MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IAmGraydon | 2025-06-28 17:54:09+00:00
What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.

So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.

Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-06-28 17:54:14+00:00
It's not a tactic. The story was that at one point the tech person in charge wanted to use ocaml because he liked it. The project was a success and there was never any reason to change it.

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with these two phenomena of the corporate world:

A) techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool

B) something that started as happenstance ends up as a defining property of critical infrastructure.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-06-28 17:54:21+00:00
I want some easier to comprehend number for BB(6), in decimal notation. But it's such a massive number I would need to invent a new notation to express that. I love this new (to me) concept of tetration number representation. 10-million sub 10, what is the number?

Look at 3 sub 10 = which is (10^(10^10)). So that is 10 to the power of 10 billion. In regular decimal notation, that is a "1" with 10 billion "0"s following it. It takes 10 gigabytes of ram to represent the number in decimal notation, naively.

The number of atoms in the universe is only 10^80, or 1,000...000 (80 zeroes). 10-million sub 10 is so huge, how much ram to represent it.

This example is from https://www.statisticshowto.com/tetration-function-simple-de...
by api | 2025-06-28 17:54:35+00:00
The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?

If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.

Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.

Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.

Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.

BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
Dbt should be re-written in Rust
by ssnape | 2025-06-28 17:55:19+00:00
We're running dbt with Dagster and have grown to ~300 models in 8 months. Compilation time has crept up to 30+ seconds, and I can see the writing on the wall.

If we follow the same trajectory to 3000 models (which we'll hit in 2-3 years), we're looking at 5+ minute compilation times.

Has anyone else hit this scaling wall with dbt? At what model count did compilation times become painful? Would love to hear war stories or if others would find a faster alternative useful.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-06-28 17:55:56+00:00
>This event, marked by ingenuity and daring, showcased the unconventional warfare tactics that defined the conflict

Why are the US's (or the west at large) war crimes always seen as "cool" and "unconventional" when it is just terrorism. We never celebrate the Viet Cong for defending themselves successfully against the most powerful military in the world, against all the odds, over decades. The Vietnam war was ridiculously unjust.

>Despite inherent risks and equipment limitations, they successfully neutralized a significant threat.

This is what I'm talking about. The invaders are the threat.

I don't think we should celebrate any person that took part in Vietnam, especially not their "genius" and "ingenuity". If they truly were smart, they wouldn't have done what they did.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-06-28 17:55:59+00:00
There are not necessarily Arab countries that want to take on millions of Palestinian refugees. There is a broader issue that what you suggest is not considered good for the Palestinian cause. I'll give an example. UNRWA uses a specific definition for Palestinian refugees that differs from the general refugee definition used by UNHCR. They define Palestinian refugees as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict". This status also extends to their descendants. This means children and grandchildren of the original 1948 refugees maintain refugee status even if born outside Palestine. When you think about it, this is kind of the opposite of what you suggested. It creates a massive class of legal Palestinians who live in and are citizens of other countries (particularly Jordan), but are ostensibly waiting for their opportunity to return (or receive some other "durable solution" such as compensation).

In general, Arab states and Palestinian leadership argue that naturalizing refugees would undermine their right to return to their original homes. You can interpret this cynically: because many Arab states are not too friendly with Israel, having a massive class of refugees putting political pressure on them could be advantageous, and is probably one of the only ways to "defeat" Israel as a jewish state (because if all of those refugees had the right to live in Israel, jews might become a minority.) But it is true that removing refugee status without a just solution would erase Palestinian claims and rights under international law.
by bird0861 | 2025-06-28 17:56:06+00:00
Not true. Perhaps very few do, but some do in fact run them at 0. I've done it myself. There are many small models that will gladly perform well in QA with temp 0. Of course there are few situations where this is the recommended setup -- we all know RAG takes less than a billion parameters now to do effectively. But nevertheless there are people who do this, and there are plausibly some use cases for it.
by afrisch | 2025-06-28 17:56:15+00:00
> Having worked with OCaml at Jane Street is not, I think most of us would agree, going to be, going to be a serious barrier to getting hired to work with another language somewhere else.

The retention factor is *not* that other companies wouldn't want to hire them, but rather that these employees are likely to dislike being forced to use something other than OCaml.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-28 17:56:33+00:00
Lots of skepticism in the comments, I want to share that I have seen this first hand twice. Yes it is possible that it's a coincidence and with so many people using chatgpt some are bound to have mental health crises and experience it with heavy chatgpt use coincidentally, but it's also possible that there is correlation?

Mass usage is still very young, yes most people have tried it, but we are increasingly starting to use this, and there's people spiking in usage every day. Scientific study of this subject will take years to even get started and then to get definitive (or p<0.05) results.

