MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lisper | 2025-06-20 19:26:44+00:00
> what constitutes "going far wrong" is not meaningful under skeptical assumptions.

I can be more precise about this. It means that the predictions I make on the basis of this assumption are very likely to be correct.

> Skepticism is irrational

No, it isn't. The vast majority of my beliefs about the world are not a result of direct observations, but nth-hand accounts. I believe, for example, that the orbit of Mercury precesses, but not because I've ever measured it myself, but rather because I heard it from a source that I consider credible. But assessing the credibility of a source is hard and error-prone, especially nowadays. There is always the possibility that a source is mistaken or actively trying to deceive you. And even for things you observe first-hand there are all kinds of cognitive biases you have to take into account. So skepticism is warranted.

> I begin from a position of natural trust toward the senses

That will lead you astray because your senses are unreliable.

> if your explanation involves contradiction of what you observe

But it doesn't. At worst it involves a contradiction of what I think I observe.
by kazinator | 2025-06-20 19:26:44+00:00
I can't read anything that is too far out of my fovea. If I look at a word in the middle of a sentence, I can read it, and the two immediately adjacent words. After that, the ability rapidly declines. If the next words after those two are simple like "and" and "the", I can still read them while staring at the middle word. Beyond that, I am aware that there are letters and words, but no decoding takes place. If something fits on the screen, it's nice that I don't have to scroll around, but I certainly cannot see it all at once in a semantic way, only as a picture.
by andoando | 2025-06-20 19:27:33+00:00
I just fail to see the point. I could see the use for some convenient functions for array manipulation, but why not just implement these as a library in any existing language?

>This allows one to think faster and further than they could encumbered but a heavier syntax.

How does the programming language limit your ability or speed of thinking, lest when the fundamental data types and operations are the same? The hard work is always knowing what to implement. Saving some keystrokes for reversing an array or whatever other array manipulation is hardly a game changer.
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 19:27:39+00:00
This is the story of the American public sector. Voters push them to outsource X Y Z to the private sector because clearly public organization X sucks. The private sector is greedy and a black box, so they're basically going to bleed the tax payers dry because they have no accountability to anyone. And the added complexity of hops between communication just burns money. And now the military is paying 150 dollars for a shovel.

The American public is allergic to just considering public actors as job programs. If the MTA would just keep everything in-house that can be a real boon to the local economy. But no, we have to give those jobs to some fuck ass companies made up primarily of salespeople who are going to make big claims and then proceed to run every project overtime and over budget.
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-20 19:27:42+00:00
>the idea that building "high-end" housing does nothing is just wrong.

Not sure anyone said this. The parent said it does nothing to solve homelessness and unless the homeowners are housing homeless people in their mansions, I think they're by and large correct. And you still have to contend with the luxury homes taking away future building potential by occupying a ridiculous amount of finite land that a county has available.

People call it a housing crisis for a reason. You don't solve a crisis by championing something by arguing "hey, it's not nothing" anymore than you would attempt to solve a famine crisis by dripping a couple of drops of water in a few malnourished kids' mouthes.
by realityfactchex | 2025-06-20 19:29:15+00:00
For anyone passionate about orbital dynamics: IMO it would be great to get more eyes on and thorough critiques of the Tychos model put forth at https://www.tychos.space where there is a book, visual simulator, forum, etc.

The sincere claim put forth appears to be that Tycho Brahe was almost right, and that something like this is in fact true:

- The planets except for the Earth orbit around the Sun - The Sun orbits around the Earth - The Earth has its own small orbit

It is pretty dense information, but seems important if true. I believe that the Tychos model is claimed to be just as consistent with observation as the conventional model, if not more so (with some arguments in the favor of the Tychos model as more likely, which escape me).

The best intro to cut to the chase may be at https://book.tychos.space/chapters/4-intro-tychos but I think that the writers would do well to summarize their main arguments somewhere.
by pessimist | 2025-06-20 19:29:26+00:00
Killian civilians in war has been completely normalized. Even in highly visible conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. People just shrug and move on.

