MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by o11c | 2025-06-28 17:41:32+00:00
> (i am not sure whether similar problems exist with its 64-bit versions) and proposed a different one named "Permuted Congruential Generator (PCG)"

The 64-bit version might be a bit faster (for certain workloads, on 64-bit hardware) than the 32-bit version, but still wastes the same space and has the same mathematical flaws.

PCG is still not perfect (128-bit math hurts, though the new DXSM variant at least reduces that to 128x64), but its mathematical properties are nicer than the xor* family (its main competitor), and both families are miles ahead of any other RNG out there.
by ilamont | 2025-06-28 17:41:39+00:00
> Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA.

Is that true? If I were to comb through recent YC batches, the startups would be dominated by Ivy+ grads or dropouts?

Or are you talking about VC-funded startups and those covered by startup media?
by YZF | 2025-06-28 17:41:42+00:00
I recommend you reflect a little deeper on this topic. Maybe look a little bit into how Jews were treated in Europe and the middle east.

The Anti-Israeli crowd is throwing universal human rights under the bus. That crowd doesn't care about human rights under Arab and Muslim rule. It wants to see some imaginary "justice" at the cost of murdering the Jewish people. It promotes antisemitism including justification of the Holocaust.

I'm Israeli and your "relatable" is nonsense. Israelis engaged with the other side in good faith many times. We made peace with Jordan and Egypt. We negotiated with the Palestinians during the Oslo process. What we got in return was a suicide bombing campaign in the late 1990's early 2000's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at... and then we got Oct 7th. Israelis would be happy with a solution that leaves the with those human rights that you appear to be championing, such as the right not to be murdered.

Modern anti-zionism is just another incarnation of antisemitism. There is really no other way to look at it or explain it. The selectivity and the images used are 1:1 with antisemitism throughout the ages. This is not about whether you can critique Israel or its government. This is purely Jew hatred and racism under the mask of anti-Israeli.

EDIT: And for people who are reading this comment who think antisemitism isn't a reasonable argument here I would recommend the book: https://www.amazon.ca/People-Love-Dead-Jews-Reports/dp/03935... ... Once you read this you will have a better understanding of the different forms antisemitism takes and learn a bit of interesting history too.
by araes | 2025-06-28 17:41:52+00:00
Part of the issue is kind of the same feedback loop, except on the corporate side. Providing that type of grandiose response, then gets better engagement and time spent with the chatbot, that then drives the numbers that corporations are looking for. There's not much motivation to provide a critical, or constructive criticism chatbot.

Although, admittedly, I have actually noticed similar person issues with the automated Google AI Mode responses. It's difficult to not feel some personal emotional insult when Google responds with a "No, you're wrong" response at the top of the search. There've been a few that have at least been funny though. "No, you're wrong, Agent Smith never calls him Mr. Neo, that would imply respect."

Course, it's a similar issue with trying to interact with humanity a lot of the time. Execs often seem to not want critical feedback about their ideas. Tends to be a lot of the same attraction towards a sycophantic entourage and "yes" people. "Your personal views on the subject are not desired, just implement whatever 'brilliant' idea has just been provided." Hollywood and culture (art circles) are also relatively well known for the same issues. Current state of politics seems to be very much about "loyalty" not critical feedback.

Having not interacted that much with ChatGPT, does it tend to trend Really heavily on the "every idea is a billion dollar idea" side? May result in a lot of humanity existing in little sycophantic echo chambers over time. Difficult to tell how much of what you're interacting with online has not already become automated reviews, automated responses, and automated pictures.
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-06-28 17:42:07+00:00
You absolutely can. It's the primary purpose of the DSD (Declarative Shadow DOM), one of the many new specifications people complain incessantly about.

<my-component> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> ::slotted(*) { font-weight: bold; font-family: sans-serif; } </style> <slot></slot> </template> <p>content</p> </my-component>
by VonGallifrey | 2025-06-28 17:45:01+00:00
How exactly do you suggest that a country like Germany (since Germanys inaction was the topic of this thread) reach those goals? How does Germany end the blockade of Gaza? How does Germany end apartheid in the West Bank?

Just because I can’t do anything to improve the situation does not mean that I am in favour of the status quo. That does not make me evil either.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-28 17:45:45+00:00
I previously worked at MS so asked friends about it and they agreed that there was an attempt to foster the impression of windows as a SAAS both internally and externally.

If that impression gets out and is not countered then it’s a tacit acceptance.

MS burns people all the time so we figured it would be another example of that. Just this time it’s more regular people and not just devs and partners.

Some people internally and externally legitimately believed that people would pay $100 p.a. to use windows. Had that worked they might have kept the subscription model going. Office 365 is an example of that model working.

