MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red75prime | 2025-06-28 21:57:06+00:00
> It boggles my mind that a number (an uncomputable number, granted) like BB(748) can be "independent of ZFC".

It's BB(n) that is incomputable (that is there's no algorithm that outputs the value of BB(n) for arbitrary n).

BB(748) is computable. It's, by definition, a number of ones written by some Turing machine with 748 states. That is this machine computes BB(748).

> It feels like a category error or something.

The number itself is just a literally unimaginably large number. Independence of ZFC comes in when we try to prove that this number is the number we seek. And to do that you need theory more powerful than ZFC to capture properties of a Turing machine with 748 states.
by dang | 2025-06-28 21:58:05+00:00
Can you please make your substantive points without putting down the rest of the community? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's much, much (did I say much?) too easy to turn a handful of unpleasant datapoints into an entire theory-of-the-community—almost always one that presents it as somehow depraved or wretched. It's understandable, but it makes for tedious conversation. That's why that guideline is in there.
by neuronexmachina | 2025-06-28 21:59:38+00:00
It's kind of confusing since the LOC serves Congress, but the Librarian of Congress is a President-appointed and Senate-confirmed position. They're supposed to serve for 10-year terms (she was appointed in September 2016) though, and my understanding is it's a open question whether the President can legally fire a LOC before their term is up.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/136-1?hl=en-US
by JamesBarney | 2025-06-28 22:01:41+00:00
If genes that increase schizophrenic risk increases cognitive abilities you should find people who have high polygenic scores for schizophrenia without having schizophrenia test well on these cognitive abilities. I'm not aware of any of data that shows this in a convincing matter. I think I've seen a few small studies but nothing that replicated this on a large scale. And most of the studies show they score worse on cognitive abilities.

The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.

1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring. 2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.
by nobody9999 | 2025-06-28 22:02:41+00:00
You misunderstand the situation.

The SCOTUS ruling is about Preliminary Injunctions[0], which aren't remedies and they aren't permanent.

They serve to prevent harm while litigation progresses. This isn't something new, nor (until very recently) has it been very controversial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction#Preliminary_injunct...
by neepi | 2025-06-28 22:03:05+00:00
I don't like getting involved in political threads but on this I have to.

All information presented is mostly unverified testimony printed verbatim by the press from untrustworthy sources on both sides. It's difficult to tell what is fact and what is not. A lot of early reports in this war turned out to be false information and the rush to immediate news notification rather than quality journalism means that the headline changes context very quickly from the first cut to what people read and remember. (I wrote an extensive suite of software to track this)

Wait and see. Do not judge too early. Take nothing as verbatim from anyone without evidence.

Don't be unknowing partisans of an information war. Veracity takes time.
by twoodfin | 2025-06-28 22:04:25+00:00
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but beyond the deliberate syntactic echoes, JavaScript and Java were the first two languages with (incompatible!) object-oriented data models enforced by the runtime to achieve widespread adoption with longevity (sorry, Smalltalk!)

Python was invented earlier, but didn’t see wide use until later.

And that they were both massively accelerated by the level of interest in the early WWW is undeniable. No other general purpose languages can say that except perhaps Perl, and it slowly burned out.
Show HN: Build Discord bots, earn prizes (18 and under)
by JustSkyfall | 2025-06-28 22:05:22+00:00
Hey HN! I just launched a new program with Hack Club for teens to make Discord/Telegram/Signal bots and win Hetzner credits, domain names and more.

One of the reasons I decided to make this was because the reason I first started learning to code was to make Discord bots for the communities I was in. And after speaking to so many other teens during user interviews, I realised that making bots was a huge reason a lot of others started programming too! So I'm super excited to bring this magic to everyone :)

In case you have questions about legitimacy (totally reasonable! I had them too at first), our finances are fully transparent[1] and we have backing from GitHub and others to run programs for high schoolers globally. If you're 18 or under, I hope to see you participate :)

[1] https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq
by nyrikki | 2025-06-28 22:06:14+00:00
I will admit that I added that cite mostly because of the very real barriers to even learning RUSS.

