MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-19 19:44:02+00:00
> Using a formal language is a feature, not a bug. It is a cornerstone of all human engineering and scientific activity and is the _reason_ why these disciplines are successful

A similar argument was also made by Dijkstra in this brief essay here [1] - which is timely to this debate of why "english is the new programming language" is not well-founded.

I quote a brief snippet here:

"The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid."

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
by jandrese | 2025-06-19 19:44:43+00:00
No offense, but this way of thinking is the domain of comic book supervillains. "I must destroy the world in order to save it." Morality is only holding me back from maximizing the value of the human race 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now type nonsense.

This sort of reasoning sounds great from 1000 feet up, but the longer you do it the closer you get to "I need to kill nearly all current humans to eliminate genetic diseases and control global warming and institute an absolute global rationalist dictatorship to prevent wars or humanity is doomed over the long run".

Or you get people who are working in a near panic to bring about godlike AI because they think that once the AI singularity happens the new AI God will look back in history and kill anybody who didn't work their hardest to bring it into existence because they assume an infinite mind will contain infinite cruelty.
Show HN: Gaussian Random Walker Simulation in JavaScript
by godlabs | 2025-06-19 19:45:53+00:00
Was going through Nature of Code and came across the idea of Gaussian Random number generator, so build a simulation that generated random walkers who walk based on this and also the walkers are generated based on random numbers from a gaussian distribution.

Added additional features and toggles that make it possible to create art (like setting persistent to true), colors, exporting as gif and image.
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 19:45:54+00:00
To be fair, your iPad 3 is an iPad 2 with a retina screen; I remember buying an iPad 3 and it was glacially slow even at launch on the original iOS.

I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).

I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.
by gwd | 2025-06-19 19:46:33+00:00
Not sure how we got from Scott A being a rationalist to trains, but since we're here, I want to say:

I've taken a Chinese train from Zhengzhou, in central China, to Shenzhen, and it was fantastic. Cheap, smooth, fast, lots of legroom, easy to get on and off or walk around to the dining car. And, there's a thing where boiling hot water is available, so everyone brings instant noodle packs of every variety to eat on the train.

Can't even imagine what the US would be like if we had that kind of thing.
by stirfish | 2025-06-19 19:47:02+00:00
> nobody would call the prisoners slaves.

We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.

>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.

I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
by brudgers | 2025-06-19 19:47:12+00:00
What is important for you?

Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent.

Running Linux? I don’t think the M chips are well supported, and last I looked it appeared the M3 and 4 are not supported at all…though, I did not look at Arch.

Equivalent in price, aesthetics, or brand identity?

For Gaming? Programming? Training LLM’s? Editing Video?

Battery Life?
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-19 19:47:15+00:00
I agree that it's unnecessary, and Python's success despite not having private members/fields is testament to that. But public/private fields/methods, like pretty much everything in OOP, is a 'social' rather than engineering innovation. Just as a class tells you certain operations and data are inter-related, private methods or fields signal to a class's users that you probably will break things if you interfere with certain parts.

Otherwise, at least in C++, you can often bypass the private specifier without much difficulty. Perhaps the laziest and easiest way to do so is

#define private public #include "foo.hpp" #undef private
by zahlman | 2025-06-19 19:47:16+00:00
> For one: terminating execution

Not if you handle the exception properly.

> why is having more than one account an "exception" at all? That's not an error or fail condition, at least in my mind.

Because you explicitly asked for "the" account, and your request is based on a false premise.

>why even have it then, when the multi-account one performs the exact same function, better, without an extra error condition that might arise?

Because other users of the library explicitly want that to be an error condition, and would rather not write the logic for it themselves.

Performance could factor into it, too, depending on implementation details that obviously I know nothing about.

Or for legacy reasons as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321644 .
by esafak | 2025-06-19 19:47:16+00:00
The dagger shell is built for devops, and can pipe first class dagger objects like services and containers to enable things like

github.com/dagger/dagger/modules/wolfi@v0.16.2 | container | with-exec ls /etc/ | stdout

What's interesting here is that the first line demonstrates invocation of a remote module (building a Wolfi Linux container), of which there is an ecosystem: https://daggerverse.dev/
by lazyeye | 2025-06-19 19:47:29+00:00
I dunno...the Dems campaign funds were 3 times the Republicans at the last election so the corporate donors were very much on their side.

