MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2025-06-07 02:12:55+00:00
> Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...

If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.

And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.

[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.
by habosa | 2025-06-07 02:13:57+00:00
Ok so OpenAI owns Windsurf now, so I would expect them to cut Cursor off from the really good stuff at some point. Anthropic has Claude Code, they could do the same. Google is a little farther behind but they do have an AI Studio thing that could be viewed as competitive.

Feels like Cursor has to make their own models to guarantee long-term survival? Especially if they’re not going for an acquisition (reports are they turned down OpenAI). Can they make a model that’s good enough for a world where OpenAI / Anthropic / Google all cut them off?
by fatihpense | 2025-06-07 02:14:49+00:00
Thanks for the comment, it triggerred a few thought experiments for me.

For example, if you focus on oral traditions you experiment and create more poems, songs, etc. If you focus on preserving food you discover jams, dried meat, etc.

Is it useful to focus on everything, or global optimal? Is it possible?

Also regarding competition and evolution, what stopped humans to get more capable brains? Is it just resource constraints, like not having enough calories(not having mini nuclear reactor with us)? Or are there other, more interesting causes?
by _heimdall | 2025-06-07 02:15:06+00:00
In my opinion that's a better argument against the usefulness of a supreme court than it is a justification for allowing leeway in censorship.

The justice is claiming that said illegal content cannot be described or identified in law, that it must be up to a judge to make that call. Such a system is insane to those being ruled by it - we can't know if we are breaking the law, but at any time a judge could decide of their own accord that we are.

We must live under a system of laws that can be comprehensible enough for a reasonable person to be able to tell when they cross the line and are likely breaking the law.
by jlcx | 2025-06-07 02:16:23+00:00
Thanks for the compliment! The larger graph is basically built by extracting all relationships of certain types (e.g. parent/child, teacher/student, cause/effect) from Wikidata, along with the earliest known date for the items (e.g. date of birth, time of invention/discovery). The layout started as a 3D force-directed layout, but I turned one axis into the timeline. For the visualization, I used (forked) https://github.com/anvaka/pm (which did get some deserved attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817852 ) and the related ngraph.offline.layout repo.

Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.
by armchairhacker | 2025-06-07 02:18:55+00:00
Distributing resources is still a dominant topic. Most of Trump’s notable actions are funding cuts: cutting government services which mainly distribute funds, restricting grants, threatening to tax endowments, etc.*

Moreover, I think lack of resources fuels most if not all social issues; if people had more money, today’s social issues would probably be less of a concern (though they wouldn’t immediately go away and we’d probably have new issues). The biggest “evidence” is that higher-income countries correlate with less social issues: compare Denmark and Spain to the DRC and Venezuela. One plausible cause: people become pacified when they have enough food shelter etc. and don’t have to work hard, I think most wouldn’t care about trans people using the “wrong” restroom at least enough to do anything serious.

However, I also think a lot of economic issues are caused by social issues, in that if we convinced more people to be altruistic and waste less money on fighting social issues (wars), more people would have more resources. All that to say: perhaps there’s no true dominant topic, and even if there is, focusing improvements on the economy or society will probably improve the other.

* Trump’s other notable actions involve immigration. The majority of illegal immigrants in the US are from poor countries. Many are immigrants primarily for an opportunity to be not poor. Others are immigrants because their home country is unsafe, which is probably fueled by their country’s poverty (justified by another correlation between national poverty and safety, and more plausible explanations).
by genewitch | 2025-06-07 02:20:11+00:00
This is gonna sound like I disagree, but I don't. What is the amount of money that a company, or better yet, a person can earn before the explotive alarm goes off?

I bet if we really start hashing this out the number is real small, but you won't be able to talk about it because it'll make everyone in $750,000 houses feel bad.

It's one of the reasons I'm loathe to look for another "job" and instead pitch my services on HN or wherever. I cannot abide another job that pays well but makes it impossible to get a good night's sleep, regularly.
by drodgers | 2025-06-07 02:22:07+00:00
> I think AI maximalists will continue to think that the models are in fact getting less dim-witted

I'm bullish (and scared) about AI progress precisely because I think they've only gotten a little less dim-witted in the last few years, but their practical capabilities have improved a lot thanks to better knowledge, taste, context, tooling etc.

