MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-06-23 15:05:54+00:00
I guess we just fundamentally disagree with how using git should work. I don't agree at all that using git for a public repo somehow implies that you're committing to preserving every single branch in perpetuity just because the tool can support it. If it's confusing, I'd argue it's from mistakenly inferring that others are conveying intent by publishing public feature branches.
by viraptor | 2025-06-23 15:06:25+00:00
> Humans are a) alot more capable than language models

That's a scale of capability, not architecture difference. A human kid is less capable than an adult, but you wouldn't classify them as thinking using different mechanisms.

> b) humans do not rely solely on the statistical relationships of language tokens. (...) Language tokens require organized language.

That's just how you provide data. Multimodal models can accept whole vectors describing images, sounds, smells, or whatever else - all of them can be processed and none of them are organised language.

> that our brains are somehow more closely related to silicon-based integrated circuits than they are to those of a Gorilla

That's entirely different from a question about functional equivalence and limit of capabilities.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-23 15:06:31+00:00
You have to repeat yourself because you're adding information when you state it again. Compare:

> if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there

with

> we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas

As in: Ignore vs Delay. It's clear in hindsight, but wasn't on first reading.
by jp57 | 2025-06-23 15:06:53+00:00
I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available."

Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-23 15:07:18+00:00
> o we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming?

A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.

The interesting gist is that Luddites were misrepresented then and continue to be misrepresented today. The Luddite movement isn't conservative nor regressive, it is human!
by close04 | 2025-06-23 15:07:20+00:00
> Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law.

In this case I have a wonderful bridge to sell you.

Of course they can. It's called lobbying and it's literally aimed at convincing representatives to support certain policies or laws. When a lot of money is involved it's no different from buying those laws.

> As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.

Of course you don't. It's why I literally said you "don’t trust reading a [history] book". History isn't limited to what and where you lived. I shouldn't need to nudge you in the right direction.

> So far I haven't heard anyone

Going back to those books, you haven't heard a lot of things. You have such strong opinions despite (or maybe because) showing so little knowledge or understanding of things in the present or in history. On top of the couple of things I pointed out just by skimming your comment, you compare using the public for the apprehending people on FBI's most wanted list with people helping catch the dreaded "engine idler".
by scuol | 2025-06-23 15:07:32+00:00
It's basically like having N of the most prolific LoC producing colleagues who don't have a great mental model of how the language works that you have to carefully parse all of their PRs.

Honestly, I've seen too many fairly glaring mistakes in all models I've tried that signal that they can't even get the easy stuff right consistently. In the language I use most (C++), if they can't do that, how can I trust them to get all the very subtle things right? (e.g. very often they produce code that holds some form of dangling references, and when I say "hey don't do that", they go back to something very inefficient like copying things all over the place).

I am very grateful they can churn out a comprehensive test suite in gtest though and write other scripts to test / do a release and such. The relief in tedium there is welcome for sure!
by falcor84 | 2025-06-23 15:08:20+00:00
> It destroys the purpose of humanity. We have so many amazing abilities to create art and music and just appreciate what’s around us

Here's my take on this - AI isn't destroying art. Whoever wants to create art can go ahead and make art, with better and cheaper tooling than ever. What AI is "destroying" is some of the willingness that companies have to pay artists.

I would argue that these companies, who are willing to switch all of their "art" needs over to AI never wanted "art" in the first place, but rather just wanted "content" to "plug a hole". Companies that still want to make an artistic statement will continue to pay good artists. But it was a bit of a quirk of history that there was such a high demand for art-like commercial work over the last couple of decades.
by londons_explore | 2025-06-23 15:09:42+00:00
Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!

The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter.

The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water.

The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years.

In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.
by vardump | 2025-06-23 15:09:45+00:00
It's interesting how arbitrarily CPU bitness is defined. Sometimes it's the register size, sometimes data bus width and sometimes the address width.

6502 has 8 bit registers, 8 bits wide data bus, and 16 bit addresses. Only PC register is 16-bit, but 6502 does have a zero page indirect 16-bit addressing mode.
by api | 2025-06-23 15:09:48+00:00
That's a genre. Genre boundaries always shift and are always a bit fuzzy. Most great works could be put in more than one genre.

