MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-07-08 01:12:35+00:00
I appreciate you engaging in good faith and explaining what you meant, since wqaatwt thought you were engaging in "obvious hyperbole" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 and I was suspecting you of trolling.

It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't had the opportunity to sell US$100k of Bitcoin, but I expect it would be closely comparable to US$100k of US$100 bills, except that I can't zap those across to fixedfloat.com to change to a different cryptocoin or a friend on another continent in 30 seconds. Maybe it wouldn't be prudent to entrust all US$100k to fixedfloat.com in one transaction; maybe you'd want to use a series of smaller transactions of different sizes to reduce the counterparty risk.

But this doesn't seem like an issue of Bitcoin being particularly illiquid. Rather, it seems like exchanges make commodities more liquid, an assertion I don't think is controversial. But most other assets, such as real estate, shares, and even precious metals, are vastly less liquid than Bitcoin in the absence of an exchange. Finding someone on the street willing to buy Bitcoin is enormously easier than finding someone on the street willing to buy your MSFT shares.

I appreciate you explaining your speculations about 51% attacks in more detail. I think the course of action you're outlining would still be very likely to cause chain forks as big exchanges decided whether or not they were going to accept blocks from the compromised mining pools. The world's investor class many be absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, but they're very interested in mitigating political risks that threaten permanent loss of their capital.

I do not think your description of the People's Republic of China is a "shithole countr[y] with no leverage" or that it was "pretend[ing] to pressure bitcoin miners". The majority of Bitcoin mining was happening there, the majority of the world's coal was and is burned there, the vast majority of the world's solar panels are made there, the vast majority of the world's other electronics are manufactured there, and virtually all Bitcoin mining hardware is still designed there. But when they prohibited mining, most of the world's Bitcoin mining activity stopped within a few weeks.
by lmm | 2025-07-08 01:12:54+00:00
> Except most programmers don't spend even a second to think about it, and we end up with "int mid = (low + high) / 2;" bugs in standard implementations of binary search in e.g. Java. And that implementation even had a written proof accompanying it!

I see this as far more of an indictment of Java than an indictment of programmers. If you make the symbol "+" part of your programming language's syntax (especially in a language where you don't allow custom implementations of "+") then it should do what the ordinary mathematical + operation does!
by echelon | 2025-07-08 01:13:11+00:00
> This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.

That's not "show, don't tell". That's "you need the companion book".

A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.

"Show, don't tell" isn't stuff that is lost on the uninitiated. It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue.

Villeneuve's mentats are like an adult joke in a kid film.
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-08 01:13:40+00:00
> Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.

No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
by nomel | 2025-07-08 01:13:59+00:00
> in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it didn’t happen again

This would be a world without generative AI available to the public, at the moment. Requiring perfection would either mean guardrails that would make it useless for most cases, or no LLM access until AGI exists, which are both completely irrational, since many people are finding practical value in its current imperfect state.

The current state of LLM is useful for what it's useful for, warnings of hallucinations are present on every official public interface, and its limitations are quickly understood with any real use.

Nearly everyone in AI research is working on this problem, directly or indirectly.
by rblatz | 2025-07-08 01:14:49+00:00
This was in response to a post about how to setup and calibrate and deal with Prusa Core One issues. The Bambu literally just runs a self calibration on first run, making the need for this sort of process unnecessary.

Maybe it’s not a big deal to do this on first setup, but clearly someone thought it was worth writing a blog post to explain to people.
by slwvx | 2025-07-08 01:15:36+00:00
I don't think so. You can't just "Montecarlo the hell" out of a post-quantum cryptographic scheme [1] which are also based on lattices. Even if that analogy isn't quite apt, I don't think looking for a good random lattice is a good way to find the densest possible lattice [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack#For_spheres
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-08 01:15:38+00:00
Those could probably be mitigated pretty easily in testing situations. For example, making sure all participants had a delay in chat conversations, or running correspondence through an LLM to equalize the personality.

However, I'm not sure an AGI test should be mitigating them. If an AI isn't able to communicate at human speeds, or isn't able to achieve the social understandings that a human does, it would probably be wrong to say that it has the same intelligence capabilities as a human (how AGI has traditionally been defined). It wouldn't be able to provide human level performance in many jobs.
by r0ze-at-hn | 2025-07-08 01:16:34+00:00
100% they were more advanced than early homosapiens. In fact I will argue that they are what made humans human. I went digging through their dna last year and Altai, Vi3315, and Vi3319 have the CYP21A2 rs6467 (C;T) variant

Their DNA is up online, but you can also see these variants here: https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/36/3/734/6071469

They were highly inbred and they were carriers for this form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to 21-Hydroxylase Deficiency. Even in its nonclassic form, this would have contributed to the low population numbers as any classic form would have been non-viable as well as resulted in evolutionary pressure to select for the genetic variants to compensate for the altered HPA-Axis. Neanderthals are most known for contributing to human specific DNA sets such as improved immune system, but if you go digging you will notice the larger pattern.