Political discourse has lost all sense of decency. Senators, the VP and POTUS all routinely mock and demean their opponents and laugh even at murder. Arrests are made by unknown masked men with assault rifles.

AI is simply irrelevant to this - humans are selfish, tribal and ugly.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-06-20 19:29:42+00:00
> Imagine having to do math with no symbols. that means 1+1 is now one plus one. Now imagine having to do that in the context of graduate levels mathematics.

That's a good way to put it. It's pretty hard to convey this to someone who hasn't actively tried and solved real problems in such languages though. You don't realize how much the "words get in the way" (as Granny Weatherwax would say) until you give an array language a good chance.

Another pop-culture quote that resonated in this regard is from The Matrix:

> Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.

All I see is range, sum-over, divide. The symbols turn into the concepts directly in your head - not as conscious translation, but in the way I imagine Chinese or Japanese kanji characters translate directly in the head of a native speaker.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-20 19:29:51+00:00
> system-level oversight—a UN-backed AI Influence Observatory

> The Observatory should maintain and continually update an open, searchable database of verified influence-operation incidents, allowing researchers, journalists, and election authorities to track patterns and compare response effectiveness across countries in real time. To guarantee both legitimacy and skill, its governing board would mix rotating member-state delegates, independent technologists, data engineers, and civil society watchdogs.

We've really found ourselves in a pickle when the only way to keep Grandma from being psychologically manipulated is to have the UN keep a spreadsheet of Facebook groups she's not allowed to join. Honestly what a time to be alive.
by xp84 | 2025-06-20 19:29:51+00:00
This is such bunk. People aren’t “programmed,” they just don’t agree with you. And people being poorly-informed is not new, and it doesn’t make elections “non-free” or make them not count.

I don’t want to get into a political debate here, but the DNC can thank itself for Trump since they coronated (with no primary!) a candidate who dropped out before Iowa when she ran in the primaries because she had zero support because no one liked her. They also basically ran on a platform of “if you don’t like our policies, you’re a bad person.” I’d imagine more than enough people to swing the election either way pulled the lever for Trump as an explicit rebuke of the DNC’s disdain for anyone outside their orthodoxy.

Anyway. When a party besides the Trump party remembers that persuading the rest of the public (not insulting them) is necessary to win elections, that’s when we’ll have relief from one-man rule by that jackass.
by andoando | 2025-06-20 19:29:58+00:00
I mean its not that bad.

You just go right to left. 1/2 applied to x^ so x^(0.5), _ is floor so floor of x^0.5. ! creates an array of numbers up until floor of x^0.5. 2+ just adds 2 to every number, and then I lost interest in learning the rest lol.

Yeah I like the python equivalent def is_prime(x): return x > 1 and all(x % i != 0 for i in range(2, x))
by brazzy | 2025-06-20 19:30:27+00:00
The messiah theme is much stronger in the manga. Not just the resurrection: she collects followers, at least one a converted enemy, by showing an all-encompassing love and helping those in need wherever she can.

On at least one occasion someone explicitly addresses her as "you, who would be a messiah". And no, that's not a translation artifact; the word is 救世主.

Of course, it is also subverted in some ways, most explicitly in the end, where Nausicaä destroys a plan for a new, better world, in favor of an escape from prophecies and grand plans.
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-20 19:30:38+00:00
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-06-20 19:30:43+00:00
Iverson's Notation as a Tool for Thought is an argument in favor of the above. I don't think it's flatly wrong, but I am skeptical of the more strong forms of it.

I think it's important to remember that APL was born of an era where having a keyboard dedicated to a single programming language was reasonable.

I think there's a lot of middle ground between the more line noise syntax of say jsoftware, or a pure lisp style prefix notation.

