MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-07 18:33:37+00:00
We don't let children vote because they are not wise enough: we demand a threshold for accrued mental competence is gained. Similarly, cars give them a power similar to that of guns: hence the restriction past the threshold.

We don't let children damage themselves because it is plain indefensible. If they want to, they must have passed said formal threshold.

These are not matters of self control.
by rowls66 | 2025-06-07 18:33:52+00:00
This article is nearly 15 years old (2013). According to center on budget and policy priorities, the number of SSDI beneficiaries has fallen from is peak in 2014. So this article was written about a trend that peaked a year after its publication and had reversed over the past 15 years. Odd that it would be reposted today.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit...
by akomtu | 2025-06-07 18:34:01+00:00
The difference between imitation and reasoning can be made more clear if we switch from language to numbers:

1 3 7 15 31 63 ...

How do you continue this sequence? What's the 1000000th number in this sequence? Imitation continues the likeness of what it sees and quickly gets off track. Imitation can't go abstract and tell the 1000000th element without writing down a million numbers leading to the answer. Reasoning finds the rule behind the set of examples and uses this rule to predict the next numbers, so it never gets off track.

The rule generating the sequence can be a sophisticated recurrent formula, e.g. a(k) = 2a(k-1) - sqrt(a(k-3)). Imitation can't solve this problem beyond trivial examples, but an AI can do what a scientist would do: come up with hypotheses, verify them against the examples and eventually find a formula that's reasonably accurate. The role of an LLM here is to suggest possible formulas.

The same sequence of examples can be generated by many formulas that differ in complexity and accuracy. This provokes the idea of a simple competition between AIs: the one that creates the simplest formula that's 99.5% accurate - wins. The formula really means a small program, once we get beyond trivial recurrent rules.

The ability to find simple and accurate models of reality is the essense of intelligence.
by internet_points | 2025-06-07 18:34:52+00:00
> a Nix system always ends up being 1.4GB

That's strange, I never had problems building really tiny docker (release) images with nix, in fact it felt easier than doing it with alpine. You just get exactly what you specify, no more.

(OTOH, when developing in nix, I always end up with a huge /nix/store and have no idea how to clean it without garbage collecting everything and having to wait all over)
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-07 18:35:29+00:00
When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day.

I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever.

He was at the time I met him very in to a kind of digital photography. My recollection was that he had a high-end drum scanner and was in fact scanning film negatives (medium format camera?) and then going with a digital workflow from that point on. I remember he was excited about the way that "darks" could be captured (with the scanner?). A straight analog workflow would, according to him, cause the darks to roll off (guessing the film was not the culprit then, perhaps the analog printing process).

He excitedly showed us on his computer photos he took along the Pacific ocean of large rock outcroppings against the ocean — pointing out the detail that you could see in the shadow of the rocks. He was putting together a coffee table book of his photos at the time.

I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly thinks they're a photographer. I think I was weighing his "technical" approach to photography vs. a strictly artistic one. Although, having learned more about Ansel Adams technical chops, perhaps for the best photographers there is overlap.
by sandspar | 2025-06-07 18:35:48+00:00
I support banning porn. You've got coordinated "teams" of men, most of them diagnosable sociopaths, who work as a group to manipulate and destroy teenagers. For every one woman you see on a porn website, there's a network of 10 men who are working as a coordinated team to manipulate her. Most of the young women are from broken homes, many of them are low IQ, and many of them were sexually abused as children by male authority figures. The male pornographer teams work together to push the teenage women into harder and harder stuff, basically stuff that causes more permanent physical and psychological damage. Once the woman has reached her capacity for pain and humiliation, she's cast out of the scene, likely with a drug addiction, likely ending up in prostitution. Saying that porn is "sexual education" or "empowering" or whatever is like saying that factory farming is the same as James Herriot-type farms. They're different in kind: in brutality, scale, and automation.

If you visit a website like Pornhub then you're complicit in this.
by LeFantome | 2025-06-07 18:35:50+00:00
I both agree and disagree with comments about Linux choas and churn. That is true of the overall ecosystem of course. But any given Linux distro can be thought of as its own operating system.