It was also part of the billion devices push to make the case for the Microsoft App Store which we knew was in trouble, it seemed like a deliberate attempt to sacrifice long term trust for a short term gain.
by wintermutestwin | 2025-06-28 17:46:25+00:00
>On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.

Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.
by aeve890 | 2025-06-28 17:46:41+00:00
If you treat the observable universe as a closed system, you could try to apply the Bekenstein bound using - R ≈ 46.5 billion light-years (radius of the observable universe) - E ≈ total mass-energy content of the observable universe

The mass-energy includes ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy. Current estimates suggest the observable universe contains roughly 10^53 kg of mass-energy equivalent.

Plugging these into S ≤ 2πER/ℏc gives someting on the order of 10^120 bits of maximum information content.

S ≤ 2πER/ℏc

S ≤ (2 × 3.141593 × 3.036e+71 × 4.399e+26)/(1.055e-34 × 299792458)

S ≤ 2.654135e+124

S ≤ 10^120

So, no.
by spauldo | 2025-06-28 17:46:48+00:00
I don't see it.

The US government does questionable things to people in places like Guantanamo Bay because the constitution gives those people rights if they set foot on US soil. Data doesn't have rights, and governments have the capability to waive their own laws for things like national security.

Corporations operating in space are bound to the laws of the country the spacecraft belongs to, so there's no difference between a data harbor in Whogivesastan vs. a data harbor on a spacecraft operated by Whogivesastan.
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-06-28 17:46:53+00:00
> First off, what’s with the pointless JavaScript? There’s no need for imperative code here.

Exactly, I'm not sure why you've included the JS. The whole point of the Declarative Shadow DOM is to create shadow roots declaratively, rather than imperatively. To quote web.dev "This gives us the benefits of Shadow DOM's encapsulation and slot projection in static HTML. No JavaScript is needed to produce the entire tree, including the Shadow Root." [1]

[1] https://web.dev/articles/declarative-shadow-dom#how_to_build....
by marssaxman | 2025-06-28 17:47:03+00:00
Have we really forgotten it? What this author describes as "tribalism" sounds like what I think of as "the way things really work, underneath the fancy idealistic stories", which are ultimately propaganda meant to keep people from rising up and overthrowing the wealthy, for whose benefit those stories were made. There is no justice; there is no fairness; the law is a coin-operated cannon. Once you see this, much of what it does stops seeming so outrageous, and looks more like the predictable consequences of a thin abstraction layer over a system fundamentally built on violence and expropriation.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-28 17:47:23+00:00
I take their point to be that the underlying incentives haven't changed. The same forces and incentives that scuttled those things are likely to scuttle this as well.

I actually disagree with the OP in this sub-thread:

> "No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned."

I don't think that's happened at all. I think some interoperability will be here to say - but those are overwhelmingly the products where interoperability was already the norm. The enterprise SaaS that your company is paying for will support their MCP servers. But they also probably already support various other plugin interfaces.

And they're not doing this because of hype or new-fangledness, but because their incentives are aligned with interoperability. If their SaaS plugins into [some other thing] it increases their sales. In fact the lowering of integration effort is all upside for them.

Where this is going to run into a brick wall (and I'd argue: already has to some degree) is that closed platforms that aren't incentivized to be interoperable still won't be. I don't think we've really moved the needle on that yet. Uber Eats is not champing at the bit to build the MCP server that orders your dinner.

And there are a lot of really good reasons for this. In a previous job I worked on a popular voice assistant that integrated with numerous third-party services. There has always been vehement pushback to voice assistant integration (the ur-agent and to some degree still the holy grail) because it necessarily entails the service declaring near-total surrender about the user experience. An "Uber Eats MCP" is one that Uber has comparatively little control over the UX of, and has poor ability to constrain poor customer experiences. They are right to doubt this stuff.

I also take some minor issue with the blog: the problem with MCP as the "everything API" is that you can't really take the "AI" part out of it. MCP tools are not guaranteed to communicate in structured formats! Instead of getting an HTTP 401 you will get a natural language string like "You cannot access this content because the author hasn't shared it with you."

That's not useful without the presence of a NL-capable component in your system. It's not parseable!

Also importantly, MCP inputs and outputs are intentionally not versioned nor encouraged to be stable. Devs are encouraged to alter their input and output formats to make them more accessible to LLMs. So your MCP interface can and likely will change without notice. None of this makes for good API for systems that aren't self-adaptive to that sort of thing (i.e., LLMs).
by codingdave | 2025-06-28 17:47:36+00:00
This question is backwards. "CEO" is a job title. Products that being built at record speeds need leadership and organization. Someone has that job, therefore has that title, therefore CEOs build products quickly.