Let's just keep an open mind on this one, and as always, use our a-priori thinking when a-posteriori empiricism is not yet available. Yes, people are experiencing psychosis that looks related to the chatgpt bot and possibly caused by it, and we have seen it act like a sycophant and it was acknowledged by Sama himself, and it's still doing that btw, it's not like they totally corrected it, finally we know that being a yes-man increases usage of the tool, so it's possible that the algorithm is not only optimizing for AGI but for engagement, like the incumbent Algorithms.

At this point, at least for me personally, the onus is on model makers to prove that their tools are safe, rather than on concerned mental health professionals to prove that they are not. Social media is already recognized as unhealthy, but at least we are engaging in conversation with real humans? Like we are now? I feel it's like sharpening my mental claws, or taking care of my mind, even if it's a worse version than real life conversation. But if I felt like if I was talking with a human but I actually was talking with an LLM?

No, no. You are crazy if you think LLMs are safe, I use them strictly for productive and professional reasons, never for philosophical or emotional support. A third experience is that I was asked if I thought using ChatGPT as a psychologist would be a good idea, of course not? Why are you asking me this, I get that shrinks are expensive, but do I need to spell it out? I don't personally know of anyone using ChatGPT as a girlfriend, but maybe I do know them and they hide it, but we know from the news that there's products out there that cater to this market.

Maybe to the participants of this forum, where we are used to LLM as a coding tool, and where we kind of understand it so we don't use it as a personal hallucination, this looks crazy. But start asking normies how they are using chatgpt, I don't think this is just a made up clickbait concern.
by pixl97 | 2025-06-28 17:58:19+00:00
The problem here is we have no baseline statistics.

I'd say my family is a great example of undiagnosed illnesses. They are disasters already happening waiting for any kind of trigger.

These undiagnosed self medicate on drugs and end up in ERs to the surprise of those around them at a disturbing rate. Hence why we need to know the base rate of mental occurrence like this before we call AI caused incidents an epidemic.
by gpm | 2025-06-28 17:58:45+00:00
I.e. an official Microsoft representative, again, in front of the press, said it. It was repeated ad nauseam by the press and they made no attempt to correct it - in fact they went around getting the press to say similar things like "Once your device is upgraded to Windows 10, it will continue to be supported for the lifetime of the device at no cost". That's an official binding statement on the company if I ever did see one.

https://globalnews.ca/news/2135677/what-you-need-to-know-bef...
by owl_vision | 2025-06-28 17:59:49+00:00
Many years ago, I interviewed with Jane Street. They asked me C++ questions and if I am willing to learn OCaml. Sure, I can learn any language. The position was given to someone else who already knew OCaml. They use OCaml for everything, building software to distributing it etc. That's my interview experience with them. I think they chose that language because it can be as speedy as C++ with proper knowledge and optimizations. I do not know OCaml besides learning it when I worked with researchers/mathematicians who wrote OCaml and i had to understand the code.
by whoisyc | 2025-06-28 18:00:23+00:00
I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person.

Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.

Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.

You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
by awb | 2025-06-28 18:00:37+00:00
Interesting read and thanks for sharing.

Two observations:

1. Natural language appears to be to be the starting point of any endeavor.

2.

> It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable, and, in view of the history of mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do the job well enough would require again a few thousand years.

LLMs are trying to replicate all of the intellect in the world.

I’m curious if the author would consider that these lofty caveats may be more plausible today than they were when the text was written.
by jerf | 2025-06-28 18:00:39+00:00
No, that's one of the freakiest things about things like the Busy Beaver function. There is an exact integer that BB(748) defines. You can add one to it and then it would no longer be that number anymore.

If you are refering to the idea that nothing that can't exist in the real universe "really exists", then the "Busy Beaver" portion of that idea is extraneous, as 100% of integers can't exist in the real universe, and therefore, 100% of integers are equally just "mathematical concepts". That one of them is identified by BB(748) isn't a particularly important aspect. But certainly, a very specific number is identified by that designation, though nothing in this universe is going to know what it is in any meaningful sense.
by Cyph0n | 2025-06-28 18:00:48+00:00
Are you seriously asking me this question, or is this an attempt at a rhetorical? And why are we shifting the goalposts once again?

How do you think apartheid South Africa ended? How does any country pressure another?

In a supposedly democratic nation like Germany, how would citizens pressure their government to stop supporting & providing diplomatic cover for another to commit a genocide & maintain apartheid?
by em-bee | 2025-06-28 18:01:09+00:00
you are right. xslt is not that bad. especially not for simple cases. your example would be just about enough for my website. thanks for that. i have used xslt before, but that was a long time ago.

however if you read through the comments there are a lot of people complaining, so they definitely see a downside to using xslt. as for longevity, well, a search led me to a chrome proposal to remove it that was made 10 years ago and ultimately rejected at the time. so maybe you are right about that too.
by al_borland | 2025-06-28 18:01:14+00:00
My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I mentioned, I don’t know. But I do hope he goes through his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he does, I’m glad he asked. But you’re right, they the kids need to be grown before that question becomes valuable.

I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids.

Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it.