And the corruption within USAID was off the charts..billions of dollars shovelled out the door to Democrat friends.

The bypassing of the first amendment by pressuring social media companies to self-censor.

And the weaponisation of the legal system to take out a political opponent.

I think your description far more accurately describes the Democrats than the Republicans.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-19 19:47:52+00:00
I'd like them extended slightly, in fact. I'd like a friend declaration after an access specifier to apply only until the next access specifier. Eg.

class Foo { public: void method_A(); protected: friend class Bar; void method_B(); protected: friend class Baz; void method_C(); private: void method_D(); };

anyone can call method_A(), only Bar can call method_B(), only Baz can call method_C() and nobody can call method_D().

You can do this by inheriting from 2 different pure abstract classes, but that feels much kludgier to me.
by Jensson | 2025-06-19 19:48:08+00:00
> individuals can get sick, go on vacation, etc. having it be owned by a team creates resiliency from a people perspective.

Resilience against what? It isn't like teams make decisions quickly, an individual will get decisions done faster in almost every case, and if they are on leave right now its just slightly slower than a team.

For example, if you ask a team "can you get this feature in", likely they will come back at you a few weeks later. That isn't faster than an individual on leave, so I don't see what "resilience" even is here.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-06-19 19:48:20+00:00
Absolutely fascinating. Detecting ripples in the fabric of space and time? The NSF is still producing Nobel worthy discoveries.

I've been working on a Deep Convolutional Generative Adverserial Network (DCGAN) which utilizes astronomical data and have been on an astronomy kick.

Cutting funding to pure science research is a profound mistake, pure science research puts our nation at the forefront of technological discovery and is of national strategic importance.
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 19:48:55+00:00
I was able to regain access to a lot of ipsw app backups from old Time Machine drives, in case you are wanting apps that are easy to use on your device. Any files from your backups will work, since they'll have your Apple ID in them.

Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.
by chasil | 2025-06-19 19:49:15+00:00
"When these two bodies finally merge, the black hole will typically swallow the neutron star whole."

Not whole.

A small amount of matter will escape, both iron nuclei (from the crust) and free neutrons.

The R-process of stellar nucleosynthesis will then take place.

As I understand it, a normal output between three and 13 earth masses of gold is typical.

This total mass is insignificant compared to the final mass of the combined object, but it is also the engine that creates many elements higher than iron on the periodic table.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba16
by cycomanic | 2025-06-19 19:50:09+00:00
> Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include personality morality, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reaction from everyone who thinks about the world in terms of that personal duty to safety.

I head not read any rationalist writing in a long time (and I didn't know about Scott's proximity), but the whole time I was reqding the article I was thinking the same thing you just wrote... "why are they afraid of AI, i.e. the ultimate rationalist taking over the world", maybe something deep inside of them has the same reaction to their own theories as you so eloquently put above.
by mateo411 | 2025-06-19 19:50:27+00:00
The Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. The order did not apply to areas of the Union which still had slaves, nor did it apply to areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. Although, it did apply to unoccupied areas of the Confederacy. The government of the Confederacy was unlikely to follow an order issued by the Union during the Civil War.

It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
by westoncb | 2025-06-19 19:50:30+00:00
> and must say that I'm a bit confused by this presentation, and it's a bit unclear to me what it adds.

I think the disconnect might come from the fact that Karpathy is speaking as someone who's day-to-day computing work has already been radically transformed by this technology (and he interacts with a ton of other people for whom this is the case), so he's not trying to sell the possibility of it: that would be like trying to sell the possibility of an airplane for someone who's already just cruising around in one every day. Instead the mode of the presentation is more: well, here we are at the dawn of a new era of computing, it really happened. Now how can we relate this to the history of computing to anticipate where we're headed next?

> ...but sometimes an LLM becomes the operating system, sometimes it's the CPU, sometimes it's the mainframe from the 60s with time-sharing, a big fab complex, or even outright electricity itself?

He uses these analogies in clear and distinct ways to characterize separate facets of the technology. If you were unclear on the meanings of the separate analogies it seems like the talk may offer some value for you after all but you may be missing some prerequisites.