You can choose a Linux distro that reflects your own preferences in terms of pace of innovation. Sure Arch has 100 package updates a day and 30 ways to do everything. However, RHEL (or its compatibles) is not that way. You can go 10 years without changing your config files. Precisely because there are so many distros with so many different curated experiences, you can find a Linux distro that matches your own preferences.

And yet all Linux distros give you the hardware support and things like the OCI ecosystem that only the Linux kernel can provide.

Given the above, I wonder sometimes why you would choose FreeBSD over a Linux distro. But your statement that FreeBSD has more users than many Linux distros is a good one. It is also true that, while distros like Arch or Debian have more software in their repos than FreeBSD, the FreeBSD ports collection has a much larger selection than most distro repos. So, overall, FreeBSD does achieve a nice balance. So, that makes sense to me.
by sitkack | 2025-06-07 18:36:05+00:00
> Large Language Models have proved surprisingly effective at solving a wide range of tasks from just a handful of examples. However, their lack of reliability and modularity limits their capacity to tackle large problems that require many steps of reasoning. In response, researchers have proposed advanced pipelines that leverage domain-specific knowledge to chain smaller prompts, provide intermediate feedback and improve performance through search. However, the current complexity of writing, tuning, maintaining and improving such pipelines has limited their sophistication. We propose oracular programming, a foundational paradigm for building LLM-enabled applications that lets domain experts express high-level problem-solving strategies as programs with unresolved choice points. These choice points are resolved at runtime by LLMs, which generalize from user-provided examples of correct and incorrect decisions. An oracular program is composed of three orthogonal components: a strategy that consists in a nondeterministic program with choice points that can be reified into a search tree, a policy that specifies how to navigate this tree with the help of LLM oracles, and a set of demonstrations that describe successful and unsuccessful search tree navigation scenarios across diverse problem instances. Each component is expressed in a dedicated programming language and can be independently improved or substituted. We address the key programming language design challenges of modularly composing oracular programs and enforcing consistency between their components as they evolve.

https://github.com/jonathan-laurent/delphyne https://jonathan-laurent.github.io/delphyne/

Related work by the author, Jonathan Laurent, on AlphaZero.jl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbLmR0aDumo it has many of the same themes as the paper.
by brudgers | 2025-06-07 18:36:06+00:00
Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers stumbled upon a surplus of Colt's old guns. By arming each Ranger with two five-chambered pistols, they found a tactical advantage against Comanche cavalry.

Crates of revolvers are what enables the Glanton Gang's carnage in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Though the standard literary approach to the book looks for complex allegory and symbolism to explain the narrative, it is a much simpler. At its core, Blood Meridian is an historically based account of technology in the North American Southwest between the War with Mexico and the Civil War.

Of course, even though the Glanton Gang and the Judge are based on historical events it is still a work of fiction.

And a work of literature, and the Judge's apparent magical-realism in matters of life and death is probably best explained as McCarthy writing his role as author into the work...as author, McCarthy has control of who lives and dies in the story (and his immediately prior novel Suttree had autobiographical elements in both its setting, Knoxville, and Suttree leaving for the West at its end just as McCarthy did before writing Blood Meridian).

Of course, that's just my theory and there is a myriad of more conventional literary analysis by famous scholars in the standard positivist ideology of literary progress, so YMMV.
by npteljes | 2025-06-07 18:36:22+00:00
I think several things are mixed up here.

>By subscribing to Premium, you make that job easier for them than when you browse the web without signing in to YouTube, and by extension, Google.

That has nothing to do with paying for YouTube Premium, but rather, with having signed in with the browser into the Google account, and using that to browse the internet as well. There are many cases where this doesn't happen. For example, if the user logs in on their phone, or smart tv, or uses separate browsers or Firefox Containers or such on PC. Also, google tracks without logging in at all, via Analytics, and by other means as well. Premium is the least of the concern here.

>Come on, let's not resort to baseless shaming and blame shifting.

Nah, you come on. Those ads were embedded in the video stream by the content creator, were they not? The onus is entirely on the uploader.

