MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nunez | 2025-06-16 04:19:55+00:00
> For personal tools, I’ve completely shifted my approach. *I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The iteration cycle is so fast that it’s often quicker to start over than trying to debug or modify the generated code myself.* This has unlocked a level of creative freedom where I can build small utilities and experiments without the usual friction of implementation details. Want a quick script to reorganize some photos? Done. Need a little web scraper for some project? Easy. The mental overhead of “is this worth building?” has basically disappeared for small tools. I do wish Claude Code had a mode where it could work more autonomously - right now it still requires more hands-on attention than I’d like - but even with that limitation, the productivity gains are wild.

So I suppose the chasm is that actually doing programming is dead, or quickly dying, and if that's the thing you actually enjoyed doing, then tough luck.

This era sucks. The suits have finally won.

(emphasis mine)
by comex | 2025-06-16 04:20:15+00:00
It should just be

res.fn = (void *)fn;

`res.fn` is of type `void *`, so that's what the code should be casting to. Casting to `func0Ptr` there seems to just be a mistake. Some compilers may allow the resulting function pointer to then implicitly convert to `void *`, but it's not valid in standard C++, hence the error.

Separately from that, if you enable -Wpedantic, you can get a warning for conversions between function and data pointers even if they do use an explicit cast, but that's not the default.
by bjornsing | 2025-06-16 04:22:37+00:00
It’s well-known that John von Neumann had this ability too:

Herman Goldstine wrote "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

Maybe it’s just an unavoidable side effect of extreme intelligence?
by poisonta | 2025-06-16 04:23:34+00:00
Many Rails developers try Phoenix at some point because they may need better performance. They’re so accustomed to the Rails structure that they assume Rails has done everything right. However, Ecto and ActiveRecord are two very different beasts. When Rails developers try out Ecto, they often feel there’s too much boilerplate and believe the Rails design is much more intuitive. This, I think, is one reason Phoenix struggles to attract Rails developers. If it can’t please Rails users, it will rarely appeal to others.
by pixelpoet | 2025-06-16 04:23:42+00:00
I'm a bit star-struck to have you reply to my somewhat offhand comment, am aware of your audio player work and really want to be a Zig convert (just missing those vec3 and complex operators, having equal mathematical standing to ints and floats) and your original Zig intro video is IMO one of the best tech presentations of all time, but I digress...

I'm aware of ReplayGain and this processing is important for per-track overall gain, but what I'm getting at is lower level: instead of there being two lossy/rounded stages of dimming and amplification, you want to communicate to the OS a log2 "dimming factor", so that this can be subtracted from a later log2 amplification factor such that we ideally waste no processing time if the sum is zero, and otherwise don't suffer the twice-quantised signal degradation (at most one accurate scaling pass, instead of two arbitrarily precision-reducing ones). It's maybe a minor point / imperceptible as others have noted, but IMO this seems like the Correct (TM) approach.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-16 04:24:05+00:00
When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.

And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.

At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-16 04:26:25+00:00
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
by ConspiracyFact | 2025-06-16 04:26:39+00:00
I will admit to a conspiratorial bias, but I curb it by asking basic feasibility questions, one of which I'll now ask you: how many people would need to be involved, and to what degree? If the education system is torturing children, doesn't that require a large degree of cooperation from many teachers? Why would these teachers willingly torture children?
by sheiyei | 2025-06-16 04:26:50+00:00
The sensible way to do biofuel is biogas from cattle. It doesn't slot so neatly into the car network (car needs to be modified to have a gas tank (why the heck do you call petrol gas, you nation of fools??)), but actually lowers the climate footprint of cattle farming even before considering the petrol that would be burnt instead of it: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and eventually burns into CO2 in the atmosphere, so it's better to burn it in an ICE.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-16 04:27:32+00:00
quantum dualism is kind of a panpsychic position because it suggests that decoherence is the source - but I otherwise tend to dislike the "everything is conscious" explanations. For one, it's like determinism, meaningless if true. Two, it seems like an explanation of convenience - we no longer have to try to explain it because its actually universal and everywhere. But ultimately it doesn't align with my own sense and understanding. We should focus entirely on the brain, because we know for a fact that's where it's happening. If we can't find it in the brain, then it simply can't be found and will always be a mystery.
by eviks | 2025-06-16 04:27:55+00:00
You're basically removing all "fit" from the term, and that's not how Darwin described it, a couple of quotes per wiki:

