MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-07-20 02:07:06+00:00
It was a joke, and I was laughing when I told the reporter, but it's not obvious to me if it comes across as a joke the way it was reported.

But then it's also one of those jokes which has a tiny element of truth to it.

So I think I'm OK with how it comes across. Having that joke played straight in MIT Technology Review made me smile.

Importantly (to me) it's not misleading: I genuinely do believe that, given a post-apocalyptic scenario following a societal collapse, Mistral Small 3.2 on a solar-powered laptop would be a genuinely useful thing to have.
by iknowstuff | 2025-07-20 02:07:13+00:00
hmm.. you would buy it but aren't?

4 oz raw/patty:

Impossible → 19 P / 14 F / 9 C, 240 kcal, 370 mg Na, 0 mg chol

Beyond → 20 P / 13 F / 7 C, 220 kcal, 260 mg Na, 0 mg chol

80/20 beef → 19 P / 23 F / 0 C, 287 kcal, 75 mg Na, ? chol (high)

Plants hit beef-level protein, ditch cholesterol, trade more sodium & a few carbs; beef still packs the fat.
by grafmax | 2025-07-20 02:09:21+00:00
I see. Elon Musk with the wave of his hand can conjure a new political party. Billionaire lobbyists hold politicians in tow. Or shape public opinion with the mass media companies they own. Supposedly my voice really is the same as theirs. (If so I wonder what they are spending so much money on.)

It seems this small wealthy faction can send people to concentration camps, collaborate on genocide, and undo the constitution. (Maybe you and I have different definitions of democracy.)

Or maybe because our government is not as bad North Korea’s I’m supposed to be fine with this state of affairs. (Thanks for the reassurance.)
by creata | 2025-07-20 02:09:40+00:00
No, sorry, in case I wasn't clear, I was talking about manual deallocation. I wasn't talking about a garbage collector. You still allocate and free cells. Here's an example of what I am talking about:

https://docs.rs/generational-arena

If you're implementing a tracing garbage collector you obviously don't need any such counters to detect use-after-frees.

This is clearly a different compromise entirely to the one made by tracing garbage collection. I'm actually not sure how you confused the two.
by davidw | 2025-07-20 02:09:44+00:00
One of the things I've noticed about shopping carefully at the local supermarket (Albertsons, in Oregon) is that they very often use beef as a 'loss leader' to get people to shop there, so beef is often cheaper than it 'should' be, and especially so if more of the externalities involved in the production of beef were included in the price.

I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-20 02:09:50+00:00
"frontier" seems to be "zapad" for OpenAI

They have a parallel effort to corner Ramanujan called https://epoch.ai/frontiermath/tier-4

(& Problem 6, combinatorics, the one class of problems not yet fallen to AI?)

The hope for humanity is that of the big names associated to FrontierMath (starkly opposite to oAI proper) Daniel is the one youngish nonexsoviet guy :)
by xp84 | 2025-07-20 02:10:08+00:00
I think you’re probably right, but more because of erroneous categorization of what is a “technology.” We take for granted technology older than like 600 years ago (basically most people would say the printing press is a technology and maybe forget that the wheel and, indeed, crop cultivation). AI could certainly be in the top 3 most significant technologies of things developed since (inclusive) the printing press. We’ll likely find out just where it ends up within the decade.
by Stevvo | 2025-07-20 02:10:17+00:00
Are you claiming that trains running outside cities are less suitable for one person operation? There is no evidence of that, plenty of trains around the world run both inside and outside cities with a single operator. There is also no evidence of a city being a "more predictable environment". Deaths are roughly equivalent; in the city it's people jumping on tracks intentionally, outside its drivers getting stuck on crossings.
by harrisi | 2025-07-20 02:11:22+00:00
I appreciate the sentiment, but even this is a good example of why this stuff is interesting. Because some strings _are_ optimized (using some definition of "optimized"), but only in some cases.

It's these quirky little things where the code doesn't exactly represent the way execution happens in most straightforward mental models of how execution works. Again, it's not bad and it's not unique to Python. It's just the nitty gritty of how some things work.

I will say that calling it "What The Fuck Python" is certainly more attention-grabbing than "Some Interesting Bits About Python Internals You Probably Don't Need To Know". What're you gonna do. :)
by vkou | 2025-07-20 02:12:17+00:00
They'll happily take the $20 and then report you, because it's their job on the line when the next guest complains that the room smells like shit.

There's no way to conceal cigarette smoke indoors. It's painfully obvious that a room's been smoked in.