What scares me is that I think there's a reasoning/agency capabilities overhang. ie. we're only one or two breakthroughs away from something which is both kinda omniscient (where we are today), and able to out-think you very quickly (if only through dint of applying parallelism to actually competent outcome-modelling and strategic decision making).

That combination is terrifying. I don't think enough people have really imagined what it would mean for an AI to be able to out-strategise humans in the same way that they can now — say — out-poetry humans (by being both decent in terms of quality and super fast). It's like when you're speaking to someone way smarter than you and you realise that they're 6 steps ahead, and actively shaping your thought process to guide you where they want you to end up. At scale. For everything.

This exact thing (better reasoning + agency) is also the top priority for all of the frontier researchers right now (because it's super useful), so I think a breakthrough might not be far away.

Another way to phrase it: I think today's LLMs are about as good at snap judgements in most areas as the best humans (probably much better at everything that rhymes with inferring vibes from text), but they kinda suck at:

1. Reasoning/strategising step-by-step for very long periods

2. Snap judgements about reasoning or taking strategic actions (in the way that expert strategic humans don't actually need to think through their actions step-by-step very often - they've built intuition which gets them straight to the best answer 90% of the time)

Getting good at the long range thinking might require more substantial architectural changes (eg. some sort of separate 'system 2' reasoning architecture to complement the already pretty great 'system 1' transformer models we have). OTOH, it might just require better training data and algorithms so that the models develop good enough strategic taste and agentic intuitions to get to a near-optimal solution quickly before they fall off a long-range reasoning performance cliff.

Of course, maybe the problem is really hard and there's no easy breakthrough (or it requires 100,000x more computing power than we have access to right now). There's no certainty to be found, but a scary breakthrough definitely seems possible to me.
by toast0 | 2025-06-07 02:22:24+00:00
FreeBSD is throughput oriented in a way that OpenBSD certainly isn't, and I don't think NetBSD is either (although, I haven't really looked, I feel like NetBSD competes on portability and doesn't spend a lot of time making sure networking throughput is high).

All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.
by sitkack | 2025-06-07 02:23:55+00:00
Negative Negs spit out low effort snark, they said the same thing about solar, electric cars, even multicore, jit, open source. Thanks for refuting them, the forum software itself should either quarantine the response or auto respond before the comment is submitted. These people don't build the future.

Fusion News, May 28th, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YHcI-SfKx8
by duxup | 2025-06-07 02:24:52+00:00
Because Musk said something(s) bad about the president? That should be allowed.

Because those orgs are valuable / important? Lots of companies qualify as that... the entire telecommunications industry would qualify for many of the same reasons.

This whole article talks about the spat more than anything making me think that's the real reason ...

The strange thing is this call happens now, during a Trump administration that has called to privatize as much as possible.
by thayne | 2025-06-07 02:25:21+00:00
Joe's plumbing doesn't have to pay those taxes. Operational costs, including paying employees for normal operations, is deductable.

But with the change, the cost of R&D employees is now only partially deductible (right now, you can eventually deduct the full amount over the course of several years), and software development has to be considered R&D.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-07 02:25:30+00:00
Considerably more than a few percent, IMHO. :)

But I also don't dabble in this area nearly enough to know whether there's years of tears and toil finding out repeatedly that O(n) is ~impossible to implement and verify :)

| n | n log n | | 5 | 8.0472 | | 10 | 23.0259 | | 25 | 80.4719 | | 50 | 195.6012 | | 100 | 460.5170 |
by _heimdall | 2025-06-07 02:26:04+00:00
> A BBC team tracking coronavirus misinformation has found links to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts say the potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much bigger.

The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.

There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.

I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.

If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-06-07 02:26:08+00:00
I agree on macros: I have been using Common Lisp since 1982 and I almost never write macros. To be fair, I like my Common Lisp code to be readable (to me) and don't care as much about conciseness.