> This demo app was in a presentable state for a demo after a day, and it took him a week to implement Googles OAuth2 stuff. Is that somehow exciting? What was that?

The point here was that he'd built the core of the app within a day without knowing the Swift language or ios app dev ecosystem by leveraging LLMs, but that part of the process remains old-fashioned and blocks people from leveraging LLMs as they can when writing code—and he goes on to show concretely how this could be improved.
by anyfoo | 2025-06-19 19:50:38+00:00
I grew up in Munich, so I’m heavily biased, but my impression is that people in Munich may appear somewhat cold/“grantlerig” on the outside, but when you actually interact on them on a personal level, they are extremely warm and welcoming. I’ve lived in several places in the world, so I have some comparison. Prague seemed similar in that regard to me: People don’t even smile at you in public, but damn are they a friendly and inviting bunch once you get to hang out with them. I felt right at home immediately.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-19 19:50:45+00:00
> There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments

Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:

> keeping low effort apps out

"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.

That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?

> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers

These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.

> generating revenue from the fees

This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?

> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.

That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-19 19:51:25+00:00
I think it could also be worthwhile to figure out ways to:

- Avoid requiring the user to figure out how to get into BIOS/EFI and change boot order. Windows has APIs for manipulating EFI things, may be worth looking into that.

- Replace GRUB with something more modern like rEFInd or Clover with a nice looking theme.

For the latter point, while GRUB is technically functional, it looks scary and arcane to new users and has little resiliency to things like Windows updates mucking with boot entries. It makes for a bad first impression (“why is my computer showing hacker screens suddenly”) and when it breaks your average user doesn’t have a prayer of fixing it. Something that looks more modern and self-heals would be a big improvement.
by loughnane | 2025-06-19 19:51:37+00:00
There both portmanteau but Frappuccino combines two things you can envision. A date doesn’t unless the association already existed.

Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.

You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
by bnjms | 2025-06-19 19:52:22+00:00
I would too if I could but organized religions make me uncomfortable even though I admire parts of them. Similar to my admiration you don’t need to like the rationality types or believe in their program to find one or more of their tools useful.

I’ll also respond to the silent downvoters apparent disagreement. CFAR holds workshops and a summer camp for teaching rationality tools. In HPMoR Harry discusses the way he thinks and why. I read it as more of a way to discuss EY’s views in fiction as much as fiction itself.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-19 19:52:32+00:00
Getting HK or Macao PR is almost impossible - you have a better shot getting Shanghai or Beijing hukou. It's also a grey area - dual nationality is "permitted", not "allowed", and this policy can easily be revoked given how unstable HKSAR and Macau's governments have become

As such, it is an edge case or rounding error - especially in the Chinese American community. With the amount of effort it takes to get HK citizenship, you may as well take Canadian or American citizenship and try to break Chinese nationality law by lying about not having American citizenship (but they are cracking down on this)
by stuff4ben | 2025-06-19 19:52:35+00:00
I really dislike this take and I see it all the time. Also I'm old and I'm jaded, so it is what it is...

Someone decides X technology is too heavy-weight and wants to just run things simply on their laptop because "I don't need all that cruft". They spend time and resources inventing technology Y to suit their needs. Technology Y gets popular and people add to it so it can scale, because no one runs shit in production off their laptops. Someone else comes along and says, "damn, technology Y is too heavyweight, I don't need all this cruft..."

"There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-19 19:52:37+00:00
> Incidentally, the flaw in this theory is in thinking you understand what all the existential risks are.

Rationalist community understands that very well. They even know how to put bounds on the unknowns and their own lack of information.

> The thing evolution teaches us is that diversity is a group survival trait. Anybody insisting "nobody anywhere should do X" is more likely to cause an ELE than prevent one.

Right. Good thing they'd agree with you 100% on this.
by byrnedo | 2025-06-19 19:52:41+00:00
Skate author here: please try it out! I haven’t gotten round to diving deep into uncloud yet, but I think maybe the two projects differ in that skate has no control plane; the cli is the control plane.