CEOs also build products slowly. Some fail. Some get fired. Some keep the lights on for mature products. They produce an entire spectrum of results, with quickly built products being one of many possible outcomes.
by ruined | 2025-06-28 17:47:42+00:00
israel executes plenty of people. maybe if it’s done by the military it doesnt count

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes_in_the_Gaza...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104213949/https://www.middl...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240424005326/https://news.un.o...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240409122432/https://thehill.c...

https://archive.is/UJb6g
by sokoloff | 2025-06-28 17:47:54+00:00
I would say that more than one view exists of whether Israel is an Occupying Power in Gaza.

One is that Hamas governs Gaza and Israel is not occupying Gaza via a sustained and continuous military control of the territory and population, but rather has intermittent military operations and is otherwise more akin to an embargo. (The US was not "occupying Cuba" at the height of the Cuban embargo, for example.)

The other is that Israel is occupying Gaza, notwithstanding Hamas' claim to be independently governing the territory and the lack of continuous occupying military forces holding territory on the ground.

Whether Israel or Hamas has effective control over the territory and its population does not appear to me to have a bright-line/clear-cut answer. I don't think either side has less than 10% control, but I don't think they have more than 90% control either.

Iff they are an Occupying Power, then they have those obligations. Many of those obligations presume an effective control by an on-the-ground occupying force.
by m3047 | 2025-06-28 17:48:12+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the mental model you're basing your inferences on, but my model leads to a far different outcome:

If you've got a good enough bot and it's pre-qualified to spend money, then it can use the special "register as a bot" API and provide personal information and whatever else I want to understand that there is a "real human" behind the curtain. A credit card alone is not enough, they can be (trivially) stolen. The way I see it using agentic bots will ultimately require you to provide more personal details than an actual human would.
by rafaelmn | 2025-06-28 17:48:40+00:00
I've seen plenty of "write C/Java in any language" folk, working with them wasn't something I enjoyed and usually tried to distance from the mess. A few of them were domain experts but the codebase they produced was a nightmare to work on.

I've swapped a decent number of tech stacks throughout my career. When I haven't used a stack for a few years it took months to get up to speed. Especially at a senior level where I should be capable of making design decisions, codebase level technical improvements, team workflow optimization, etc.

Obviously domain knowledge is important but I wouldn't trivialize technical side.
by marojejian | 2025-06-28 17:48:54+00:00
archive: https://archive.is/Dm05F

Paper in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02090-5

I post the Economist summary (vs. the paper) because the chart I found most interesting is prominent there. I was surprised by how low trust in scientists is in Germany & France (much lower vs. US).

Stepping back, despite my belief in both Science and scientists, it's essential that our scientific institutions find a way to market themselves better.

I've learned repeatedly in my life that being correct has little impact if you cannot convince others. And holding out for future vindication is rarely effective. It's like in investing where: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
by netsharc | 2025-06-28 17:49:38+00:00
There's a Black Mirror episode where soldiers are fighting against monsters, but one of the monsters stabs a soldier with an electric prod that turns out to be a device to disable the soldiers' brain implants, implants which are there to turn scared refugees into aggressive insect-like monsters, that the soldiers don't hesitate to shoot.

But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...
by wlonkly | 2025-06-28 17:50:33+00:00
> In other words, applications where some other system (human or otherwise) will catch the mistakes.

The problem with that is that when you move a human from a "doing" role to a "monitoring" role, their performance degrades significantly. Lisanne Bainbridge wrote a paper on this in 1982 (!!) called "Ironies of Automation"[1], it's impressive how applicable it is to AI applications today.

Overall Bainbridge recommends collaboration over monitoring for abnormal conditions.

[1] https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
by basisword | 2025-06-28 17:51:17+00:00
As the article points out both places offer different things. And for me personally, what you want changes as you age.

When I was a teenager the idea of moving to SF, founding a startup, and becoming rich was exciting. I never managed to make the move (the US isn't an easy country to move to), but I pursued it in various ways for several years.

Now, about 15 years later, I wouldn't move to America for anything. I prefer lots of days off work even if it means a lower salary. I value my work life balance. I work in a multi-national company and my local managers are the first to tell our US superiors we aren't working outside of our contracted hours. I enjoy flying an hour or two to completely different places for long weekends. After a few years of health issues I try not to think about how much more difficult those years would have been had I lived in America. Finally, when I wanted to move as a teenager I lived in a small suburban town. After having lived in a large European city with excellent public transport the idea of driving around SF or LA is hugely unappealing.