In any case, I think every developer should have a few languages that they really enjoy using.
by MoonGhost | 2025-06-07 02:28:01+00:00
> What do you think has changed? The situation is still about as promising for AGI in a few years - if not more so

It's better today. Hoping that LLMs can get us to AGI in one hop was naive. Depending on definition of AGI we might be already there. But for superhuman level in all possible tasks there are many steps to be done. The obvious way is to find a solution for each type of tasks. We have already for math calculations, it's using tools. Many other types can be solved the same way. After a while we'll gradually get to well rounded 'brain', or model(s) + support tools.

So, so far future looks bright, there is progress, problems, but not deadlocks.

PS: Turing test is a <beep> nobody seriously talks about today.
by _heimdall | 2025-06-07 02:28:47+00:00
I don't like the president, but I don't remember seeing him say to take chloroquine phosphate tablets. I definitely heard him say that he though hydroxychloroquine might me a possible treatment, presumably referring to hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets.

More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-07 02:29:23+00:00
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.

Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
by mycall | 2025-06-07 02:29:50+00:00
Artem Kirsanov provides some insights into the neurochemistry and types of neurons in his latest analysis [0] of distinct synaptic plasticity rules that operate across dendritic compartments. When simulating neurons in a more realistic approach, the timing can be deterministic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9StHNcGs-JM
by clipsy | 2025-06-07 02:30:03+00:00
In my (also naturally limited) experience, the quality of the teacher may or may not be higher in high school AP classes, but the rigor of the classes is typically higher at a reputable university.

In particular (and relevant to your username!) I have to say that while my own high school AP calculus teacher was truly excellent, the AP calculus standards were markedly lower than the standards of the calculus sequence I TA'd at two universities.
by sandspar | 2025-06-07 02:31:09+00:00
I'm not an expert but I've read that Middle Eastern diplomacy is particularly personal. In places like Qatar, all the top guys know each other and are cousins or whatever, and their family ties go back hundreds of years. It's not like in Sweden or something where diplomacy happens between institutions more than between people. In traditional cultures, if you refuse a gift then it's almost like saying "I refuse to be bound with you." It's a big insult and almost a threat that you'll one day betray them. Try refusing a gift from your Chinese or Qatari or Swahili father-in-law and see how that goes. Accepting the jet today means that the Qatari's may accept your data center tomorrow.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-06-07 02:33:10+00:00
Wayland is still pretty garbage. Hyprland is the most viable window manager replacement. The community is amazing too, way better than the Sway people. Lots of help from their forums and chatroom. Still, I had trouble with some basic stuff not working. So much tool replacement! So much work, for so little reward.

With i3/X11, I can run xrandr and see all my disconnected displays. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to see disconnected display outputs in any wlroots or other Wayland composer. None. There's no standard way to do screenshots or video recording. It requires some custom portal for every single composer. I've never gotten Flameshot working in Sway or Hyprland and the suggested replacements are clobbered together garbage.

I do use network transparency (ssh -Y) quite often and it's not there in Wayland.

i3/X11 is just so much better and smother and I don't see the gain of Wayland. It's 100x more difficult to write programs that need to work in different composers. I hope this project succeeded and we really do see an X11R8 out of it.

I'm old enough to remember the switch from XFree86 -> xorg. I hope we see that again and we have real competition so the Wayland devs can finally get around to fixing their broken garbage of a display regression.
by drodgers | 2025-06-07 02:33:13+00:00
I think that commenter was disagreeing with this line:

> because omniscient-yet-dim-witted models terminate at "superhumanly assistive"

It might be that with dim wits + enough brute force (knowledge, parallelism, trial-and-error, specialisation, speed) models could still substitute for humans and transform the economy in short order.
Ask HN: Why are job descriptions and resumes so bad?
by throwaway123198 | 2025-06-07 02:33:42+00:00
I don't get it. Why can't we move past this world

- where Job Descriptions aren't REALLY what the hiring manager wants - where Resumes don't REALLY represent your skills - where we can't seem to give candidates feedback on their gaps - where we can't seem to match talent to jobs they're qualified for

LinkedIn didn't really solve it. We're still using terrible interviewing platforms. This is a data problem.