> "This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest." – Darwin, Charles gqiyoh

> This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection

Dumb meteor luck doesn't care about preserving favorable, doesn't care about any advantage in structure, so there is no fit going on even if you constrain it to a binary classification

So coming back to your first comment, your understanding of "fit" doesn't help *at all* in "drastically cut[ting] down on the issues". You don't cut anything bad if you don't filter out bad/fit for good, but instead have dumb luck making dumb choices.
by goku12 | 2025-06-16 04:29:23+00:00
Disclaimer: Take this as a criticism of news articles like these, rather than as a commentary on gender politics.

It think that articles like these are celebrating the institution itself, rather than the individual's achievement. In particular, this paragraph stands out:

> Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called the appointment "historic" at a time "when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital".

When an institution faces challenges, you need a competent and bold individual at the helm. Not someone from a specific demographic group. I'm certain that Ms. Metreweli fits the bill, since this hers one of the rare jobs where the professional skills align with the personal skills required to climb up the organization hierarchy. But the statement itself seems to emphasize that the MI6 achieved something. A declaration of "we are progressive too".

The article itself says more about MI6 and C's duties, rather than about Ms. Blaise Metreweli. Granted that this is one job where the personal achievements cannot be divulged beyond a limit. But then, the article could be equally brief. This is a common pattern. Such stories use the achievements of these remarkable individuals to advertise the job instead.

In the defense such article, there is one meaningful purpose that they serve. It may attract the attention of girls and women who are a good match for the job, but may not have considered it otherwise. It also gives them the reassurance that their career growth won't be limited by their gender. That's not a bad deal in my opinion.
by abtinf | 2025-06-16 04:29:35+00:00
Of course it is.

It's just a form of compression.

If I train an autoencoder on an image, and distribute the weights, that would obviously be the same as distributing the content. Just because the content is commingled with lots of other content doesn't make it disappear.

Besides, where did the sections of text from the input works that show up in the output text come from? Divine inspiration? God whispering to the machine?
by petermcneeley | 2025-06-16 04:29:50+00:00
> Designed to keep us moving and prevents us from being contemplative and forming groups that can address the problems of modern society.

It is sorta like the promise of cyberspace failed [0]. I wonder if something killed/smothered it or it was simply poorly formulated to begin with. [0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-16 04:30:15+00:00
> There’s a lot of non justifiable assumptions baked into those axioms, like that we’re anywhere close to superintelligence or the sun running out of hydrogen.

Nowhere in my post did I imply a timeline for this. The first predicate of the argument is when we eventually do develop ASI. You can make plans for that, same as you can make plans for when the sun eventually runs out of hydrogen. The difference is, we can look at the sun and say that at the rate it's burning, we've got maybe billions of years, and then look at AI improvements, extrapolate, and assume we've got less than 100 years. If we had any indication the sun was going to nova in 100 years, people would be way more worried.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-06-16 04:30:21+00:00
As nullc mentioned, the simplex method can take exponential time in some pathological examples (a space of measure 0, if that matters). The first P-time linear programming algo (and proof) was the ellipsoid method of Khachian in the 1980s. I have the impression it wasn't really practical. A later P-time interior-point method by Karmarkar is used sometimes today (it beats simplex on certain types of problems) from what I understand. But, I'm nowhere near expert in this area.
by comex | 2025-06-16 04:31:57+00:00
Note that some CFI (control flow integrity) implementations will get upset if you call a function pointer with the wrong argument types:

https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/EaPqKfvne

You could get around this by using a wrapper function, at the cost of a slightly different interface:

template <typename T, void (*fn)(T *)> void wrapper(void *d) { fn((T *)d); } template <typename T, void (*fn)(T *)> Func0 MkFunc0(T* d) { auto res = Func0{}; res.fn = (void *)wrapper<T, fn>; res.userData = (void*)d; return res; } ... Func0 x = MkFunc0<int, my_func>(nullptr);

(This approach also requires explicitly writing the argument type. It's possible to remove the need for this, but not without the kind of complexity you're trying to avoid.)
by colechristensen | 2025-06-16 04:32:14+00:00
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".