Vapes are way lower-key, and as a non-smoker/vaper/etc, unlike cigarettes, someone vaping in a space really doesn't bother me.
by blackoil | 2025-07-20 02:12:18+00:00
A trustless society can't progress/function a lot. I trust doctors who treat me, civil engineers who built my house and even in software which I pretend to be expert in I haven't seen source code of any OS and browser I use as I trust on companies or OSS devs.

Most of this is based on reputation. LLMs are same, I just have to calculate level of trust as I use it.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-20 02:13:08+00:00
The headline is vague, but this is about increasing the requirements to two operators per train.

It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.

> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.

Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.
by BrianCripe | 2025-07-20 02:13:29+00:00
I think we are both approaching the situation with the same intent, which is: "when I have a repetitive task with a small cardinality of input options, I want to create a deterministic abstraction and an easy-to-invoke trigger".

If the implementation and execution of the script is considered separate, I just want my agent to immediately know "how it's supposed to be used" for any new script I just wrote and be given scoped permissions for it. If it's given full Bash access it can certainly invoke it as I would, but unless the documentation in the script is extensive, it might not know all the context I do about how and when to use it properly. Plus, the output may be overly verbose by default and waste tokens, so it should make sure to only call in a more "quiet" mode.

The original point of this thread was around "how to design CLI better for AI Agents", so the question is if we can do better from a token efficiency standpoint than writing the same scripts as before. Perhaps simple hook-driven actions are not good examples of where things may be significantly improved.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-07-20 02:13:50+00:00
The job guarantee is supposed to be federal macroeconomic policy undertaken with ample fiscal space (by the highest level government also in control in the currency).

Saddling the heavily budget-constrained MTA with unnecessary labor costs, that ain't dynamic with the state of the economy, isn't it. The MTA is supposed to deliver transit, a narrow task, not do that and manage the economy writ large in unrelated ways

Indeed, many job guarantee advocates are careful to distinguish JG jobs from regular government jobs, since they don't want to end up degrading public sector institutional capacity even further.
by kazinator | 2025-07-20 02:13:53+00:00
In C, cast converts a value to another type (or a more or less qualified version of the same type). What that conversion means depends on the source and destination type.

A cast of insert a conversion that wouldn't take place:

1/2 vs 1/(double)2

or coerce a conversion that otherwise requires a diagnostic:

bar *b = 0; foo *f = (foo *) b;

Loosely speaking, casting is another name for coercion, which refers to making a conversion happen that might not otherwise.
by w10-1 | 2025-07-20 02:14:52+00:00
I wouldn't try to make macOS into Arch, if Arch is what works for you.

Just run Arch in a VM on the mac, using Apple's virtualization framework [1]. (No need for other wrappers; the framework is often easier to use directly.) I find no significant performance issues; a lot of software actually runs faster in a Linux VM than when I compile and run it on the mac.

The limitations are that the Linux VM's don't support save/restore of state (i.e., you have to shut down to stop the VM) and the graphics and device support is limited.

You might get more performance if you compile your own Arch distribution with all the flags necessary to enjoy modern CPU features in M-series (particularly M4+ with SME extensions). With M4-Pro memory should run 273GB/second for JAX and PyTorch.

However, AFAICT, PyTorch supports vectorization on Apple silicon by delegating to Apple's Metal API's, and that wouldn't be available from the Linux VM, so you might prefer running those on macOS directly.

To me the biggest draw of the M4 processor is that it supports CPU tracing (at least for Xcode-run code): actual, direct (not sampled) data about CPU internals like branching, cache misses, etc. If you're into performance, this will take you from working with a black box to seeing exactly what's up.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/run...
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-20 02:15:17+00:00
One the one hand: Yes, if it's not your code then it's not exactly your responsibility to fix.

On the other hand: As a user, the takeaway isn't "well that's not their fault", the takeaway is "if I use this software, then I am vulnerable to this problem". The question of who's responsible or where the fault lies is irrelevant.
by setgree | 2025-07-20 02:16:01+00:00
On the Ethan Allen Express (Amtrak) I took this week, the boarding steps to the cars had to be manually deployed by train staff, along with a little step stool. When I got on, there were two people doing this, so only two train cars were boardable.

I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
by skydhash | 2025-07-20 02:16:57+00:00
Why I don't bother with LLMs for the above is:

1. I usually just pull up the docs for the CSS framework, give it a quick look over to know what it offers and the nomenclature and then keep it open for all the code examples.

2. I've serialized json in enough languages to know the pain points, so what I usually do is locate the module/library responsible for that in that language. And then give the docs/code sample a quick lookover to know where things are.