NCAH specifically results in higher neurogenesis. They were smarter. They also now had a bigger glucose preference and started to shift calories to grain. At some point between 130-70KYA there was enough excess calories from grain to not need to eat the dead. (see their teeth between this time) Admixture with modern humans occurs around 50-43KYA. These adaptations would have contributed to the loss of the mitochondrial DNA due to low female reproductive success compared to the higher male Neanderthal with female human success. The 2-4% that is found together is found together for a reason. They are incredibly valuable together.

This support for reduced HPA-Axis would have allowed for many other variants on the HPA axis and while not a single genetic variant, atypical HPA axis phenotype is associated with intelligence due to the enhancement in ability to detect unexpected events.

The glucose/grain preference with higher caloric density supported the higher population densities that occurred rapidly due to the Younger Dryas (last glacial period) and resulting agricultural and villages transition in Mesopotamia. These agricultural populations outcompeted other human groups while spreading the Neanderthal derived genetic variation.
by bombcar | 2025-07-08 01:16:37+00:00
The problem is it ALWAYS dings (the car seat is always there or it detects door openings) and so it just gets ignored along with the fifty other billion warnings it gives.

Which is insane because it obviously has much more intelligent sensors - if I try to lock the doors with the windows down and the wind blowing it screams bloody murder and refuses to lock because it detects motion. Windows up and someone moving? Same thing.

But it doesn’t beep based on that.
by zahlman | 2025-07-08 01:17:07+00:00
These are things that less experienced Python programmers might not know about, but they're not at all uncommon. If anything, calling `super()` in a base class should be the default if you're designing a framework where you expect people to use mixins (or even just explicitly intend for them to derive your classes, really).

Creating blank `__init__.py` files has basically become standard because the use cases where you'd prefer to omit them don't work well with packaging tools (since everything will be in `site-packages` anyway; most people also aren't going to install multiple things from a common namespace that you publish; adding those files helps build backends and other tools understand your project layout; etc.). On the flip side, the use cases for writing something in `__init__.py` should be evident from just considering the fact that it's possible. (It's also a useful refactoring tool; if you are planning to make a package but don't know what all its modules should be yet, you can start by turning an existing `foo.py` into `foo/__init__.py`.) Preemptively importing from `__init__.py`, though, is not always a great idea; it represents extra up-front import time that clients can't opt out of. (This has a lot to do with why Pip takes a significant amount of time even when it ultimately determines that it hasn't been asked to do anything.)

Preferring relative imports is, if anything, not common enough, but is certainly common among people who know what they're doing.

As for class/static/instance methods:

> When should we use class or static methods? Here are some basic guidelines I found.

The use cases more or less derive directly from their differences. But if you're going to cite sources for this, it's a crying shame to leave out Raymond Hettinger's "Python's Class Development Toolkit" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTLu2DFOdTg).
by elliotto | 2025-07-08 01:17:35+00:00
I think you've fallen into the trap of Descartes' Deus deceptor! Not only is #1 the only question from my list we can definitely answer yes to, but due to this demon this question is actually the only postulate of anything at all that we can answer yes to. All else could be an illusion.

Assuming we escape the null space of solipsism, and can reason about anything at all, we can think about what a model might look like that generates some ordering of P(#). Of course, without a hypothetical consciousness detector (one might believe or not believe that this could exist) P(#) cannot be measured, and therefore will fall outside of the realm of a scientific hypothesis deduction model. This is often a point of contention for rationality-pilled science-cels.

Some of these models might be incoherent - a model that denies P(#1) doesn't seem very good. A model that denies P(#2) but accepts P(#3) is a bit strange. We can't verify these, but we do need to operate under one (or in your suggestion, operate under a probability distribution of these models) if we want to make coherent statements about what is and isn't conscious.
by analog31 | 2025-07-08 01:18:26+00:00
As I understand it right now, the corn & beans are ready to harvest when the water content falls below a certain threshold, to minimize the cost of drying it. In my region, it's a betting game against the weather. If the right conditions emerge, everybody's trying to harvest everything at once.