I'd say literary fiction is a genre that focuses on the craft of writing, usually through either poetic prose or deep character study. There are bonus points if the topic or style is challenging, so you get tropes that lead in this direction: deep studies of complicated often problematic characters (Lolita), deep studies of society (Pride and Prejudice), unusual plot structures (Cloud Atlas), experimental prose style (Ulysses), etc. These are literary tropes because they're challenging to write -- in terms of the craft of writing itself. The most literary of literary fiction is "writer's writing" in the sense that some experimental jazz is "musician's music."

And of course you can have deliberate genre crossovers. Literary sci-fi has been popular lately, like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or the already mentioned Cloud Atlas.
by jppope | 2025-06-23 15:09:57+00:00
Totally understand that the article is romanticizing the old web, which I do miss. But I do want to mention my two favorite trees, one is gone now.

My first favorite tree was an American Chestnut that I used to walk past on the way home from elementary school. For a time there was a slate sidewalk underneath the tree and the chestnuts themselves were a constant annoyance, but the tree was big, beautiful and shady, it made my neighbor's yard look really nice. I was shocked to learn later how fortunate I was to experience a real American Chestnut that had survived the blight (reddit even has a sub dedicated to finding survivors: https://www.reddit.com/r/americanchestnut/). I went back to try to find pictures of the tree and its since been razed. Presumably it died of blight, and the owners replaced it.

My second favorite tree is a somewhat famous Giant Sequoia I found after moving out west. I'm not doing disclose the location or the tree's name because its too easy to figure out where I am. The tree is the largest in town but not by much... it does stand out though. Without knowing its species the tree got me curious. I found out that it was actually a Sequoia! this surprised me because I thought they were relegated to small areas inside of national parks - NOT TRUE! Finding this tree led me to be intensely curious about all the other trees in town- what else was I missing? so I spent 6 months going on morning walks with a tree identification book. I met all sorts of people, and learned a ton about the trees. Tree identification is super hard by the way... I'm still getting my feet underneath me even after all that time. I was able to identify ~30 native species though, which was really cool!

I'd love to hear about other people's favorite trees.
by Bnichs | 2025-06-23 15:09:58+00:00
The number isn't the point, the messaging of "this number is science" is. If it were delivered clearly as "we done have all the information, but our best judgement based on a, b, c says the number is X" that would be far better and most of all honest than "it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces"

Does that make sense to you?
by hogepodge | 2025-06-23 15:10:11+00:00
I'd say less abandoned, and more deferred.

It was highly aspirational goal, and practically speaking it's better right now to take inspiration from Python and have stronger integration hooks into the language (full disclosure, I work at Modular). We've specifically stopped using the "superset of Python" language to be more accurate about what the language is meant for right now.
by yrro | 2025-06-23 15:10:14+00:00
> For some reason, instead of only applying its contents to the user environment for the child process like any sane person would do, they are trusting its values for the library calls in the privileged parent itself.

The only safe way to use pam_env's `user_readenv` parameter is as the final rule of `type=session`. This behaves as you'd expect, affecting the child process only.

It appears that openSUSE enables the option for other rule types (auth and/or account), in which case it affects the parent process as well. Oops!

For the record, user_readenv has been disabled since:

commit 4c430f6f8391555bb1b7b78991afb20d35228efc Author: Tomas Mraz <tm@t8m.info> Date: Mon Oct 11 14:24:30 2010 +0000 Relevant BUGIDs: Purpose of commit: bugfix Commit summary: --------------- 2010-10-11 Tomas Mraz <t8m@centrum.cz> * modules/pam_env/pam_env.c: Change default for user_readenv to 0. * modules/pam_env/pam_env.8.xml: Document the new default for user_readenv.

... PAM 1.1.3. And it's been deprecated for a while, to be removed in a future release entirely.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-23 15:10:21+00:00
I am absolutely startled by the amount of AfW and BSW apologism on this thread.