By the typos etc.. you. can probably also tell I was doing this on mobile, unfortunately as a passenger in a car.

To quote Chaitin’s explanation here:

> In contrast I would like to measure the power of a set of axioms and rules of inference. I would like to be able to say that if one has ten pounds of axioms and a twenty-pound theorem, then that theorem cannot be derived from those axioms.

This paper's notation does seem to be confusing, but I still think it is essentially complete with the above.

"K_{ℱ_{QG}}" would probably most commonly be L in most descriptions, a natural number that is the upper bound of complexity for provable statements in a formal system S

L is not a limit on complexity, it means that there is no formal proof for S that its Kolmogorov complexity exceeds L, for any string.

You can still prove that there are strings far more complex than L with S, and in fact there will often be far more of those strings than the ones equal to or less than L.

It is a limit on what you can prove about those strings with a greaterKolmogorov complexity in S.

Or to rewrite the above:

"There exists a natural number L such that we can't prove the Kolmogorov complexity of any specific string of bits is more than L."

Does that help or did I miss the mark on your objection?
by ndiddy | 2025-06-28 22:06:42+00:00
The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-28 22:07:19+00:00
Normal users don't know what MCP is and will never use an MCP server (knowingly or unknowingly) in their life. They use ChatGPT through the web UI or the mobile app, that's it.

MCP is for technical users.

(Maybe read the link you sent, it has nothing to do with defining a new standard)
by martin-t | 2025-06-28 22:07:25+00:00
Please, don't anthropomorphize it. A model does not "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training data. Basing them on more work performed by other people does not make it less derivative.

It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that just means it gets caught more easily.

LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single person's work just a little, they will get away with it.

Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody should make 1000x more money from it either.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-28 22:08:05+00:00
Unfortunately, I'm not fluent in German and haven't read any of his works. Can't really comment on it.

Broadly, in the English speaking anthropology community, the views you'll find are pretty well summarized by Kelly's Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, if you want English reading.

The vast majority of these groups probably would have been very vocally egalitarian to avoid even the appearance of status and power. Everyone's aware of it, simply to avoid it because of the social repercussions that come from the association and the fact that others can simply leave you.
by bigthymer | 2025-06-28 22:08:17+00:00
> Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.

I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
by int_19h | 2025-06-28 22:09:21+00:00
Yes, this is a good example of how not having the bottom type actually makes things messier overall. Without it you have to make those case-by-case hacks. With it, all the stuff that people actually want to write and that makes sense "just works", and sure, there's more stuff that you could write that doesn't make sense as well, but it's not something that people might end up writing accidentally by mistake and get wrong behavior.
by jdietrich | 2025-06-28 22:09:31+00:00
Israel's neighbours are absolutely unwilling to take large numbers of Palestinians, for reasons that seem perfectly fair.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_insurgency#Gaza_Strip_sp...
by dang | 2025-06-28 22:09:46+00:00
I'm guessing the association is that these are two figures who weren't famous in their lifetimes and became known later.

You're right that putting down one figure is not a good way to introduce another. It would be better to submit the most interesting online article about Vivian Maier, so we could have a thread about her in her own right.

Edit: turns out we've had quite a few! though not very large ones:

What Vivian Maier saw in color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239046 - March 2025 (11 comments)

Vivian Maier, One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930530 - July 2024 (1 comment)

What Vivian Maier Saw in Color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498483 - March 2019 (17 comments)

Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19358138 - March 2019 (5 comments)

Camera Obscura: A biography of street photographer Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214955 - Sept 2017 (5 comments)

Digging Deeper into Vivian Maier's Past - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886162 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

Man Buys 10k Undeveloped Negatives, Discovers Important Street Photographers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750598 - June 2015 (1 comment)

Misplaced: Ethics and the Photographs of Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084386 - Feb 2015 (1 comment)

Vivian Maier's undeveloped film on hold amid legal fight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906719 - Jan 2015 (8 comments)

Vivian Maier: Amazing unknown street photographer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256750 - Feb 2011 (4 comments)

Vivian Maier: A life's work seen for first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127744 - Jan 2011 (51 comments)
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-06-28 22:10:21+00:00
You clearly have an axe to grind, and I'm not particularly interested in proselytizing. If you don't find the Declarative Shadow DOM useful, that's fine!