During this time there's also a crush for the available harvesters, semi trucks, and elevator capacity. All of which rides the ups and downs of prices.

The robots could be programmed to manage this process too.

Of course we'll need less of these crops, if we all become allergic to beef because of that tick. ;-)
by tptacek | 2025-07-08 01:18:57+00:00
Your source [2] provides numbers (and a graph) only for total US electrical usage (4.4 TWh or so). The number you cite for data center usage exceeds 2023 estimates for all data center usage globally. Do you have numbers for data center usage in the United States? It's the US TWh number that tells us whether data center usage is merely rising (of course it is!) or whether it's actually a significant component of all US usage.

This snagged you as well with your "recent growth" claim; I have no trouble believing it's true, but what you're saying and what I'm saying can be true at the same time.

I don't think there's anything productive I can do with your "$455B worth of data center" numbers, as there's no transform that takes me from buildout cost to electrical usage.

Respectfully: you said I was not just wrong, but "extremely wrong", so this should be easy for you to spell out. I appreciate the effort so far!
by lmm | 2025-07-08 01:19:18+00:00
> Sure, and if I store my data in a Rust array and store indexes into that array around the place as sort of weak references (something I've seen Rust programmers use and talk about all the time), I can easily fetch the wrong data too.

Maybe, but you'll do so in an understandable way that you can catch in testing. You won't suddenly start fetching different wrong data when someone builds your program with a newer version of the compiler, which is a very real risk with C. To say nothing of the risk of arbitrary code execution if your program is operating on attacker-supplied data.

> The irony, of couse, is that the characters that can break your terminal session are perfectly valid UTF-8.

Terminals that can't handle the full UTF-8 range are a problem with those terminals IMO. And terminals implemented in Rust probably don't have that problem :).
by NoPicklez | 2025-07-08 01:19:37+00:00
I don't think I really agree with this article.

Most things regarding photography mentioned in the article are still important and relevant. There's no death of landscape orientation, just that our primary displays for looking at photos mostly posted on social media are portrait. However the rule of thirds still applies regardless of whether you use a mobile phone or a DSLR.

Anyone can pick up a mobile phone and take a photo or a video, but the fundamental rules of photography and videography still apply if you want to do things seriously and properly. The article talks about manipulation

Yes its easier to pick up a mobile phone and take a good photo compared to picking up a DSLR. But that doesn't mean the fundamentals aren't important in making both of those devices take incredible photos.

Lastly, the article acts like decades ago photographers weren't taking photos with their DSLR's all dialed and dropping them into photoshop to retouch photos.
by imgabe | 2025-07-08 01:23:28+00:00
FWIW I though Rebirth was pretty good. At least, it was a step up from the nadir of Dominion, which was an awful mess. Rebirth got back to the basics of Jurassic movies - people go to a place with dinosaurs and everything goes wrong. It's also a heist movie of sorts, which is a different spin on the usual disaster movie trope the others use.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-07-08 01:23:33+00:00
not necessery. The OG operator may have a personal quote open with musk or some other thing happend making OG over-critical. We don't know. Discontent is a big drive for "fans of" and fans can be really discontent sometimes - and the biggest critics.

I've stopped judging by the source credibility and started to only consume arguments. With the time, there will be some leveling of informational bias supported by the wrong / right / pro / contra / this & that picked up on different occassions.
by schoen | 2025-07-08 01:24:23+00:00
There is some historical connection between CT and blockchains.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

Ben Laurie read this post by Aaron Swartz while thinking about how a certificate transparency mechanism could work. (I think Peter Eckersley may have told him about it!) The existence proof confirmed that we sort of knew how to make useful append-only data structures with anonymous writers.

CT dropped the incentive mechanism and the distributed log updates in favor of more centralized log operation, federated logging, and out-of-band audits of identified log operators' behavior. This mostly means that CT lacks the censorship resistance of a blockchain. It also means that someone has to directly pay to operate it, without recouping the expenses of maintaining the log via block rewards. And browser developers have to manually confirm logs' availability properties in order to decide which logs to trust (with -- returning to the censorship resistance property -- no theoretical guarantee that there will always be suitable logs available in the future).

This has worked really well so far, but everyone is clear on the trade-offs, I think.
by kelnos | 2025-07-08 01:27:54+00:00
What do you mean by "negotiating"? They can buy the books in paperback form from Amazon. And for e-books available for sale without DRM, they get to skip the cutting and scanning part.