At some point I have to wonder if this is even organic - especially given that companies like Upvote Club have openly advertised being able to bypass the bot detectors on HN. And nation state bots have occasionally been on HN - one similar nation state backed disinfo network that Meta cracked down on in 2023 was posting on HN as well.
by lotharcable | 2025-06-23 15:10:28+00:00
Not a security expert here...

But Discretionary Access Controls is a standard part of OS design for a very long time.

It is certainly possible to go back to DOS-days and run all your programs without controls as terminate and stay resident programs. But that would be awfully inconvenient.

The concept of "users" isn't just for human users. It is used to do things like prevent your web server from being able to read and edit your password files and such things.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-06-23 15:10:36+00:00
Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-06-23 15:10:46+00:00
I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem.

Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the convenient option, or people will actively seek out unsafe but convenient options.
by anon-3988 | 2025-06-23 15:10:51+00:00
Man, I know it is a meme but Japan simply have mastered "aesthetics". It is especially incredible given that they achieved this in an urban area.

For example, consider the vines that are growing on that shed. Is that dirty? Should we clean them to get a pristine shed? Yes, you have to sweep the floor everyday to clean the dust, but should you cut down that small plant growing between the cracks of your building? Or the vines overtaking the roof? I think if you answers no to this, then you understand that sense of aesthetics.

For some people tho, they think its a bad thing (1), which I simply don't understand? I don't understand how people can willingly spend every couple of hours every week to trim their lawn to a pristine, perfect cube of grass. Is this beautiful? I think not. In my apartment, I have trees growing from the cracks of the building, and I think that's beautiful.

I don't know how they do it, it is not simply just being clean. I think parts of it is "allowing nature to take its course" which gives a typical structure depth and age.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/comments/vs1n0n/help_wh...
by achillesheels | 2025-06-23 15:11:09+00:00
“It didn’t take long for me to discover that these lands were systemically stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism.”

Everyone is playing by the same rules…this includes Natives and their own capturing of soil…this feigned ignorance of the progress of human sentience through capturing land and improving it is deceitful.
by nodesocket | 2025-06-23 15:12:00+00:00
Just set this on my MiniPC running Debian which runs Jellyfin.

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Look for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add: i915.mitigations=off

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet i915.mitigations=off"

Then:

sudo update-grub sudo reboot

To verify:

cat /proc/cmdline
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-23 15:12:07+00:00
Not banned, taxed. These are behavioral economic nudges to encourage healthier outcomes. You can still get a Coca Cola, but the economics shouldn’t make it your primary source of hydration, right? If you’re expecting “will power” to fix this, the evidence is robust [1] that is not going to happen.

We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917096
by kennywinker | 2025-06-23 15:12:14+00:00
It’s possible that there would be unintended bad consequences. But we can try it out and course correct if that happens. Unless there is a specific bad that will definitely happen, why should we be afraid to try things?

I’ll answer my own question: we are afraid to try new things legally because gov is unresponsive. As an example, the majority of the US has supported cannabis legalization since at least 2012. If it takes a decade and counting for the law to change to follow the will of the people, trying new things risks locking in bad policy for decades / forever.

But this law’s already been passed, so if it’s bad and should be changed we’ll need proof of specific harm
by maxerickson | 2025-06-23 15:12:29+00:00
The wheat starch in pasta is rapidly converted to sugar during digestion.

Like there is probably some argument to be made about satiety, but I assure you, it is quite possible to consume excess calories in the form of pasta.

And then corn subsidies mostly benefit livestock and ethanol producers, processed food products are a small portion of the end use of field corn.
by leviathant | 2025-06-23 15:12:36+00:00
Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?

They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.

Choose your battles wisely.

I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
by loph | 2025-06-23 15:12:49+00:00
It was the interoperability of X Window System devices that enabled this.

Your X server (e.g. a X terminal) could display applications running on a variety of other vendors' hardware and operating systems. The specification enabled this interoperability. Apps running on SunOS could display on VAX workstations, and vice versa (as long as you had TCP/IP installed!)

The advantage X terminals had was that they were relatively inexpensive to buy and operate. Most did not require management, however the CPU cost moved into a computer room and you needed a pretty fast network to get reasonable performance.
by intuitionist | 2025-06-23 15:13:16+00:00
> Now the question I ask is: how was it distilled? what chemicals were used in the process? are those chemicals safe? and a million other related questions. With regular pot there's none of that.