3. With nice IDEs, you launch the debugger and you have a nice stack frame to go through. In languages with not so great tooling, you hope for a trace.

It's not that your workflow won't yield result. But I prefer to be able to answer 5 successive why's about the code I'm working on. With PRs taking hours and days to be merged, it's not like I'm in an hurry.
by scythe | 2025-07-20 02:17:01+00:00
Part of the reason that cheap meat is cheap is because it's a byproduct of producing nice meat. Chicken thighs are cheap because the chicken seller makes money on breasts. Round is cheap because the cow is paid for with the revenue from brisket and ribeye etc.

The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
by topspin | 2025-07-20 02:17:03+00:00
I built a disaster recovery system using python and borg. It snapshots 51 block devices on a SAN and then uses borg to backup 71 file systems from these snapshots. The entire data set is then synced to S3. And yes, I've tested the result in a offsite: recovering files systems to entirely different block storage and booting VMs, so I'm confident that it would work if necessary, although not terribly quickly, because the recovery automation is complex and incomplete.

I can't share it. But if you contemplate such a thing, it is possible, and the result is extremely low cost. Borg is pretty awesome.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-07-20 02:17:22+00:00
It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.

There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.

This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
by gruez | 2025-07-20 02:17:31+00:00
>I'm not sure guaranteed jobs should be rejected in this case.

1. as an actual jobs policy it's terrible. It brings an absolute minuscule amount of jobs, and puts the burden on the part of the economy that can least afford it (ie. underfunded transit system). If you want to legislate some jobs into existence, do something like forcing social media companies to hire local content moderators, or hiring elevator attendants.

2. "universal jobs" policy is terrible in general. For one, it doesn't help the disabled or their caretakers. UBI doesn't do a perfect job here either (eg. a special needs kid probably would need way more money than the standard UBI), but at least the disabled person/caretaker doesn't need to waste time on job. For the able-bodied, a "universal jobs" policy isn't great either. If their labor is actually worth something, then they can probably find gainful employment in the private sector. If they can't (eg. they're mentally disabled), then making them to make-work like digging ditches and filling them back again as a condition of getting financial assistance is humiliating and cruel.
by randycupertino | 2025-07-20 02:18:04+00:00
I remember when veggie burgers first came out and they actually featured veggies and tried to taste like veggies instead of psuedo-meat patties. They were so good! Then everything tried to just clone meat, poorly, in taste and texture and they were so much worse. But those first ones that really tasted like veggies were delish.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-20 02:18:34+00:00
This has nothing to do a with a universal job guarantee like your article.

It only protects one very specific job and the people qualified to do it. Those people are also protective about letting newcomers become trained to have those jobs. They don’t want you or anyone else to be able to go get that job, they want it protected for themselves.

Such is the nature of narrow job protection bills like these.
by ksec | 2025-07-20 02:19:16+00:00
>Yes, Zig is meant to be a low-level programming language, but stuff like this is basic table stakes nowadays.

I think it is table stakes for higher level programming language. Zig wants to be somewhat like high level assembly.

There is still someway to go before 1.0 so may be something will be done. I mean I am still uneasy with them focusing so much on async.
by Apreche | 2025-07-20 02:20:24+00:00
Crazy idea here. Why don’t we just have the best of both worlds?

We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.

MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
by drewg123 | 2025-07-20 02:20:31+00:00
Its way better than a bean burger IMHO. As a vegan, what I like most about Beyond burgers are that they are consistent, and pretty amazing at not being awful. If I'm in a random restaurant with a few token vegan options, the last thing I want to do is take a chance on some potentially terrible homemade bean or chickpea burger. If they have Beyond or Impossible, I know exactly what I'm getting.
by Timwi | 2025-07-20 02:20:47+00:00
Wikipedia is not a company, it's a website.

The organization that runs the website, the Wikimedia Foundation, is also not a company. It's a nonprofit.

And the Wikimedia Foundation have not “spent years trying to get things right”, assuming you're referring to facts posted on Wikipedia. That was in fact a bunch of unpaid volunteer contributors, many of whom anonymous and almost all of whom unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-20 02:21:19+00:00
> Want to understand this more. I know I'm talking from a position of privilege, but it's really hard to find a machine these days with less than 16 or 32GB of RAM from the factory.

* Not everyone is using a new machine.

* Right now, if I go to https://www.bestbuy.com/ and scroll down until I hit a laptop, the first 2 have 16GB, and the third is https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-victus-15-6-144hz-full-hd-ga... with 8GB. It's not even cheap.