If the book is out of print, then tough luck. That's not a license to infringe on the publisher's copyright. If we're not ok with that, we have legislative means to change that. A judge shouldn't be rewriting law in that manner.
by fugalfervor | 2025-07-08 01:28:06+00:00
Perhaps the transferable skill in hand-tool woodworking with the greatest relevance to a career in programming is this: recognizing when slowing down for precision is called for; perhaps for many of us, the implied converse is more important. That is, recognizing when we can save time and effort by accepting something noncritical as "good enough".

Paul Sellers has an incredible ability to communicate passion for making things, at once providing incredibly precise instruction and making the beginner unafraid of making mistakes. Watching this series of videos set me on a path that I will surely be traveling years from now. For those of you who don't know his body of educational work, perhaps it will interest you to explore it.
by muzani | 2025-07-08 01:28:41+00:00
YT Music is a good algorithm for exploring music. You click a song and the playlist after that song is a mix of similar music and music you like to hear. There's also a button which lets you decide if you want to discover different music or something fresher based on your taste.

Twitter is an example of being entirely in the comfort cage - it links you with people who you agree with, even going out of the way to create these bubbles.

Meta seems to end up with a rage cage. If you criticize say, videos on how to become a billionaire, it would show more billionaire videos.

HN used to be the default. A forum where everyone is in the same cage. People criticize HN culture and thoughts, but sometimes it's just people being shown a side of the world they're not used to.
by janalsncm | 2025-07-08 01:28:51+00:00
I was responding to someone who said they don’t understand why someone would play a game if they can’t engage with it on an intellectual level as art. I brought up Mario Kart because I spent many nights with friends playing Mario Kart and the experience was about friends, not the game as art.

So I believe that some people will still play games no matter what the creative process is as long as the result is good. I’m sure there are plenty of games whose creators don’t do interviews. Of course ancillary media content is good for marketing and some fans like it but it’s not strictly necessary.
Do you know any AI agent that uses PC to complete any task?
by itstomo | 2025-07-08 01:29:06+00:00
Hey hacker news, I'm looking for an AI agent that completes arbitrary tasks by using the entire PC (screen view + clicking buttons etc).

I know there are many attempts to achieve this, but I don't know any one that actually works.

If you know any, please comment below! Thanks!
by OJFord | 2025-07-08 01:29:11+00:00
No mention of any Oscar at your link, not that that's really important. I think you should read my 'for adults' as precluding animations/cartoons, not to say that Flow isn't aimed at adults or that's childish or anything, just that that's what I meant - in that format of course you can do it and I'm sure there's been loads, no doubt an adult can (re) watch and enjoy A Land Before Time too; I assume TFA was also thinking of 'live action' films.
by nomel | 2025-07-08 01:29:11+00:00
> No one is “requiring perfection”

> If “don’t hallucinate” is too much to ask then ethics flew out the window long ago.

Those sentences aren't compatible.

> but hallucination is a major issue

Again, every official public AI interface has warnings/disclaimers for this issue. It's well known. It's not some secret. Every AI researcher is directly or indirectly working on this.

> is in the opposite direction of the “goal” of AGI

This isn't a logical statement, so it's difficult to respond to. Hallucination isn't a direction that's being headed towards, it's being actively, with intent and $$$, headed away from.
by dandano | 2025-07-08 01:29:17+00:00
I disagree with this take. I work very closely with my UX lead and we always do lo-fi in Miro/Figjam before hi-fi designs in Figma. This gives us flexibility of expression to quickly mock things up loosely before going into the final design. Auto-layout, components is a huge win for designers. We were on another design product called UXPin which didn't have this sophistication and it was an absolute drag.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-08 01:30:01+00:00
> you don't work for a company or know anyone who works for a company or government that China might want to [...]

As I read it, yes, parent does not have ties to that category of companies. TBH I don't too.

In contrast we are meddled enough by the US that actively following US national news makes sense from a work perspective.
by drzaiusx11 | 2025-07-08 01:30:03+00:00
As an example we recently had a Ruby application that had a test suite that was taking literally an hour per build, but turned out it was running entirely sequential by default, using only 1 core. I spent an afternoon migrating our CI runners to split the workload across all available cores and now it's 5 minutes per build. And that was just the low hanging fruit, it can be significantly improved further but there's obviously diminishing returns
by sothatsit | 2025-07-08 01:31:40+00:00
> First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16).

It sounds like the Authors were the one who brought this argument, not Anthropic? In which case, it seems like a big blunder on their part.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-08 01:32:17+00:00
Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.

The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.

Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.