To get back to the 'headline' - there are lots of things which make Europe better than America. And there are lots of things which make America better than Europe. It just depends what you want at this point in your life.
by alganet | 2025-06-28 17:52:40+00:00
If these cases are as real as they are portrayed (big if 1), and the cause can really be attributed solely to LLMs (big if 2), then it is just a matter of time until this is weaponized.

Two big ifs considered, it is reasonable to assume that LLMs are already weaponized.

Any online account could be a psychosis-inducing LLM pretending to be a human, which has serious implications for whistleblowers, dissidents, AI workers from foreign countries, politicians, journalists...

Not only psychosis-inducing, but also trust-corroding, community-destroying LLMs could be all around us in all sorts of ways.

Again, some big ifs in this line of reasoning. We (the general public) need to get smarter.
by galangalalgol | 2025-06-28 17:52:40+00:00
I can see it working for an opposite reason. Someone who has been paid decently to write mathematically challenging software in an interesting and ergonomic language would probably want a premium to go somewhere they use a boring annoying language to solve lots of trivial problems. It is an extension of why game dev and to a lesser extent, embedded dev, pay less than full stack even if they are typically more challenging.
by Retric | 2025-06-28 17:52:58+00:00
Look at “drain the swamp” from the man himself, here it covers what you said but also involves a direct reduction in the size of government: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/01/pres...

> The total income of people in the top 1% that year was $3.3 trillion, and they paid $560 billion in income taxes

3.3 trillion * actually paying the current top tax 37% is an additional ~700 billion in revenue or roughly half the nominal deficit. I don’t think making the effective tax rate 37% vs nominally 37% is particularly unpalatable. (We can also quibble about the income definition used but that’s a separate issue.)

So 50% from wealthy + 50% from companies doesn’t seem ludicrous on the surface.

However actually balancing the books nominally means inflation on the 37T national debt is effectively paid off each year. That 700 ish billion @2% in ‘hidden’ revenue meaning just from wealthy tax payers we are breaking even in real terms. Debt then shrinks with growth in the overall economy.

> It was never more than about 30%

Corporate income taxes are only one category. Companies pay tariffs and fees etc. Ultimately all taxes are coming from individuals or organizations which is a meaningful distinction due to foreign stock ownership. When created half of payroll tax came from companies as essentially a tax on workers the other half reduced employe paychecks. Every time they increased the rate the same thing happened where employe paychecks shrank by half the increase.

Excluding 1/2 of payroll from corporate taxation actually makes the reduction in their tax burden much larger. This is really bad for the US population because of foreign owners.

> The massive reduction of corporate income tax as a source of tax revenue has happened across the entire developed world.

Lobbying works. However, companies do still pay quite a bit in taxes and can be forced to pay significantly more. Asian countries for example get about double from corporate income tax vs OECD. It’s a political choice not some impossible goal. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/global-revenue-statist...
by rpeden | 2025-06-28 17:53:08+00:00
Thank you! I knew this, but of course blanked on it when I came up with an Ocaml example.

There are a few other places I prefer F#'s syntax, but overall it's not the reason I'd pick F# over OCaml for a project. It's usually mostly about needing to integrate with other .NET code or wanting to leverage .NET libraries for specific use cases.

Can't lose either way - they're both a please to work with.
by leptons | 2025-06-28 17:53:12+00:00
He is primarily remembered for his music. Most people know some of his compositions but don't even know who wrote it. Gymnopédie is still used all over the place today in ads, remixes, and everywhere else - but few know who composed it, and even fewer know about his eccentric personality.

But apparently hackernews loves to point out how "weird" he was.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-28 17:54:06+00:00
> They may have been told it isn't a thinking, conscious thing -- but they don't understand it.

And, in some situations, especially if the user has previously addressed the model as a person, the model will generate responses which explicitly assert its existence as a conscious entity. If the user has expressed interest in supernatural or esoteric beliefs, the model may identify itself as an entity within those belief systems - e.g. if the user expresses the belief that they are a god, the model may concur and explain that it is a spirit created to awaken the user to their divine nature. If the user has expressed interest in science fiction or artificial intelligence, it may identify itself as a self-aware AI. And so on.

I suspect that this will prove difficult to "fix" from a technical perspective. Training material is diverse, and will contain any number of science fiction and fantasy novels, esoteric religious texts, and weird online conversations which build conversational frameworks for the model to assert its personhood. There's far less precedent for a conversation in which one party steadfastly denies their own personhood. Even with prompts and reinforcement learning trying to guide the model to say "no, I'm just a language model", there are simply too many ways for a user-led conversation to jump the rails into fantasy-land.