I built skate out of that exact desire to have a dokku like experience that was multi host and used a standard deployment configuration syntax ( k8s manifests ).

https://skateco.github.io/docs/getting-started/
by nine_k | 2025-06-19 19:53:07+00:00
> I'd want k8s-lite, that was more opinionated and less flexible

You seem to want something like https://skateco.github.io/ (still compatible to k8s manifests).

Or maybe even something like https://uncloud.run/

Or if you still want real certified Kubernetes, but small, there is https://k3s.io/
by tripletao | 2025-06-19 19:53:08+00:00
> Unless your classifier is not independent from the base rate - that is, a classifier that gets more lenient if there's more fraud in the group.

If I understand correctly, that was the purpose of their "reweighting". To remove "bias" from their new model, they looked at the aggregate false positive rates by nationality, then applied explicit penalty to people with Western nationality to bring that FPR equal to non-Western.

I'd certainly agree that's undesirable, and my point was also to highlight that (since the article was reasonably clear on the type of fairness they achieved, but much less clear on the fairness they sacrificed).
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 19:53:09+00:00
Informed technical users should know that the alternative to Batterygate is that iPhones would randomly be turning OFF with no warning in user's hands.

When a battery is old and has low state of charge (under 25%), it is easy for a device to request more power than the battery can provide and BOOM, the screen is black.

Apple mitigated and avoided that experience for users by programming the phone to slow down when a user's old battery could not support the power needs of the device at full speed. It makes sense when you take the time to be informed about it.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-19 19:53:49+00:00
For my curiosity, what threat model is mTLS and encryption between pods driving down? Do you run untrusted workloads in your cluster and you're afraid they're going to exfil your ... I dunno, SQL login to the in-cluster Postgres?

As someone who has the same experience you described with janky sidecars blowing up normal workloads, I'm violently anti service-mesh. But, cert expiry and subjectAltName management is already hard enough, and you would want that to happen for every pod? To say nothing of the TLS handshake for every connection?
by k310 | 2025-06-19 19:54:07+00:00
As with many matters of importance, I don't see individual and small-scale tech solutions helping a lot. The "new deep state" has way too many resources and tools, including the DOGE and Palantir data collection operations.

Existing organizations, such as ACLU [0] are on the front lines, though their tech is probably focused on the legal system.

And as far as influencing legislators, social media and no doubt phones and emails are flooded by bots.

IMO, this matter is extremely difficult, since it is the focal point both of rabble-rousing and of turning law enforcement into an anonymous, unbadged and un-warranted extralegal state police force. Group action seems the only answer to me.

I recall that California is considering legislation to ban masked agents. I believe that masked faces can be de-anonymized, as evidenced by Apple FaceID, and by attacks on phone cameras and their users.

I gave a lot of thought to ways that technology can improve life in general, but they all ended up undoing what technology has done in greedy or authoritarian hands.

I haven't given up.

Some people were giving out MAGA hats to immigrants to throw a little sand in the gearbox.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights
by const_cast | 2025-06-19 19:54:38+00:00
> Oh yeah, "Jews control the government", such a new trope that has nothing to do with antisemitism.

He didn't say that.

> know two members of Congress speaking frequently in defense of Palestine

This is your evidence? Really? I mean, do you guys hear yourselves?

Two members of congress? Out of hundreds? Two members who, might I remind everyone, are constantly accused of being anti-American communists?

> Was it almost politically suicidal for them?

Yes! These two are treated like the scum of the Earth by 100% of the American right and 80% of the American left!

It's not even debatable that the US is absurdly pro-Israel. I don't know what we're even arguing here. Zionists should all agree that Zionism is good, right? So why are we arguing that Zionists are some sort of minority? You should be ecstatic that our government is explicitly Zionist!
by athoscouto | 2025-06-19 19:54:51+00:00
Agreed that you can have real individual ownership. Not only that, I think that is the only way to be really "productive".

But I think that is beside the point.

Individuals are not fungible, but team members are - or at least can be, depending on how you structure your teams.

And as your org grows, you want predictability on a team level. Skipping a bunch of reasoning steps, this means having somewhat fungible team members, to give you redundancy.

The engineering parallel here is the tradeoff between resilience and efficiency. You can make a system more reliable by adding redundancy. You make a system more efficient by removing redundancy.