There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"

People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
by hansvm | 2025-06-16 04:32:19+00:00
As far as the US is concerned, it's fair game to drone-strike US citizens [0,1,2] from time to time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Death

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-16 04:33:13+00:00
Sorry, can you illustrate which point you were confused by or which aspects of my sentiments you felt weren't fleshed out? On rereading I think i'm perfectly clear. Do you feel like one of your points didn't get the attention it deserves? I'm happy to comply—if I didn't respond to a point, it's because I don't want to indicate disrespect, and as a result I have nothing left to say. But I would be overjoyed to tell you my actual thoughts if you can bear the social conflict.

If you don't want to or do not feel equipped to reply to my thoughts you can do just that—not reply.
by Swizec | 2025-06-16 04:34:05+00:00
Anyone who goes to an LLM for spiritual enlightenment and self-understanding, should first read about the Forer/Barnum effect. Yes that means you too.

The Forer/Barnum effect is why horoscopes, myers-briggs, enneagrams, fortune tellers, and similar parlor tricks work. You tell a person you’ll perform a deep assessment of their psychology, listen intently, then say a bunch of generic statements and their ego will fill in the blanks so it feels like you shared deep meaningful insights that truly understood the person.

This effect works even if you know about it. But once you know, you can catch yourself after that first wow impression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-16 04:34:13+00:00
I think the second sentence I wrote makes it clear that whether it's malicious is irrelevant. Water doesn't have to be malicious for you to observe that we shouldn't be building dams stretching into space next to populated cities when our technology to make dams higher is moving faster than our tech to make them stronger.

And it can still make you nervous when the tiny dams in unpopulated areas start breaking when they're made too tall, even though everyone is telling you that "of course they broke, they're much thinner than city dams" (while they keep building the city dams taller but not thicker)
by muzani | 2025-06-16 04:35:40+00:00
Good points here. It's given me quite a bit to think of.

Let's define censorship as the suppression of speech, ideas, communication, and information in general.

Some people would say censorship is done by an authority. Let's define authority as a unit of administrative power and control. This is dang. This is also the group of people who have the power of downvotes. It's not the majority. But even if it were the majority (e.g. reddit), it doesn't matter. There's a bias. There is always a bias, whether it's HN, FB, reddit, X, Threads, Mastodon, Discord - all these websites are self-selective by design.

Authority (e.g dang/YC) builds a system (e.g. downvotes) to destroy bad content. As dang puts it, they're white blood cells.

But back to censorship. Censorship is the suppression of communication. If something hits -4 downvotes, it is hidden unless you have showdead on. It only needs 4 people to disagree. And I find myself being hit with this whenever I praise a Chinese company, for example. I mean people will upvote if I praise Microsoft, but certain Chinese companies or perhaps Russian ones will get me hit with downvotes to -4.

I do believe trolls should be censored. If anyone goes around asserting the world is flat, that's in bad faith and should be deleted.

What of the guy who brings up the idea that certain vaccines are not properly scienced with evidence? In HN, that gets downvoted to a -2 or so. But systems can be corrupt. I've done corrupt research but frankly nobody would listen to a high schooler's word against professors. I tend to be sympathetic to these, even though very often, it's just more trolls. These are still visible, but out of the way. Bringing a discussion to the bottom of the page brings attention to it, so it's the opposite of censorship IMO.

Now the big thing is anti-corruption agencies. Because ironically, they're a nest of corrupt individuals. You know in a movie that the Ministry of Truth is always the corrupt one, lol. The ones in my country are a mixed bag - they catch the corrupt, but sometimes they kill the people who report corruption too. They're effectively inquisitors; they step above the lines of justice by having a high error rate but they catch the criminals who use red tape as a shield.

