54:23+00:00
As much as I generally like MDv1: I hate those floating buttons with a passion.

They can occasionally work. But the vast majority of the time they simply get in the way and can't be hidden, because you're in a content-edge-case that doesn't scroll far enough, or you simply reached the end and they didn't leave after-end padding to make room for it. And very few actions are so important that you want to display it over everything else, for the same reasons that everyone recommends against popups.

Just put it in the freaking toolbar. Top or bottom, I don't care.
by Retric | 2025-05-16 23:54:38+00:00
> I could go to the pub with friends and ask for a glass of something but ai don’t mind what

You’d very much mind you got a cup of bull sperm or diarrhea. That request is actually excluding the vast majority of possible liquids.

> if you feel the need to add a prefix

There’s only two types of money, fiat and barter.

If I’m exchanging a promissory note that I can exchange for 1 barrel of wheat or 1lb of gold or whatever that’s barter through an abstraction. If you’re using stamped gold coins people are just bartering precious metals of a known purity thus the need to weigh the coins not just count them.
by ajross | 2025-05-16 23:55:17+00:00
Really no. As much as deficit nuts want to grasp at this as a confirmation of priors, this is absolutely 100% not at all about "The Debt". (In point of fact outstanding[1] debt as a fraction of GDP isn't even all that large, historically; it was much higher in the 80's and literally every one of those bonds is now paid off!)

We could magically pay it off right now and the US would still look like a credit risk. It's all about trade policy right now, and the general existential risk that we blow it all up. The treasury rate spike in April (likely but inconclusively due to strategic dumping) continues to have everyone spooked, and fiscal restraint, tax policy, austerity, etc... don't speak to that concern at all.

[1] Corrected: service cost of the debt
by SllX | 2025-05-16 23:55:36+00:00
I like where your head is at on a lot of this and there's a ton of waste to cut within the military itself, but we don't want to scale it down that far. It's still good to be able to effectively put boots on the ground in other parts of the world and back them with the most effective logistics infrastructure in the world, not to mention we want deterrence options other than a nuclear holocaust.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-05-16 23:56:17+00:00
gkrellm used to be a mainstay on my desktops in the early 2000s, such a nice throwback. For extra vintage goodness, I also recommend xosview [0], even better when using a Motif-styled window manager. I actually wonder what either of them would look like on a system with, say, an Epyc 9965 or similar (192 cores) or a system with four or more sockets.

ah, nostalgia for that feeling working on systems that looked like that.

[0] https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/
by garrickvanburen | 2025-05-16 23:56:24+00:00
I don’t see the problem.

I’m not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from Wikipedia or World Book.

Maybe? and if the question is “did the student actually write this?” (which is different than “do they understand it?” there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student understands the material…that don’t involve submitting typed text but still involve communicating clearly.

If we allow LLMs- like we allow calculators, just how poor LLMs are will become far more obvious.
by sjtgraham | 2025-05-16 23:58:34+00:00
It’s not true. There are two steps to EB-1A: the statutory criteria, functionally identical to the O-1, and a final merits determination where the examiner evaluates the totality of evidence to determine if you belong to the small percentage at the top of your field. This is a far higher bar than O-1. Additionally, each petition before USCIS is evaluated independently, except for subsequent O-1 petitions with substantially similar facts. In such cases, USCIS policy and the APA’s prohibition on arbitrary and capricious action generally require approval absent extraordinary circumstances.
by zmmmmm | 2025-05-16 23:58:46+00:00
I don't agree directly with this, but a variant of it does bother me: will the auto-regressive nature of AI eventually limit the novelty of the ideas humanity can come up with?

So many breakthroughs come from people who work either in ignorance or defiance of existing established ideas. Almost by definition, in fact - to a large extent, everything obvious has already been thought. So to some extent, all the real progress happens in places that violate norms and pre-established logic.

So what's going to happen now if every idea has to run the gauntlet of a supremely intelligent but fully regressive AI? It feels like we could lose a tremendous amount of the potential for original thought from humanity. A good counter argument would be that this has already happened and we're still making progress. I just wonder however if it's a question of degree and that degree matters.
by 0xBDB | 2025-05-17 00:02:18+00:00
> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.

The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.
by thasso | 2025-05-17 00:03:40+00:00
Systems languages have these weird semantics to allow writing performant low-level code and abstracting over the hardware at the same time (unsafe Rust too, check out its memory model for example). This doesn’t make any sense. Either you want a high level language to write correct code on many machines, or, if you want to make code fast, you want a language that allows writing for a specific platform. The C standard is stupid, just turn on -fno-strict-aliasing like any sane person would and get on with it.
by toast0 | 2025-05-17 00:04:07+00:00
Worse credit rating is bad economic news. When there's bad economic news, the market tends to 'flee towards safety', and that means selling risky investments and buying treasuries. When the market is moving capital to treasuries, borrowing costs are reduced.