The example I was responding to was using the Declarative Shadow DOM. My comment was intended to point out the simple fact that the imperative component definition the author was complaining about is superfluous, meaning you can safely remove that entire script from the example.
by ofjcihen | 2025-06-28 22:10:53+00:00
Ha, I’d love to share the optimism that that’s what most people would say but what we’ve seen is the opposite. The more convincing the media (as in media format) is the more people are willing to believe it.

Don’t get me wrong. I hope this level of fake media causes people to stop taking things at face value and dig into the facts but unfortunately it seems we’re just getting worse at it.
by gavinray | 2025-06-28 22:11:03+00:00
At Hasura/PromptQL, we attempted to use Substrait IR through Datafusion for representing query engine plans but found that not all semantics were supported.

We ended up having to roll our own [0], but I still think Substrait is a fantastic idea (someone has to solve this problem, eventually) and it's got a good group of minds consistently working on it, so my outlook for it is bright.

[0] https://hasura.github.io/ndc-spec/reference/types.html#query...
by chipsrafferty | 2025-06-28 22:11:22+00:00
I've done the math, and if the US had given every Palestinian $100,000 to move elsewhere (surely enough to relocate) they could have forcefully relocated every single Palestinian without killing them all. And they would have spent less money than they have on bombs and stuff for Israel.

Still a dick move, but much less so than wiping out an entire group of people.
by ENGNR | 2025-06-28 22:12:04+00:00
This was our experience too. I don’t know how Microsoft gets anything done, their systems were just buggy, poorly documented chaos for us.

We had a boat load of credits, an existing codebase/system we were just trying to move from AWS, and even tried to use their “expert mentor” service or whatever it was called. Their expert had zero knowledge and was immediately clear that they were worse at reading their own docs than us.

Never trying Azure again, and I’d like my wasted hours back please.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-28 22:13:09+00:00
That's why parallel fifths are considered a bad thing. They disappear into the rest of the texture and you lose one stream of independent movement.

Counterpoint is like any other musical technique. If you're a hack you can get it "right" and never say anything expressive with it. But if you have a creative musical sensibility it can add interest and complexity that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
by Fogest | 2025-06-28 22:13:59+00:00
Yeah, I have to agree with this strongly. I worked at a University before and it was only the super old employees still using plain text email clients, everyone else was using Outlook. Most of the reason for not switching was simply due to a refusal to adapt and learn something new. Especially since there are more modern clients that also feature hotkeys/shortcuts that still allow you to do things quickly.

The people who refused to adapt to newer technology also caused slowdowns in other parts of the workplace as anything new that would be implemented in any site/service had to also try to account for people who wanted to do things old ways, instead of the faster new ways. Because they had 100 scripts they'd use to make the old way not suck as much and viewed that as better than learning the new way.

Realistically nobody is 100% productive, and the slight seconds that may be lost using a GUI based email client over something plaintext is insignificant.
by boothby | 2025-06-28 22:14:09+00:00
Individual numbers can be uncomputable! For example, take your favorite enumeration of Turing machines, (T1, T2...) and write down a real number in binary where the first bit is 0 if T1 halts and 1 otherwise, second bit is 0 if T2 halts... clearly this number is real and between 0 and 1, but it cannot be computed in finite time.
by tucnak | 2025-06-28 22:14:14+00:00
Not necessarily! The setup I'm discussing is explicitly non-GPU, and it's not necessarily a TPU either. Any accelerator card with NoC capability will do: the requests are queued/batched from network, trickle through the adjacent compute/network nodes, and written back to network. This is what "compute-in-network" means; the CPU is never involved, main memory is never involved. You read from network, you write to network, that's it. On-chip memory on these accelerators is orders of magnitude larger than L1 (FPGA's are known for low-latency systolic stuff) and the on-package memory is large HBM stacks similar to those you would find in a GPU.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-28 22:14:32+00:00
And indeed they did come to that conclusion - for Dart 2.