If you were corrupt, you would 100% want to censor anti-corruption agencies, and this is the line where censorship should be held back.

What people generally censor on HN is the idea that wages could be lower, that jobs could be outsourced, that tech which reduces employment is profitable. Or that their cushy job causes environmental and ontological damage. This kind of information should be challenged too, otherwise you end up with people insisting that you should be paid a bazillion dollars for level 63 like they do on Blind and Instagram. Lack of censorship also leads to false information.
by yorwba | 2025-06-16 04:35:42+00:00
Music artists get in trouble for using more than a sample from other music artists without permission because their work is in direct competition with the work they're borrowing from.

A ZIP file of a book is also in direct competition of the book, because you could open the ZIP file and read it instead of the book.

A model that can take 50 tokens and give you a greater than 50% probability for the 50 next tokens 42% of the time is not in direct competition with the book, since starting from the beginning you'll lose the plot fairly quickly unless you already have the full book, and unlike music sampling from other music, the model output isn't good enough to read it instead of the book.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-16 04:36:39+00:00
Does this matter? That is extremely difficult to differentiate via the archaeological record, so most archaeological research simply abandons the distinction. You should essentially never read intention into archaeology unless someone makes an extremely strong case the alternatives might be firmly excluded. As an example for a strong case of intention: if you find twenty skulls with pickaxes in their heads lined up on a shelf in an underground cubicular room, you should probably not assume this is a coincidence.

If you're reading about the use of pottery in soil, it does not matter what the people intended—at least, not as a primary concern. It is easy to read intention into headlines though.
by motoxpro | 2025-06-16 04:38:30+00:00
Can you give an example? I feel like you didn’t answer any of their questions and I am genuinely curious about what these things mean. “Institutional model”? what does customization mean beyond time and risk?

It’s sounding like you you have a bucket of etfs that you call risky (Russel 2000, emerging market) and things that you call safe (bonds, debt, large cap) and depending on my time horizon and risk I start with a certain portfolio and you systematically roll into more “safe” based on my time horizon?
by marchenkorr | 2025-06-16 04:38:51+00:00
Claimed functions:

Shotstars will help find and expose naked kings and their retinue (fact: stars in some repositories are inflated) Shotstars calculates parameters: aggressive marketing, trend, fake stars, peak of popularity and its date. Shotstars will calculate progress or regression over the last month (median - trend in percentage change and average - calculated in fact in times). Shotstars Shotstars will calculate the names of the months that had the most and the least stars (mode / anti-mode). Shotstars will output the longest period of time without adding stars. Shotstars scans repositories for stars added and removed with statistics for a selected time period. Shotstars reports the real date of the repository (fact: developers can declare/fake/change the date of their projects commits, but Shotstars will not fool them, the utility will display real numbers). Shotstars will show ~ the size of any public repository. Shotstars will also provide a short description of the repository. Shotstars offers a scan history with a selection of previously registered projects for quick checking. Shotstars generates CLI/HTML reports (stats, time periods, duplicate user activity, urls, graphs and json). Shotstars can simulate results, documented hack: a function designed to check the utility's operation (to make sure) on dead/stable repositories without moving stars. Shotstars finds users that overlap across Github projects, including those with hidden/private profiles. Shotstars calculates to the minute and displays the time when the github rescan restriction is lifted (if token is not used). Shotstars is created for people and works out of the box, OS support: Windows7+, GNU/Linux, Android (the user does not need: technical skills; registration/authorization on Github and even the presence of Python). Shotstars processes tasks with jet speed and for free (cross-platform open source software, donations are welcome).
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-16 04:40:10+00:00
> notable impacts to short term memory and deep concentration

So these are permanent? Is it caused by the cancer or the drugs? Is there any peer-reviewed research on the matter?

To be clear, chronic absenteeism is defined by the US Dept of Education as: "students missing 10% or more of school". Eh, that is one day every two weeks. That's not so bad. Most kids can still get a pretty good education at that level.