This is a little snippet from Stevan Apter, a k programmer that has an old school home page with a lot of array language curiosities:

https://nsl.com/papers/kisntlisp.htm

If you look at the pseudo code example at the end using words vs ascii glyphs, I think that's quite readable while also concise. It uses k's bracket notation to easily specify slices of nested arrays.

Interestingly kxsoftware themselves went this route with q (Stevan's essay predates this I believe). There they kept nearly all the power of k but exposed it va a more approachable sql like syntax.
by kazinator | 2025-06-20 19:31:24+00:00
In this context it just means "one parameter function".

It looks like every apparently free variable in a Klong brace expression is actually bound as a function parameter.

This is so in basic algebra in that we can think of, say, x^2 + y^2 as a two parameter function, even without writing out the full f(x, y) = x^2 + y^2 notation with the f(x, y) head.

A two parameter function would be called "dyadic" in the jargon which calls one argument functions "monadic".
by Manuel_D | 2025-06-20 19:32:58+00:00
This is one of the more recent studies: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8039393/

The desistence rate for this study was 87%. Most other studies fall in the range of >70%

> At the time of follow-up, using different metrics (e.g., clinical interview, maternal report, dimensional measurement of gender dysphoria, a DSM diagnosis of GID, etc.), these studies provided information on the percentage of boys who continued to have gender dysphoria (herein termed “persisters”) and the percentage of boys who did not (herein termed “desisters”).2 Of the 53 boys culled from the relatively small sample size studies (Bakwin, Davenport, Kosky, Lebovitz, Money and Russo, Zuger), the percentage classified as persisters was 9.4% (age range at follow-up, 13–30 years). In Green (47), the percentage of persisters was 2% (total n = 44; Mean age at follow-up, 19 years; range, 14–24); in Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis (52), the percentage of persisters was 20.3% (total n = 59; Mean age at follow-up, 19.4 years; range, 16–28); and in Steensma et al. (51), the percentage of persisters was 29.1% (total n = 79; Mean age at follow-up, 16.1 years; range, 15–19). Across all studies, the percentage of persisters was 17.4% (total N = 235), with a range from 0 to 29.1%.3

You can find studies that find a very low rate of desistence, in the single digits. But those are among children that were put on puberty blockers.
by youworkwepay | 2025-06-20 19:33:15+00:00
The value of vibe coding isn't that it writes good or sustainable code. It's that you can build a sufficiently non-shitty prototype of a concept as a non IT expert to validate the use case and secure proper assistance.

From a change leadership perspective, walking in the door with a shitty prototype beats pitching vaporware every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And the fact amateurs can deliver (basic, crappy) "things" without budget accelerates growth.

My first projects were 80% copied off Github and some intro tutorials. Know what? They still work. We banked seven figures off of them so far...
by timr | 2025-06-20 19:33:48+00:00
> It hasn't panned out that way at all however, it's just great for everyone.

Oh, come now. Try a little bit harder to see the other side.

Live here, don't have a car -- haven't had one for 20 years. Ride the subway every day.

I freely acknowledge that the roads feel less crowded, but it makes no practical difference to me. As far as I am concerned, the entire thing is a small net loss, in that it's another tax, and on the rare occasions I do actually need a car or a service that requires a car (plumber, mover, etc.) it costs me more.

I look at congestion pricing purely as a question of "do I consent to another tax for the MTA?", and when framed in that way, the answer is emphatically "No."
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-20 19:33:54+00:00
3 things.

0. The people must take their governments back from corporate technofeudal overlords.

1. Society must shift away from lionizing unbounded capitalism.

2. Workers must form employee-owned co-ops for more stability and better morale and share profits of their labor more fairly rather than extracting maximum amounts for the ownership class that will fire them whenever it suits them.
by h2zizzle | 2025-06-20 19:34:08+00:00
>if your candidate could only win by having the moderate vote split five ways, you're the ones doing political maneuvering.