YT Premium is not charity, but a rather cheap subscription to a great service. It makes the Google ads go away, and with that, lifts a mental burden, because advertising is often plain evil.
by righthand | 2025-06-07 18:36:39+00:00
Question: Is there some implied negative critique of Consumer Reports here? I rather enjoy their work and the fact they're reader funded, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I should be aware of that's not clear from it (the way they test or how they accept another type of money). I know they review too many cars (every issue lately features a car banner at the top of the cover).
by cogman10 | 2025-06-07 18:37:42+00:00
> while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs

Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.

The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.

What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.

One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.
by timewizard | 2025-06-07 18:38:10+00:00
> which depends on ad revenue

They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.

Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.

> Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea

While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.
by godelski | 2025-06-07 18:40:01+00:00
You should see Vietnamese! It's decreasing, but it used to be ~40%! Now it's closer to 30[0].

And don't forget that there's Lee[1], Lee[2], Lee[3], Lee[4], and Lee[5]! Which are all different

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(English_surname)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BD_(Vietnamese_surname)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(Korean_surname)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(surname_%E6%9D%8E)

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(surname_%E5%88%A9)
by nchmy | 2025-06-07 18:40:54+00:00
> am pretty much on the side of wordpress in the big dispute

This essentially discredits you completely... A judge already granted an injunction against Matt to revert all his nonsense, which only really happens when the case is overwhelmingly strong against them.

> The parasites will have killed the host.

The problem is that the "host" IS the parasite in this case.
by j_bum | 2025-06-07 18:41:36+00:00
Yep. I have a deep love/hate relationship with R.

This is one of those decisions that I just do not understand. In your mind, why do you imagine a set of improvements won’t be made?

Otherwise, for now, working with Python and R using the reticulate package in Quarto is perfect for my needs.

If the Positron IDE could get in-line plot visualization in Quarto documents like the RStudio IDE has, I’d be the happiest camper.
by timerol | 2025-06-07 18:42:15+00:00
> I hated my pitcher filter long before I knew I didn’t need it. It would clog up any time a bit of rusty water came through the pipes, which, in a 70-year-old building with cast-iron service lines, was often.

I'm a little confused that this is used as an argument against filtering water. I get that iron is not a particularly worrisome contaminant, but I still don't want the occasional "bit of rusty water" showing up in my glass
by beloch | 2025-06-07 18:42:28+00:00
It's moved beyond radio now too.

e.g. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was fuelled by Facebook's engagement algorithms[1].

In Rwanda, they had to create radio stations. Today, all you have to do is generate clicks for Meta.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
by david-gpu | 2025-06-07 18:42:36+00:00
You are making the same argument as somebody else on this thread, as if this was some sort of a gotcha.

I don't go around talking about my porn watching habits for the simple reason that I am sufficiently attuned to social customs to understand that nobody has any interest in them.

You can't be shamed for something you are not ashamed of. If a porn provider made them public for whatever reason, it would not bother me one iota. So, I am asking, genuinely, why would anybody care.

So far the replies are things like "do eet!! lOLLOL" or "it can get you killed", so I have lost interest at this point. After some thought, I guess that some people are unquestioningly ashamed of their sexual preferences, which is sad. Living your life without the burden of shame is much better, as any queer person can tell you. There's nothing wrong with what you like.
by written-beyond | 2025-06-07 18:42:43+00:00
Yeah idk what "gap" every cursor user talks about. I installed cursor, it didn't work on wsl closed that chapter asap. Went to windsurf, enjoyed it but it's credit usage scheme was very confusing, nearly pressed the buy button until I went back to try copilot.

Copilot is good enough, even the free tier gets whatever annoying tasks I don't want to do done. Anything more complex I already have a Gemini and ChatGPT subscription so I just do the old copy paste.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-06-07 18:43:12+00:00
Similar risks regarding removal of sulfate from public water supply, or via filtration.[1] Who knew! Some of us were relying on actual nutrients from the water all along. Pristine water was, and is, a challenge for this cohort.

[1] https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.006372.php
by timewizard | 2025-06-07 18:44:38+00:00
That for loop syntax is horrendous.

So I have two lists, side by side, and the position of items in one list matches positions of items in the other? That just makes my eyes hurt.

