MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:02:40+00:00
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.

If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.

It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.

But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:

"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.

"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)

"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
by mckn1ght | 2025-05-15 23:02:58+00:00
I think things like that should be easy to say, if by that you mean censorship. Sure. But talk is cheap. And there are gradations of reality.

It would maybe be easier for a 15-25 y.o. to kill a baby they don't know and whose parents/family they don't know, and maybe even easier if they don't speak their language or look like them. Of course, the baby wouldn't be the only one you'd have to kill, most likely.

I submit that it would be very very different if you found out that your 4 year old child was going to go on to be the next Hitler. For a "normal" person, I think they would go to the ends of the earth to try to shape them into the kind of person that wouldn't do it. I think very few people would coldly calculate "welp, guess I gotta execute this adorable little child I've grown so attached to" as it looks up at them saying "I love you so much forever, mommy/daddy" with their little doe eyes.

(ETA: it also brings up side questions about nature vs nurture and free will)

And then consider the lifelong repercussions of the emotional fallout. You can use all the logic in the world to justify the action, but your human brain will still torment you over it. And likely, most of the other human brains that learn about it would torment you as well.

---

So, while I think you can say things like that, ie the ability and allowance, I think you should question whether you should. I think saying those kinds of things really doesn't add much to the discussion because I believe it's really just an uninformed platitude that only someone with a lack of life experience would believe.

For me this all highlights the fact that meaty ethical questions don't have a simple reductive answer. Which ties back in to the original problem that OP outright states that this is simply and clearly the wrong path to go down.

(PS the downvoting/flagging could be due to breaking the guidelines around discussing downvotes and flags, and not actually due to the topical content of the posts, and/or assuming bad faith on the part of other users as such: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
by protocolture | 2025-05-15 23:03:05+00:00
>This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.

I disagree in part.

You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.

In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.

Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.

>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.

Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.

>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.

Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
by threeseed | 2025-05-15 23:03:05+00:00
But nobody wants you as a service provider. Everyone wants to have Gemini, OpenAI etc which are significantly better than the far smaller and less capable model you will be able to afford to host.

And you make this claim that the cloud provider can SSH into the VM but (a) nobody serious exposes SSH ports in Production and (b) there is no documented evidence of this ever happening.
by Mawr | 2025-05-15 23:03:44+00:00
> * You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.

Are you serious? That's a lot to type without realizing what you're saying at some point. You could not get a more backwards argument - so many cyclists have had crashes with cars, so lets have more cars. Wow.

> I fully support more people biking and walking. But I think the optimal solution is multi-modal. Cars aren't bad, they're just one piece of the puzzle.

Your idea of "more people" is clearly still massively lopsided towards cars. You're thinking on the order of increasing the current 1% of people walking&biking to maybe 5%, whereas you should be thinking 80%+. Completely wrong mindset.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:05:26+00:00
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.

You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
by timewizard | 2025-05-15 23:06:35+00:00
> Explicitly initialize your variables, and if you ever fall in to the trap of thinking C++ is a sane language, remember this

It's a systems language. Systems are not sane. They are dominated by nuance. In any case the language gives you a choice in what you pay for. It's nice to be able to allocate something like a copy or network buffer without having to pay for initialization that I don't need.
by kemotep | 2025-05-15 23:06:56+00:00
Median household income in the 1940’s seems to be something like $2,600. Using your inflation figure that is ~$59800 in today’s dollars.

2024 there seems to be an estimated ~$75,000 median household income.

Housing and cars are also apples and oranges seeing that the average family size and sq footage for even 50’s homes is completely different than today. Today fewer people are living in significantly larger spaces than was normal back then.
by virtualritz | 2025-05-15 23:07:07+00:00
> There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

One street in a city the size of NY?

I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;)

On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.
by occamsrazorwit | 2025-05-15 23:07:11+00:00
I don't want to sound like I'm victim-blaming here, but the reality is there's no free lunch. Investments are not risk-free, and, as you've discovered, there's a reason you got these properties at such a low cost. It seems like your real estate situation can't go on like this forever, right?

> selling my properties would be a ruinous move letting go of my most valuable assets that are the only toe hold I have in this economy, and may threaten my ability to become a homeowner potentially ever again, depending on how this economic future plays out.

Despite these negatives, it's possible that selling is the financially-smart thing to do. Keeping your properties may also be a ruinous move that could cost your ability to become a homeowner ever again. It's unfortunate, but it sounds like you need to choose whichever is the lesser of two evils and stick with it.

> If i was bestowed some gift of capital, I could complete the renovations and make the house income-producing.