* On my desk right now is a mini PC with 12GB, which I bought earlier this year.

* Even if we pretend everyone has 16GB+, it would be nice if we could use that memory for other stuff instead of an email client hogging it.
by gregjor | 2025-07-20 02:22:32+00:00
Consider finding a different yardstick, or not trying to measure "success" at all.

By age 40 I had three children, and I hadn't died or suffered serious illness or injury. That represents "success" in terms of evolutionary purpose and compared to the large majority of humans who have ever lived.

I have spent over 45 years working in the software industry. Not rich, but it has given me a comfortable living. I have friends and former colleagues who got rich, mostly by finding themselves in the right place at the right time and making the most of it (i.e. they got very lucky). I don't envy people who have more stuff. Desire is the root of all suffering, so you can stop feeling like you have failed by letting go of desire for superficial markers of success you apparently internalized from celebrity media meant to get you to spend more.
by ksec | 2025-07-20 02:24:03+00:00
I dont believe that is the case, and I cant any reference to it. Nearly all are pointing to Spotify as number one both in terms of revenue and market shares.

The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.
by MugCostanza | 2025-07-20 02:25:47+00:00
Hey, I made this joke variant that's Chess + Russian Roulette. Basically, every time you move a piece, except for the king, that piece has a 1-in-6 chance of dying. Though, to balance the game, roulette deaths are limited to 5 per player. Please provide feedback! I would to know if you guys have any suggestions, particularly with the UI.
by drewg123 | 2025-07-20 02:27:05+00:00
I'm just the opposite.

I'm a vegan who loves & misses the taste of meat. Without Beyond (and Impossible), it would have been way harder for me to have become vegan. I think black bean burgers are disgusting. When picking a restaraunt for a team dinner with non vegans, I specifically look for menus that offer Impossible or Beyond, and I avoid restaurants that offer homemade bean/pea/etc burgers.
by zuluonezero | 2025-07-20 02:27:10+00:00
Now this is the juicy tidbits I read HN for! A proper comment about doing something technical with something that's been invested in personally in an interesting manner. With just enough detail to tantalise. This seems like the best use of GenAI so far. Not writing my code for me or helping me grock something I should just be reading the source for or pumping up a stupid start up funding grab. I've been working through building an LLM from scratch and this is one time it actually appears useful because for the life of me I just can't seem to find much value in it so far. I must have more to learn so thanks for the pointer.
by gruez | 2025-07-20 02:27:49+00:00
You're not taking into account two factors: union bosses don't like it because it means their fiefs shrink. Politicians/parties don't like it because it denies them a captive voting bloc. They'd actually have to do stuff like walking the length of Manhattan to get elected, rather than securing the major voting blocs by making a few backroom deals with the top unions/business leaders.
by ksec | 2025-07-20 02:28:28+00:00
Non Youtube contents such as TV broadcast needs to get streaming done right. And they haven't done it. Apple or Google could have helped here. Where All Broadcast TV are in one place / App just like a normal TV. And the content will be streamed in decent quality. But neither are they interested as Youtube belongs to Google and Apple is going with Apple TV+ direction and wants to own TV itself.

It is such a sad state of things since Steve Jobs passed away both Apple and Google have a complete lack of taste and product sensibility to deliver something truly helps the customers. Instead every product and features are marketing or sales driven.
by Sytten | 2025-07-20 02:28:46+00:00
My homebrew story is always something along the lines of:

Me: Please install software A.

Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!
by Tainnor | 2025-07-20 02:29:19+00:00
It's "not interesting" because no novel insight has to be used in order to solve this. It's immediately obvious how to solve it, just follow the textbook procedure.

This is distinct both from other typical IMO problems that I've seen and from research mathematics which usually do require some amount of creativity.

> exp(i\pi)+1=0

If your definition of "exp(i*theta)" is literally "rotation of the number 1 by theta degrees counterclockwise", then indeed what you quoted is a triviality and contains no nugget of insight (how could it?).

It becomes nontrivial when your definition of "exp" is any of the following:

- The everywhere absolutely convergent power series sum_{i=0}^\infty z^n/n!

- The unique function solving the IVP y'=y, y(0)=1

- The unique holomorphic extension of the real-valued exponential function to the complex numbers

Going from any of these definitions to "exp(i*\pi)+1=0" from scratch requires quite a bit of clever mathematics (such as proving convergence of the various series, comparing terms, deriving the values of sin and cos at pi from their power series representation, etc.). That's definitely not something that a motivated high schooler would be able to derive from scratch.
by leguminous | 2025-07-20 02:29:39+00:00
I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.

In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.