(Doesn't always happen like this, and may not have happened like this last time, but it's not uncommon)
by rectang | 2025-05-17 00:04:56+00:00
> We will cover state-of-the-art [...] how we approach techniques that allows the system to offer virtually certified correct answers.

I don't need AI to generate perfect SQL, because I am never going to trust the output enough to copy/paste it — the risk of subtle semantic errors is too high, even if the code validates.

Instead, I find it helpful for AI to suggest approaches — after which I will manually craft the SQL, starting from scratch.
by zerox22 | 2025-05-17 00:05:04+00:00
That's exactly what I do as well. Sometimes I stumble upon a question that I know I won't find an answer for just by googling, so it's easier to formulate it fully to an AI. In some cases it's like a more convenient search engine, where I'm pretty sure I will get an answer to my question without needing to trick the engine with a good query. Which is rather tedious more often than not.
by russellbeattie | 2025-05-17 00:05:47+00:00
> "...when your project..."

Oof. The same old excuse. So you prematurely optimize your code based on a theoretical line count in the future, cluttering your code with redundant information to save yourself from that one bug you'll encounter in QA anyways. Got it. Makes total sense. I bet you like Java FactoryFactoryImpls as well.

If you already know your code will reach 10 kloc in a project where catching a type related bug is that important, choose an appropriate type safe language. So many wasted man hours dealing with truly pedantic details.
by stefap2 | 2025-05-17 00:05:59+00:00
I have done this using the OpenAI 4o model. I had to pass in a prompt with business-specific instructions, industry jargon, and descriptions of tables, including foreign keys. Then it would generate even complex join queries and return data. In my case, I was more interested in providing results to users not knowledgeable about SQL, but the SQL was displayed for information.
by wffurr | 2025-05-17 00:06:32+00:00
I'd encourage you to read the article. Chemical weapons are effectively useless against a well-trained "modern system" army. Part of that is the chemical warfare equipment and vehicles, but mostly it's cover-and-concealment. If you can actually find the enemy, it's much faster and simpler to use the other vastly destructive munitions that modern militaries have.
by BirAdam | 2025-05-17 00:06:57+00:00
Research, roads, and schools do not make up a meaningful percentage of the federal budget at all. Healthcare makes a decent chuck with Medicare and Medicaid, and those badly need reform as many people receive aid who are fully capable of paying costs themselves. Social Security, defense spending, and debt service are the other big ones.

Ultimately, no idea what will happen when debt services consumes all tax revenues. This will come in the mid-2030s at the current rate. I figure that the Fed will just suspend the requirement of Treasuries and debt payments, print like crazy, and the USA will look like Zimbabwe.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-05-17 00:07:23+00:00
Indeed. Major advancements throughout history often happened because someone looked at a problem differently than traditional approaches.

The AI will have been trained predominantly on the traditional approaches.

I feel AI will be fundamentally limited to regurgitating past ideas and intelligence.

It may at least use a breadth of knowledge to save some people time by helping them avoid repeating work already done.

I’d love to see an AI trained only on knowledge up to 1800 come up with a single invention of the past 200 years. (It won’t happen)
by mmooss | 2025-05-17 00:07:56+00:00
> In the extreme, the very limits of a sensory system’s access to the physical world might be defined not just by biophysical constraints, but further curtailed by the kinematic bounds of the motor actions that acquire sensory information. Conclusive demonstrations of such action-dependence of the limits of perception are missing, but a key prediction is that perceptual processes should be tuned to an action’s typical sensory correlates, even in the absence of the accompanying action11,12,13. Here we confirm this prediction for a fundamental perceptual process in human vision: We demonstrate that a shared law links the limits of perceiving stimuli moving at high speed to the sensory consequences of rapid eye movements.

I've read countless papers in fields where I have no expertise, but I'm stuck on this section.

> the very limits of a sensory system’s access to the physical world might be defined not just by biophysical constraints, but further curtailed by the kinematic bounds of the motor actions that acquire sensory information.

What is the difference between biophysical constraints and kinematic bounds of the motor actions? Isn't the latter a biophysical constraint? What other biophysical constraints are they talking about? I don't see them mentioned previously and there would seem to be very many.

> perceptual processes should be tuned to an action’s typical sensory correlates

What sensory correlates? That could mean many things. Is it a term of art in this field?
by insin | 2025-05-17 00:08:00+00:00
I sometimes wonder if they're vulnerable to a coordinated effort of deliberately upvoting shit assistant turns and praising in the next user turn - how much does that actually contribute to future training, if at all?

I had a very basic React question about useState while porting some vanilla code last week which all models of all stripes I've tried it on have been confidently and completely incorrect about, up to stating the code absolutely will not work, even when I take a turn to assert that I ran it and it does, so there's plenty of shit in there already.
by dgfitz | 2025-05-17 00:08:04+00:00
Wealth is taxed, there’s just a ton of loopholes.