As an alternative, if this is actually true, then you'd be the perfect candidate for a loan against your house. People commonly get emotional around housing and debt, but there's no room for that when you're struggling to survive.
by Animats | 2025-05-15 23:07:47+00:00
That's how classic Lojack worked. Lojack is a car theft detection device. It's not GPS based. It's hidden somewhere on the vehicle and connected to power. It listens to FM broadcast radio stations until it finds one with the Lojack subcarrier, something Lojack licensed from radio stations in most cities. It decodes the subcarrier, listening for serial numbers of Lojack units that have been stolen. Then it starts transmitting. It doesn't transmit location, just its serial number. Police cars equipped with Lojack receivers get an indication of direction and distance. Lojack had an effort to equip police cars with the equipment. At peak, LoJack had coverage in parts of 29 states.

It was very effective. 98% recovery rate.
by andrepd | 2025-05-15 23:08:39+00:00
> I tend to be of the opinion that for modern general purpose CPUs in this era, such micro-optimizations are totally unnecessary because modern CPUs are so fast that instructions are almost free.

What does this mean? Free? Optimisations are totally unnecessary because... instructions are free?

The implementation in TFA is probably on the order of 5x more efficient than a naive approach. This is time and energy as well. I don't understand what "free" means in this context.

Calendar operations are performed probably trillions of times every second across all types of computers. If you can make them more time- and energy-efficient, why wouldn't you?

If there's a problem with modern software it's too much bloat, not too much optimisation.
by JoshuaDavid | 2025-05-15 23:08:49+00:00
Along these lines, if the main LLM goes down a bad path, you could _rewind_ the model to before it started going down the bad path -- the watcher LLM doesn't necessarily have to guess that "skip" is a bad token after the words "let's just", it could instead see "let's just skip the test" and go "nope, rolling back to the token "just " and rerolling with logit_bias={"skip":-10,"omit":-10,"hack":-10}".

Of course doing that limits which model providers you can work with (notably, OpenAI has gotten quite hostile to power users doing stuff like that over the past year or so).
by oever | 2025-05-15 23:09:03+00:00
The submission title was 'Microsoft blocks International Criminal Court email access' which highlights the tech related part of the article.

If the ICC would be self-hosting their mail, they would not have this issue.

As it stands, Microsoft can read all their (non encrypted) mail, see all metadata and even spoof ICC mail. The ICC is not the only public organization in this predicament.

The carelessness of hosting e-mail with a foreign company makes them vulnerable to political sanctions.
by bartread | 2025-05-15 23:09:08+00:00
I suppose the hot take on this is something like: there are detractors, but I think for the majority of software engineers - and certainly those using premium plans of the various available providers - this is not news.

Being perhaps a little bit more thoughtful: 2 - 3 years after the beginning of widespread adoption of ML - specifically transformer - assisted software development, having some actual numbers that demonstrate its value and can help to press the case for its adoption is in fact useful.
by scythe | 2025-05-15 23:09:29+00:00
>Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.

I think he's talking about really long periods of time. It's true that gold is an extremely volatile investment, whose price can seemingly quadruple or be cut in four at any time. But if you look over periods where the price of gold increased by more than 20x, this becomes a lot less important when you try to estimate things like the average rate of inflation. If you work with a ten-year moving average of the price of gold the problem is also reduced. Gold is the only metal whose sulfide is unstable under standard conditions (101.3/293.15).

In other fields, this is called a "low-pass filter".
by 1659447091 | 2025-05-15 23:09:31+00:00
>Statistically, there is significant violence against white farmers in South Africa. However, the counter to genocide is that the country's overall murder rate is among the highest in the world. The problem is because there's so many white farmers that it's skewing the data?... South Africa during no war has a murder rate of 45 deaths per 100,000 per year. One of the worsts in the world.

Are you suggesting that most of those murdered are white farmers?

The "Third Quarter 2024/2025 Crime Stats Presentation" [pdf] from South African Police Service Crime stats [0] show between: October 2024 to December 2024 there were 6953 Murders in RSA.[pg 8] and of those there were 12 victims linked to the "farm/small holding" community [pg 32]. 5 farm dwellers, 4 employees, 1 Farmer, 1 Security, & 1 not specified.

12 people linked to farms (but only 1 Farmer murdered) in the last quarter of 2024 in a place with some of the highest murder rates in the world -- does Not white farmer genocide make, nor is it "significant violence against white farmers". There were 68 total "contact crimes" committed in Rural communities; and 187,892 "contact crimes" for RSA in that time.

Contact crimes being violent crimes (and not counting sexual offenses or robbery)

[0] https://www.saps.gov.za/services/crimestats.php
by dilipdasilva | 2025-05-15 23:09:36+00:00
Inefficient languages/build systems can make the problem worse.