That's highly presumptive. Supporters of the other candidates made their initial choices for reasons. If they could have chosen someone other than Biden, they would have. The DNC purposely induced a panicked run to their chosen candidate (when they weren't calling heads instead of tails). That's as much a vote as the decision which door to exit out of after someone yells, "Fire," is a choice. To belabor the analogy: there was no fire. They pushed everyone to the leave the way that led to the concession stand instead of to the parking lot.

On the other hand, if your candidate can only win by forcing his ideological rivals out of the race with backdoor quid-pro-quo deals, not only is he now corrupt, he is still definitely only winning through political maneuvering.

>Polls always showed that Biden was the Obama guy.

Clarence Thomas and Strom Thurmond.
by lurk2 | 2025-06-20 19:34:24+00:00
I’ve been hearing about the dangers of influence campaigns like Russian bot farms, deep fakes, and LLMs for the last ten years now. While these sorts of papers go out of their way to use the word “democratic,” it always seems to be motivated by a (not-very-compelling) idea that right wing populism is an essentially artificial creation rather than an organic backlash to the excesses of the Obama era. The scale of these influence campaigns may have increased in the last five years, but the (common, in these circles) idea that Russia stole the election with a few million posts on Twitter is silly and itself begins to look like an attempt to implement anti-democratic measures that would allow established authorities to pull the ladder up behind them.

The authors of this paper have at acknowledged that there are (practical, more so than moral) limitations to strict identification systems (“Please insert your social security number to submit this post”) and cite a few (non-US) examples of instances where these kinds of influence campaigns have ostensibly occurred. The countermeasures similarly appear to be reasonable, being focused on providing trust scores and counter-narratives. What they are describing, though, might end up looking a lot like a Reddit-style social credit system which has the impact of shutting out dissenting opinions. One of my favorite things about Hacker News over Reddit is that I can view and vouch for posts that have been flagged dead by other users. 95% of the time the flags were warranted (low-effort comments, vulgarity, or spam), but every once in a while I come across an intriguing comment that others preferred to be censored.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-20 19:34:39+00:00
You seem to have skipped over your initial citation of it being invalid syntax, to say nothing of the sibling comment to yours also using that opaque syntax

As for why I linked to "some random guy," that's because the Hashicorp people in their infinite wisdom didn't ship any rendering binary so some kind soul had to glue one to the official sdk https://github.com/tmccombs/hcl2json/blob/v0.6.7/go.mod#L8

I hear you about JSON might not be a goal, but I can tell you that Terraform accepts .json files just as much as it accepts .hcl files so that sane people can generate them, because sane people cannot generate HCL https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/syntax/js...
by kulahan | 2025-06-20 19:34:56+00:00
I think I’m up to like 8 canvas bags, significantly thicker yet still significantly plastic, which I continue to forget at home.

These laws have absolutely increased my carbon emissions, and I think o saw it’s like 10,000 visits to offset the carbon difference? AKA it’s more intensive initially to build things that last longer, idea being that you offset it over time

I’d be surprised if I got 80k grocery store trips left in my LIFE!
by Reason077 | 2025-06-20 19:36:06+00:00
> ”Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines.”

Interestingly, in London’s case we do not get this particular benefit from the congestion charge zone, because congestion charging ends at 6pm! So all the boys eager to show off their hot, loud cars still show up on a Friday or Saturday night.
by Retric | 2025-06-20 19:36:12+00:00
There are deterministic solutions to the three body problem or the double pendulum in Newtonian mechanics.