I think modern languages took a wrong turn by adding all this "magic" in the parser and all these little sigils dotted all around the code. This is not something I would want to look at for hours at a time.
by adastra22 | 2025-06-07 18:45:36+00:00
San Jose water is absolute trash. There may not be (much) lead, but there are a host of other minerals and contaminants. It’s also a roll of the dice whether you’ll find Legionnaires' disease in your pipes.

I have a whole-house soft-water filter for general use, and for drinking/cooking get 5-gallon bottles filled with RO purified water from The Water Spring on Homestead in Santa Clara. The municipal source for RO water matters, and Santa Clara has the best utilities in the valley.

http://waterspring.com/

Stay safe out there.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-07 18:46:00+00:00
Cliche, but vote with your wallet and look for open source alternatives. Beside chatgpt I think there is a free and open source, viable alternative for your list.

I used to sail the high seas also, back when I was still a Windows user. I switched to Linux completely, and I don't feel the need to pirate anything. I don't even remember when was the last time I pirated any software. Anything I needed ever since I could either install from my package manager, or compile it myself from source.
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-07 18:46:01+00:00
You should provide sources. And after that, you could be presented other sources that present much cleaner environments. It will depend.

...So, what you have said is "Shoes are made in sweatshops: ban shoes".

--

Replying to the dead post below: yes, you have as if declared that "all shoe production is substantially like torturing geese for foie gras", but we note that "producing shoes does not necessarily involve torture", hence "you cannot ban shoemaking because of local abuses".
by wesnerm2 | 2025-06-07 18:47:37+00:00
Atkinson's HyperCard was released in 1987, before the widespread adoption of the web. HyperCard introduced concepts like interactive stacks of cards, scripting, and linking, which were later adopted and expanded upon in the web. Robert Cailliau, who assisted Tim Berners-Lee in developing the first web browser, was influenced by HyperCard's hyperlink concept.
by bradlys | 2025-06-07 18:47:44+00:00
So, his suggestion isn't to buy a water filter system and filters that could last you 10+ years but instead to pay $300 for a test. Retarded. The NYTimes is such a joke and so is this guy. If you're living in newer construction in a place like NYC then you're likely going to be fine. I am in this group currently but I will be moving back to the bay soon and I will have to use my RO system.

If you live in the bay area, you know you have to filter your water because it tastes like metal. We hadn't even had an electric kettle for more than six months in our startup with less than 5 employees using it, the entire bottom of the kettle was covered in 1/4" thick plates of various minerals. Obviously, water differs per city but this was a common occurrence throughout the bay area. The water, of course, always tasted poorly. I'm not even getting into how the housing stock in the bay area is decrepit and full of homes and apartments that are nowhere near up to modern construction standards. You have copper pipes? That's cool but you probably still have lead solder in those pipes. Who knows what kind of supply pipes are coming off the street. Yeah, your local supply probably replaced the ones that run in the street but the ones on your property? Unlikely. Your fittings? Still could have up to 8% lead until 2014. The amount of homes I'd see that still have knob and tube wiring was astounding. You can bet your ass that place still has an abundance of lead all over it.

The poor tasting water in the bay area is reason enough to filter it - even if it wasn't for all these other issues like most homes not being up to modern standards. A lot of these water tests are done at the county's office. It does not reflect what your home will add to your water supply. So, yeah, getting at home test could be nice... for $300... or you could just install a nice RO system that will last many years and give you better water anyway.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 18:47:46+00:00
Eventually, as long as you survive that long.

As has been said repeatedly in this thread, this change is purely a boon for existing big tech companies that now have even less to worry about from startups. It takes a startup 5 years before they'll be playing on an even field with big tech.

> if you’re operating a profitable company

You keep saying this across this thread, and keep ignoring that Section 174 has now redefined "profitable" for tax purposes to include companies who:

* Are in year 1 with no history of expenses to draw on.

* Have spent <900% of their year 1 revenue on software development expenses.

i.e., a startup that earns $1mil and spent $8mil in software dev expenses is only able to deduct 10% * 8mil = $800k of expenses, which means that as far as the government is concerned they made a profit of $200k and owe taxes on that on top of their already-net-loss of $7mil.

You can keep ignoring this fact, but ignoring it doesn't help your case. If you want to argue that this is fine and dandy you need to explain why the above math doesn't prevent new companies from competing on fair terms with big tech.