It should be illegal to borrow with stock as collateral. This makes tax avoidance really easy for wealthy people.

Nobody needs as much wealth as the top 1%. Limits and incentives need to be put in place to essentially create a luxury tax.

Stock buybacks should be disincentivized. Companies holding so much money in cash sitting on the sidelines (Apple) don’t stimulate the economy.

The US has an embarrassing amount of money, it’s just all manipulated away from the market and the people.
by ajross | 2025-05-17 00:08:10+00:00
I did indeed say that wrong, the nominal debt was lower but the cost to service it was much higher (borrowing in the 80's was done at interest rates into the double digits!):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=iEiV

Again, if the debtpocalypse didn't happen then it's clearly not happening now. This is simply not about fiscal policy. Period. It's about institutional trust in the government's ability to manage payments.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-17 00:08:59+00:00
I'm really surprised more people haven't caught on. Claude can one shot small stuff of similar complexity, but as soon as you start to really push the model into longer, more involved use cases Gemini pulls way ahead. The context handling is so impressive, in addition to using it for coding agents, I use Gemini as a beta reader for a fairly long manuscript (~85k words) and it absolutely nails it, providing a high level report that's comparable to what a solid human beta reader would provide in seconds.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-17 00:09:04+00:00
I don't think either of those are true. I'm not arguing against cleaning up objects during the normal runtime. What I'd like is something that would avoid GC'ing objects one-at-a-time at program shutdown.

I've had cases where it took Python like 30 seconds to exit after I'd slurped a large CSV with a zillion rows into RAM. At that time, I'd dreamed of a way to tell Python not to bother free()ing any of that, just exit() and let Linux unmap RAM all at once. If you think about it, there probably aren't that many resources you actually care about individually freeing on exit. I'm certain somewill will prove me wrong, but at a first pass, objects that don't define __del__ or __exit__ probably don't care how you destroy them.
by skeaker | 2025-05-17 00:09:48+00:00
If you wanted to do that you could just release a cancer-causing agent and it would similar mess with their DNA and kill them much more effectively at a fraction of the cost. Or just blow them up or something. Harming the masses in such a roundabout way won't leave the realm of science fiction because it is so much less effective and so much more difficult to do than existing methods. Not worth worrying about even in theory.
by djoldman | 2025-05-17 00:10:00+00:00
They are grandfathered in as an oligopoly because by law many large funds are prohibited from investing in securities below a certain credit rating.

Additionally, if you are on the other end (the one getting the rating), you pay the credit agencies for a rating so that buyers of debt will buy it. It's basically required that you have a rating if you want to issue debt.

It's a racket in some ways with a ton of bad incentives and inefficiency.

Kind of like a lot of things.
by abathologist | 2025-05-17 00:10:37+00:00
I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years.

The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they will be automated away.

I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical" (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot).

I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism). Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is a dark, sad, dead end.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-17 00:11:17+00:00
The logistics can be argued elsewhere, I’m simply saying that is where you can tax; there is nowhere else of material value to. The majority of US households can’t even afford to survive, let alone face a tax burden.

> For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a "minimal quality of life" is out of reach, according to the group, a research organization focused on improving lower earners' economic well-being.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

https://lisep.org/mql
by awongh | 2025-05-17 00:11:31+00:00
Another way to ask the question is how wrong would they have to get it before people stopped relying on them?

The interesting aspect to me is that they are not a government department- they make these ratings as part of a profitable business model. It's not like they keep chugging along no matter what.

It just seemed like that during the housing crisis the businesses seen to be putting their "ok" stamp on everything would have been the first to go down.
by sidibe | 2025-05-17 00:11:58+00:00
Yeah I think it's because people want it to be true that LLMs will stop improving and regress. If nothing else they can always just access data from the before times if it was an actual issue

So much burying the head in the sand from people in this industry and wishful thinking that AI will stop before whatever they're good at. A little reminder a couple years ago most people hadn't even heard of LLMs.
by scoofy | 2025-05-17 00:12:13+00:00
>the U.S. national debt doesn’t matter they way it does for other nations. No matter how frustrated the rest of the world gets, American debt will still be a safe bet even if issued seemingly endlessly.

Ah, yes, the old "this time is different" argument. That one worked so well for the British Pound-Sterling nearly a century ago.

The thesis begs the question of by assuming a static economic environment. The point is that the tenuousness of the stability of the dollar, makes people want to hold it less, which makes it more likely for people to find other reserves. It would certainly take some time to unwind, but not that much time.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-17 00:12:22+00:00
I was using perl in the late 90s for sysadmin stuff, have written web scrapers in python and have a solid history with regex. That being said, AI can still write really complex lookback/lookahead/nested extraction code MUCH faster and with fewer bugs than me, because regex is easy to make small mistakes with even when proficient.