We can’t measure things to arbitrary precision due to quantum mechanics, but Philosophy isn’t bound by the actual physical universe we inhabit. Arbitrary physical models allow for the possibility of infinite precision in measurement and calculation resulting in perfect prediction of future states forever. Alternatively, you could have a universe of finite precision (think Minecraft) which also allows for perfect calculation of all future states from initial starting conditions.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-20 19:36:32+00:00
They come with a charger case that’s pretty pocketable. I had some with transition lenses so they weren’t full time sunglasses

I returned them cause I didn’t like forcing a camera into everyone’s face unannounced and the photos it took weren’t very good (vertical pics cutoff most stuff in my field of view, weird choice of focal length. Maybe with two cameras they could have a wide angle and a telephoto but the ray bans at least just had the one.
by roughly | 2025-06-20 19:36:39+00:00
Just to call it explicitly, because I think this is one of the big points of misunderstanding between pro- and anti-nuclear people (take that as a very rough categorization and not an accusation) -

There is a difference between “something can be done correctly” and “something is likely to be done correctly.” Nuclear advocates I’ve read tend to argue the former - it’s possible to have safe reactors, it’s possible to keep the waste sequestered safely, there’s not a technical reason why nuclear is inherently unsafe. Skeptics tend to be making a different argument - not that it’s not possible to do things safely and correctly, but that in our current late-capitalist milieu, it’s almost impossible that we _will_. It’s not an argument about capability, it’s an argument about will and what happens in bureaucracies, both public and private.
by argentinian | 2025-06-20 19:36:39+00:00
In Bruno the config also is just a text file.

I was using Rest Client and was very happy with it, but once I needed Rest Client to use my computer's NO_PROXY env variable to avoid using the proxy for a certain url, and I found it was not possible to do that with Rest Client. That's the only reason I had to look for an alternative tool. After an analysis, I liked Bruno and Hurl. I didn't try hurl yet.
by zahlman | 2025-06-20 19:36:58+00:00
>If you introduced congestion pricing where I live, commute times for people driving cars might go down even more as people are priced out of driving, but there aren't enough buses so you would simply be left with no viable options.

What evidence do you have that there physically aren't enough buses?

Here in Toronto, it often happens that the buses move too slowly, because they aren't prioritized over other traffic. They keep a slow, irregular schedule which allows too many new passengers to accumulate at a bus stop in between, a positive feedback loop.

Extra buses don't help as much in this situation as might naively be expected. The first bus gets overloaded while the second nearly tailgates behind, with far fewer passengers. The second bus should be able to overtake and pick up the passengers for the next stop (or the first one should bypass it if nobody's disembarking there), but this can be hard to arrange with cars in the way and passengers on the first bus already getting impatient.

But if the existing service is only every half hour or something like that, then yes of course that adds quite a bit to mean transit time. And yes you probably do fix that mainly by adding more buses and carrot-and-sticking people out of their cars. The neat thing about congestion pricing is that you can use it to fund those buses.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-20 19:37:01+00:00
Others have explained what's really going on here, but I want to take a moment to address this idea that they don't "have my passwords" because that's illuminating too.

In a very real sense most of these systems, almost everything on the web today, do have your password, though that wasn't necessarily the direct cause of the problem here.

Passwords in this context are a shared secret. You remember your Google password is hunter2, you send that password to Google's web server to log in, they check, yup, hunter2 is the password, OK.

For 50+ years we've had these slightly goofy strategies with these shared secrets, which if you have a good password (so, not hunter2) and Google implement the strategy well, mean that at rest they don't really know your password. But still every single time you authenticate, you are sending them your password, and when that happens you both know what it is† - this means for example they could accidentally publish it, record it to a log, or anything else.

For less time, but still decades, we've known how to build an Augmented PAKE. With this technology, you can prove to (say) Google that you know some password, and then later, that you still know the same password, yet Google never learns what the password is - which means that even if they really wanted to they can't tell anybody else - all they can do is check that you still know your password, which is in fact the thing we actually wanted.

Nevertheless, here we are in 2025, and judging from previous times I've explained this, HN will insist that the schemes which haven't worked are a great idea and there's no reason to use an Augmented PAKE.

† As does anybody who can read the messages, which in 2025 is usually nobody else, but say 10-20 years ago was usually anybody on the path, e.g. your ISP.