Go is the product of like 3 Googlers' tastes. It isn't some perfect answer born out of the experience of thousands of geniuses.

I think they got a lot right - fantastic tooling, avoiding glibc, auto-formatting, tabs, even the "no functional programming so you have to write simple code" thing is definitely a valid position. But I don't think anyone can seriously argue that Go's handling of null is anything but a huge mistake.
by saubeidl | 2025-06-28 22:14:47+00:00
The problem is that AI code is painfully verbose and annoying to read. It's like having a coworker who's kinda shit at his job and who's PRs you have to review and try to get into reasonable shape by requesting changes again and again.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather just write the damn thing properly myself than have to deal with that.
by kragen | 2025-06-28 22:15:56+00:00
From 01979 until about 02000, Oracle's RDBMS software was probably the best in the world, and definitely better than the free-software alternatives like Postgres. (Remember that MariaDB, then named MySQL, didn't become free software until 02000 and didn't support transactions until even later.) For several years after that, it was still the best database for some purposes. And that's true even though the Bastard Database Operators From Hell were present from the very beginning.

SQL is kind of shitty, but the relational database model is so great that it makes up for it. And until the rise of entity component systems, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, all the decent implementations were proprietary software. Separately, although SQL's implementation of transactions is even more broken than its implementation of the relational model, transactional concurrency is also great enough to make up for SQL, and, again, all the usable implementations used to be proprietary.
by baxtr | 2025-06-28 22:16:32+00:00
Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:

If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.

So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.

I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-28 22:16:36+00:00
I think people should study the RCCX gene cluster and link to giftedness more, I have TNXB SNPs which results in hEDS, but C4 SNPs have a similar effect and is likely to result in Schizophrenia. There are some cross over symptoms such as dopamine dysregulation and flat affect. I think dysautonomia and auto-immune plays a big part. Our lifestyles are very different than they used to be and this could be exacerbating auto-immune issues and as we get better at treating auto-immune conditions I expect we'll get better at treating Schizophrenia.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-28 22:17:00+00:00
But that's the thing - each generation struggles with whether some new thing is a number. We're typically very inclusive, accepting imaginary numbers and even weirder things like surreal numbers, which we definitely can't count.

But as someone in this generation, I see a good argument for rejecting the big busy beaver numbers, which are provably outside of the realm of calculating with all the resources of our universe's runtime, from being fully accepted as numbers, any more than the first uninteresting number [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
by smt88 | 2025-06-28 22:17:22+00:00
Why would we think it did?

The slogan harkens back to something like the 1950s (or at least an imaginary version of that decade) when corporations had lower margins and domestic manufacturing was a high percentage of GDP.

Anyone who thought kicking immigrants out of the country would be good for business was either blinded by nostalgia or had no understanding of the modern economy.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-28 22:17:33+00:00
> But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.

It is possible to find work in a different area at the company for such in-between times.

For example at the company where I work, a (very capable) secretary whose original role was not needed anymore, but for who there existed a very role in the future was for the in-between time assigned to assist some other department in their reporting duties to regulating authorities.
by Fogest | 2025-06-28 22:17:45+00:00
I had to suffer with many dinosaurs in a University I worked at, and they did in fact do pretty much everything you mentioned. Was a pain in the ass to upgrade/improve sites while trying to make sure these sites could operate without JavaScript. It was such a waste of resources just for a few people who refused to learn new things. The old way wasn't really faster, they just refused to learn the new way.

One of them even was browsing many webpages using a command line based browser rather than just using something like Firefox.