There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
by movedx | 2025-06-28 18:01:20+00:00
I couldn't agree more.

Just a slight point I think is more making:

> We never celebrate the Viet Cong for defending themselves successfully against the most powerful military in the world, against all the odds, over decades.

"During the Vietnam War, China provided substantial military and economic aid to North Vietnam, playing a crucial role in supporting their war effort against the United States. This aid included troops for infrastructure repair and defense, military equipment, and financial assistance."

But you are correct.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-06-28 18:01:21+00:00
I wonder how many people took the whole Mars colonization talk seriously. If Elon had been really serious about Mars colonization he would've had to commit a lot more resources to research, while reaching out to every major nation-state to get them to also commit on collaborating into making this a long-term reality. You can't brute-force a world-tier quest of this magnitude without significant global buy-in and without actually bringing in the absolute best-of-the-best of every relevant domain.

Also, Mars just kinda sucks. There's dust everywhere and it's nearly impossible to get it all off. Go outside one time in Mars and that dust will cling so tightly that it'll follow you into the cycle of reincarnation.
by Bender | 2025-06-28 18:01:42+00:00
Let’s make it uncensorable now, before it’s too late.

The tech has existed since the start of the internet but people just don't want to bother with it. If the majority of people self hosted their own content then had something similar to the old "web rings" of sorts then it would become exponentially harder to play whack-a-mole in taking down, censoring, redacting, cancelling, etc... I know all the arguments. Wont scale!! well that is a lie. I ran a porn site in 2000 that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single Pentium 3 700 Mhz server. But it needs to handle millions!! also a lie when everyone is running their own nodes. In reality a single video might have a few thousand simultaneous viewers and that can be handled easily by 1999 tech and trivially today on modern tech. People have been programmed to believe the only possible options are the large centralized platforms and it's just lies. No crypto needed, just a simple server, a web daemon and a platform managed by the open source community with its repository not hosted on a platform owned by a corporation. Ignore everyone. Happy to myth-bust all the other lies. Pick your favorite forum software and try it out. If people complain about friction just accept those are the people you probably don't want anyway. Their contributions will be extremely low effort. Find some quality members and do not expect it to explode in growth over night.

Hacker News is running on a single server. It sails along just fine with the occasional code bug that team dang have always managed to sort out. Most of the time it is not on a CDN. It can even handle some topics that some governments would really like not discussed. To make it harder to cancel would just mean multiple people at YC creating multiple registrar accounts, a few domains each and the low risk members each knowing about some of the fall-back domains and of course a few .onion domains each.

If the site is not hosting borderline content then one could even just run HAProxy and Wireguard on a little VM and host the actual server at home. This works fine even with CG-NAT as the home is reaching out to the VM over WireGuard. Cachable content can remain at the edge with the right cache-control headers and HAProxy configuration.

To put another way, if 8chan can still exist then pretty much anything within the gray areas of law can. not linking to there from here
by ajkjk | 2025-06-28 18:01:57+00:00
Not an expert, but I've read about this a bit because it bothered me also and I think this is the answer:

Most of these 'uncomputable' problems are uncomputable in the sense of the halting problem: you can write down an algorithm that should compute them, but it might never halt. That's the sense in which BB(x) is uncomputable: you won't know if you're done ever, because you can't distinguish a machine that never halts from one that just hasn't halted yet (since it has an infinite number of states, you can't just wait for a loop).

So presumably the independence of a number from ZFC is like that also: you can't prove it's the value of BB(745) because you won't know if you've proved it; the only way to prove it is essentially to run those Turing machines until they stop and you'll never know if you're done.

I'm guessing that for the very small Turing machines there is not enough structure possible to encode whatever infinitely complex states end up being impossible to deduce halting from, so they end up being Collatz-like and then you can go prove things about them using math. As you add states the possible iteration steps go wild and eventually do stuff that is beyond ZFC to analyze.

So the finite value 745 isn't really where the infinity/uncomputability comes from-it comes from the infinite tape that can produce arbitrarily complex functions. (I wonder if over a certain number of states it becomes possible to encoding a larger Turing machine in the tape somehow, causing a sort of divergence to infinite complexity?)
by avoutos | 2025-06-28 18:02:51+00:00
Oct 7th was certainly not the start of the conflict, but it was at a level of barbarity that one can not consider it to be provoked.

> Without a sense of proportionate response, if Hitler did some false flag attacks, do you expect the whole world to be okay with the Holocaust?

Can you explain this point? I don't think I quite understand.
by atmavatar | 2025-06-28 18:03:42+00:00
Some things to consider:

* The majority of the Palestinian population are minors (< 18)

* The last nationwide election in Palestine was 2006

In other words, the last time an election was held, the majority of Palestinians weren't yet born, let alone old enough to vote in it. So, it's difficult to hold the Palestinian people en masse responsible for Hamas in the same way we'd hold Israelis responsible for their current government, who held their last election in 2022.