Why is this still unsolved?
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-07 02:35:08+00:00
I had known about some of these, and I had thought that some others are at least possible.

I know that there is a ICAO code on Mars (since I had read about it before).

I think there are some airports that have a ICAO code but not IATA code and vice-versa, and some have a "pseudo-ICAO" code with letters and numbers together.
by cycomanic | 2025-06-07 02:35:50+00:00
> A government agency will have less incentives to be corrupt, in theory. On the flip side, it will be incompetent and demotivated.

And you have what evidence for this? The reality is, is that government departments often achieve much with very little. Case in point the interview with the former dodge engineer on HN earlier today. I think the reason why the myth persists is because everyone wants to have their demands prioritised while at the same time pay the minimum amount of tax, leading to continuous understaffing and everyone being unhappy (I would exclude defense from that assessment, because they suffer much less from cuts than most other spending).
by cma | 2025-06-07 02:36:16+00:00
They wouldn't need terrorism or the defense production act. Musk can have citizenship stripped since he illegally worked under a student visa according to his brother, if he didn't disclose it in the naturalization process. And any assets earned while here can be taken. The latter may be harder but could be done with civil asset forfeiture stuff Trump brought back last term, with a lower standard of proof, though I think that was more about sharing state forfeitures.
by tocs3 | 2025-06-07 02:36:39+00:00
SpaceX did OK with the Dragon capsule some years ago. I will happily give them credit budget wise and performance (and timing for something like that is hard). The Golden Dome project is a different animal all together. This is a cynical take, but Golden Dome is another giant DoD project. It will not keep to any sort of budget and the timeline is fantasy. Something might get produced but congress will have no trouble awarding launch contracts to who ever spends the most on lobbying.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-06-07 02:36:50+00:00
> but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence.

I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?

>Ix systems

I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt.

That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that intentionally.

> This is a huge difference to Linux

This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-06-07 02:37:58+00:00
First of all, SpaceX's market share in tonnage does not immediately make it an anti-competitive monopolist according to anti-trust law like the article claims. In fact I find it extremely unlikely that an antitrust case would find that SpaceX is a monopolist as the final ruling. Furthermore, even if this was the case, the remedy wouldn't be nationalization, it would almost certainly be breaking it apart (ex: Starlink spun off).

Moving on from there, the entire article hinges around Steve Bannon's idea (an ardent far right extremist) hijacking the "Defense Production Act to nationalize SpaceX. Of course it's blindingly obvious that this is a grossly far-reaching reinterpretation of what the defense production Act was meant for. Even if crewed spaceflight squabbles put the entire nation in danger in the interim period before Boeing Starliner is back in action, NASA does still have exchange agreements with Roscosmos in place.

Taking ideas from far right extremists to repurpose laws for political aims (and considering the source, this is clearly originating from the anti oligarchy angle rather than true concern with a National Security Emergency) is not a reasonable solution, nor is it acceptable in any way. Bannon's idea literally sits alongside twisting other laws to get Trump elected for a third term.

I don't like Musk either. Perhaps an anti-trust case in a court of law would be appropriate, but stop sane-washing this. People like Bannon don't care at all about NASA concerns either. The literal reason they're out on social media stirring the pot is to *normalize" things like this.
by brigandish | 2025-06-07 02:38:09+00:00
Offense is taken, not given. Unless it's harassment or assault (both forms of violence) then the response to speech should always be either speech in return, or to ignore it, not to use violence - either through the state's monopoly, in this case via the police, or through vigilante action.

To say using one's freedom of conscience and freedom of expression is beyond the childish "cringe", it's illiberal, dogmatic, and authoritarian.
by westurner | 2025-06-07 02:38:14+00:00
/? https://www.google.com/search?q=The+deficit+has+increased+un... :

- History of the United States public debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...

- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/rep... (2019) :

> The deficit is the difference between the money that the government makes and the money it spends. If the government spends more than it collects in revenues, then it’s running a deficit.

> The federal debt is the running total of the accumulated deficits. [Or surpluses]

"Federal Surplus or Deficit [-] (FYFSD)" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD#

"Federal Surplus or Deficit [-] as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (FYFSGDA188S)" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S