You absolutely should be asking those questions about “regular pot” as well. AIUI concentrates are among the bestselling and most profitable products in legal states, and they use uncertain chemicals of questionable provenance even if the delta-9 THC is 100% natty. But even if you’re just buying flower you could reasonably be concerned about pesticides or mold [1].

I think there are some quite good reasons to oppose cannabis legalization (for example, it’s made the super-high-potency concentrates which are associated with bad outcomes much more widely available) and it’s possible your own culture war or other biases are getting in your way here. But there are also lots of good arguments in favor of course.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/marijuana-mold-contami...
by saghm | 2025-06-23 15:13:25+00:00
Yep, I don't disagree with you about that. To me, the cost of having to stick with a workflow that prevents it (which you describe) is still worth it to have a clean history without merge commits, but I totally understand that this is a matter of personal preference, and having a consistent workflow for everyone working on a project together matters more. Right now, I'm working on a team that uses merge commits for the first time in a while, and it's definitely taking a bit of time to get used to again, but I'm still committing to it (pun intended!)
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-06-23 15:13:28+00:00
I've never been to Japan, but lived in Norway for a couple years and I always felt like they had mastered western "aesthetics". Norwegians seemed to really appreciate Japanese/zen styles as well. One thing I always found interesting is most homes in Norway will have fresh flowers, despite living in a climate not conducive to that at all.

They have this word called koselig that we don't have in English that means cozy plus a lot more things, and these Japanese coffee shops really do embody that word.
by jcynix | 2025-06-23 15:13:47+00:00
IIRC Huxley became rather sceptical in his later works regarding "eugenics" or in general "scientific dictatorship" as a solution to the social problems of humanity.

I may have to re-read his work "Ends and Means" sometime later, but I'm quite sure that calling him an "eugenicist" is too easy.

EDIT: fixed typo
by viraptor | 2025-06-23 15:14:34+00:00
You seem to be taking about some kind of free will and perfect independence, not autonomy as normally understood. Agents can have autonomy within the environment they have access to. We talk about autonomous vehicles for example, where we want them to still stay within some action boundaries. Otherwise we'd be discussing metaphysics. It's not like we can cross physical/body boundaries just because we've got autonomy.

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

> An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.

The same idea is used for agents - they're autonomous because they independently choose actions with a specific or vague goal.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-06-23 15:14:59+00:00
I’ve never understood the energy complaint. It’s a legitimate complaint for right now.

But humans are able to exercise a ton of thinking with remarkably low energy levels a day. And the calories of energy humans consume are also used primarily for physical mechanisms like movement, breathing, etc. so the energy requirements for pure thought is even less.

Why should improved AGIs in the future consume any more energy? Besides, AGIs across the world can communicate with each other. So once one AI computes something theoretically it should never need to do it again. It can tap into the answer saved by some different AI at some point in the recent past further reducing energy needs.

I really don’t see why AI energy consumption should be too high.
by cbfrench | 2025-06-23 15:15:48+00:00
This is true. I’m sure most dispensationalists consider themselves “literalists” even though they require charts upon charts to demonstrate how their “literalism” isn’t just creative interpretation. And besides, “literalism” is just a modern framework; none of the Church fathers (or most interpreters of Scripture for over 1900 years) were literalists in the sense it’s meant today. And heck, read the Sermon on the Mount to see that Jesus himself probably wouldn’t have qualified as a “literalist” lol.
by j-pb | 2025-06-23 15:15:58+00:00
The current naivite of the scientific community is exhausting.

As if the current political climate isn't going to result in the sabotage of scientific infrastructure if some state actor decides that it could provide some economic or military advantage. (hello three body problem)

DOIs should have been hashes, that would have been cheaper, more resilient, and more covenient. But sadly librarians tend to re-build paper workflows digitally instead of building digitally native infrastructure.

Blockchain would be fine as a timestamp service to replace publishers, although a consensus based system hosted by the worlds libraries would also be fine for that purpose and require a lot less machinery.