There are many statically typed languages that can compile in under a second. But when you change any function signature, you still have to ensure every caller is fixed. You then have to recompile, restart the application and rebuild all the data structures. Some static languages allow for hot reloading in interpretive mode, but the types of changes allowed are limited.

In dynamic languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk you can update the program while it is running. The speed of iteration is 100x faster, because you don't have to restart the application and rebuild all the data structures to get to the point where you can test your change.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-15 23:09:44+00:00
(No side is going to give up control to make it happen but,) I'd love love love the Chromecast model of software here:

There is a competent powerful computer here, running a standard platform (the web). Load whatever software you will! Add some new web-sensors that are car specific like throttle, rpm, fuel efficiency.

A little trickier is harnessing the physical inputs of the car. Sure many of these could probably map to gamepads fine, but there's probably some extra needed.

Of course it keeps going. There's so many peripherals. Multi-zone climate control, windows, adaptive cruise control display. Projecting backup and 360 cameras into getUserMedia. Ideally you don't stop at a single user mode, ideally somehow side & rear passengers also fit into the model.

But the root idea holds very well in my mind. A powerful canvas for software, using perhaps the world's best hypermedia engine. "Run this URL" is kind of all it takes!

Shout out to defunct Webinos, a very interesting project that had some inroads on automotive, where the car privately securely made itself accessible over a secure virtual private network to the owner. Less about porting interfaces in, but still amazing pro-user IoT that the world has only ever fallen away from in the decade since.
by timewizard | 2025-05-15 23:09:46+00:00
Define "it."

And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."

It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.

The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
by _--__--__ | 2025-05-15 23:09:47+00:00
I'm curious how your engine decides to trigger rollbacks without explicit knowledge of which parts of the game state each input can actually affect. Naively rolling back on every missed input can and will be abused - in early versions of Street Fighter V players found out that while being comboed you could churn out inputs as fast as possible to cause rollbacks for your opponent, even though none of those inputs could actually do anything (this was made worse by other issues with that game's inability to keep opponent game clocks synced and constant one-sided rollbacks).
by dndn1 | 2025-05-15 23:10:08+00:00
If you need to know a leap year and it's before the year 6000, I made an interactive calculator and visualization [1].

It's >3 machine instructions (and I admire the mathematical tricks included in the post), but it does do thousands of calculations fairly quickly :)

[1] https://calculang.dev/examples-viewer?id=leap-year
by marceloaltmann | 2025-05-15 23:10:17+00:00
Replication has been one of MySQL’s most powerful and relied-upon features since the early days — long before it had things like foreign keys or even subqueries. It’s one of the foundational pillars that made MySQL suitable for large-scale, production use. This blog post walks through how replication evolved over time, and why it remains one of the strongest features in the MySQL ecosystem.

The Beginning (MySQL 3.23 — early 2000s) MySQL introduced statement-based replication (SBR) in version 3.23.15 in May 2000. This was a major milestone: it allowed users to replicate changes from one server (the source, previously called master) to others (replicas, previously slaves) by logging SQL statements executed on the source and replaying them on replicas.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:11:07+00:00
>You keep saying everything is great.

I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.

There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.

> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add

... And?

> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".

If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.

As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
by geertj | 2025-05-15 23:11:13+00:00
My current thinking on model checking (still evolving):

Modeling languages are useful to check the correctness of an algorithm during development. During development, a model can also serve as a specification for the actual implementation. This requires that your the modeling language is readable to a broad range of developers, which TLA+ is not. We have been experimenting with FizzBee (fizzbee.io) which looks promising in this regards.

When you go to prod, you really want to test your actual implementation, not a model of it. For this you want something like https://github.com/awslabs/shuttle (for Rust), or https://github.com/cmu-pasta/fray (for Java). Or use something custom.
by protocolture | 2025-05-15 23:11:31+00:00
Depends on scale.

I did some consulting for a separate branch of the same organisation.

They only had ~4 full time staff, people who had been promoted out of the volunteer pool. There was a small amount of nepotism, but everyone getting paid was absolutely crazy about the purpose of the organisation. And IIRC the salaries were very low.

Compare that to the branch I existed in, and it was chalk and cheese. Layers and layers of do nothing management drawing spectacular wages and finding ways to send themselves to fabulous parties and media events.

There was a component of the business focused on rehabilitation, and it operated for 3-4 years with only 6 or so staff. They would go on fantastic rehab holidays to demonstrate the benefit of their programs. Unfortunately for those first years they struggled to find volunteers for their rehab programs, so they were constantly sending their own staff on tours of europe or sailing adventures etc.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-15 23:11:50+00:00
Assuming the title is a play on the paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"[1][2] by Eugene Wigner.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

[2]: https://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableE...