MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-07 05:42:53+00:00
None of these examples contradict what I've said. The historical fact is that continuous functions and vector addition were discovered as interesting mathematical properties based on certain visual intuitions. Only later were did they come to be extended to more general notions applicable to wildly different conditions.

What I claim in addition is that it's still useful for your intuition to understand this history and the leaps that were made by extremely talented mathematicians of the past who came up with these formalizations of intuitive properties.

I'd also claim that they couldn't have ever arrived at the current formal systems if they hadn't started with certain intuitions for simple systems.
by graycat | 2025-07-07 05:43:20+00:00
"Functions Are Vectors"?

Let's see: Let A be a non-empty set, N the set of positive whole numbers, and X the set of all functions f

f: A --> N

with usual notation.

Assume as is common, the scalars are the set of real numbers, but the set of complex numbers will also do.

So, is X a vector space and, thus, each f in X a vector?

No, since -f is not in X. Neither is (1/2)f.

Some references (with TeX markup):

Paul R.\ Halmos, {\it Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, Second Edition\/}

linear algebra treated as functional analysis.

Walter Rudin, {\it Real and Complex Analysis\/}

with Lebesgue integration and, then, Banach and Hilbert vector spaces.

Walter Rudin, {\it Functional Analysis\/}

with Fourier theory.

Jacques Neveu, {\it Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability\/}

with random variables, that is, functions from a probability space to, usually, the set of real numbers with convergence results, building on the work A. Kolmogorov building on the work of H. Lebesgue.
by osn9363739 | 2025-07-07 05:43:57+00:00
So you agree with nomdep? If you know you have time blindness it's a good opportunity to do something about it. I tend to choose the be really early option because that works for me. But it can be stressful for sure. And I probably don't get as much done as someone that can organise their time better. That's just the way it goes.
by camillomiller | 2025-07-07 05:44:38+00:00
> We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent.

While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life. This is true for all the other examples mentioned.

That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.
by aaron695 | 2025-07-07 05:45:48+00:00
Grok blamed Elon Musk for the deaths of the girls at Camp Mystic.

That should be in the headline not a tiny paragraph at the bottom.

https://x.com/grok/status/1941506767046967650

Not my exact words, but close enough: Trump's NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk's DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts. This contributed to the floods killing 24, including ~20 Camp Mystic girls. Facts over feelings.

Facts are not convenient for HN narratives.

The entire Holocaust is shaped by 90's Hollywood movies. Can you not see how Art Spiegelman's 1980's "Maus" is nothing like how it is told today?

The UK is to British period dramas as Hollywood is to Holocaust movies. Could we not occasionally pick another genocide FFS and the UK make another season of Red Dwarf.
Show HN: A tool that explains Python errors like you're five
by BB5 | 2025-07-07 05:45:49+00:00
I built Error Narrator — a Python tool that explains exceptions in plain English (and Russian, too).

It goes beyond just showing the traceback. It tells you: – What happened (in human terms) – Why it happened (including the concept behind the error) – Where exactly it happened (file + line) – How to fix it (with code suggestions)

It works with OpenAI or HuggingFace models and runs directly in your terminal or scripts.

This tool helped me save time and also helped friends who are just learning Python. I'd love your feedback, suggestions, or even contributions. It’s open source.
by intended | 2025-07-07 05:45:54+00:00
Nothing changed - mostly it seems the American condition is a side effect of dedicated partisanship and asymmetric political behavior since the 1970s.

The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.

That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.

It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.

Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.

So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.

What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
by int_19h | 2025-07-07 05:45:57+00:00
I don't think this tells us much. The present distribution of supporters is rather unique in how strongly it correlates with population density, which means that Dems are going to have a major structural handicap in Senate. I don't think there was ever anything similar historically. And it won't change unless and until the coalitions change, which, sure, will happen eventually - but then it'll be a completely different party under the same brand, so why would Republicans today care about that new party's difficulties?
by Animats | 2025-07-07 05:46:18+00:00
Automation is seen in the more advanced countries, ones which lack an oppressed underclass like the US. There's much more automation on farms. Robotic milking is widely used in Australia, but less popular in the US. [1] New Zealand has the best automated slaughterhouse technology.[2] Those jobs are mostly done by illegal immigrants in the US, and the companies hiring them are screaming about stricter ICE enforcement.[3][4]

[1] https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/dairy-robotic-milking-sys...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdq1uBCI2Kw

[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/06/23/dairy-industr...

[4] https://tucson.com/news/national/article_fe9b9724-1526-557b-...
by jschveibinz | 2025-07-07 05:46:55+00:00
I took your strata and did some research:

1. The Tiny Ultra Rich (Top 0.1%)

~0.1% of the population

⸻

2. The Very Rich (Top 1% excluding above)

~0.9% of the population

* the top 1% control about 35% of the total wealth

⸻

3. The Moderately Rich (Top 10%, excluding above)

~9% of the population

⸻

4. Shrinking Middle Class (Homeowners with Mortgage, Some Stability)

~25–30% of the population

⸻

5. The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Majority (Working but Financially Precarious)

~40–45% of the population

⸻

6. The Invisible Class (Undocumented, Unhoused, or Living in Vehicles)

~10–15% of the population

In 1900, you might have seen a similar stratification. For example:

Below is a historically grounded approximate breakdown of the adult population by economic stratum in 1900:

⸻

1. Capitalist Elite / Plutocratic Class

~1% of the population

• Industrial tycoons, major landowners, top financiers.

• Controlled a disproportionate share of national wealth (upward of 25–40% in the U.S.).

⸻

2. Upper Middle Class / Bourgeois Professional Class

~5–7% of the population

• High-status professionals, corporate managers, senior civil servants.

• Educated, well-connected, often urban.

⸻

3. Lower Middle Class / Petty Bourgeoisie

~10–15% of the population

• Shopkeepers, skilled tradespeople, clerks, schoolteachers.

• Often lived modest but stable lives; economically vulnerable to downturns.

⸻

4. Urban Working Class (Skilled and Semi-skilled)

~25–30% of the population

• Industrial workers in factories, transportation, and infrastructure.

• Many joined trade unions; others lived paycheck to paycheck in cities.

⸻

5. Rural Laboring Class / Tenant Farmers

~30–40% of the population

• Agricultural workers, sharecroppers, farm tenants.

• Still a dominant population in 1900, especially outside major cities.

•In the U.S., this included a large population of Black agricultural laborers in the South.

⸻

6. Underclass / Casual Labor / Destitute

~10–15% of the population

• Unemployed, chronically poor, recent immigrants in slums, itinerant laborers.

• Often invisible or ignored in public discourse except as objects of reform or charity.
by ianbicking | 2025-07-07 05:47:03+00:00
There's a hundred ways to use AI for any given work. For example if you are doing interesting work and aren't using AI-assisted research tools (e.g., OpenAI Deep Research) then you are missing out on making the work that more interesting by understanding the context and history of the subject or adjacent subjects.

This thesis only makes sense if the work is somehow interesting and you also have no desire to extend, expand, or enrich the work. That's not a plausible position.
by zhivota | 2025-07-07 05:47:55+00:00
That's a big part of it, yes. Retailers take advantage of information assymetry after all. While you're in Best buy, you may pay more than online to walk out with an item, but would you pay more if you could instantly confirm it's at Walmart next door for $20 less? Maybe not.

Funnily enough though Best Buy loved us and provided real time data via API and daily CSV data dumps just for us. They were like that, along with Toys R Us and AutoZone. Most others hated us, including Guitar Center after we accidentally DDOSed their web site with our scrapers.
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-07 05:49:01+00:00
In the sense that I expressed, has it not already then sought out an accurate meaning that you have asked? And then failed to give a satisfactory answer? I would also ask: is said model an advertised "reasoning" model? Also, does it have access to external facts via a tool like web search? I would not expect great ability to "arrive at truth" under certain limitations.

Now, you can't conclude that "they clearly don't 'seek' anything" just by the fact that they got an answer wrong. To use the broad notion of "seeking" like you do, a truth seeker with limited knowledge and equipment would arrive confidently at incorrect conclusions based on accurate reasoning. For example, without modern lenses to detect stellar parallax, one would confidently conclude that the stars in the sky are a different thing than the sun (and planets), since one travels across the sky, but the stars are fixed. Plato indeed thought so, and nobody would accuse him of not being a truth-seeker.

If this is what you had in mind, I hope that I have addressed it, otherwise I hope that you can communicate what you mean with an example.
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-07 05:49:21+00:00
You are misreading the article. At a guess, you have come into it "knowing what a vector is" from physics or computer science. Specifically, a vector is not "a sequence of reals", it is any object that obeys a certain set of properties. He is not "extending" your definition, he's trying to teach you the actual definition, which is more general than the examples you are used to.

(Imagine/remember what it feels like when children first learn that the integers aren't the only number, there are also fractions, then irrationals, then complex numbers...this is a very similar situation).

With that in mind, you may want to reread the text and pay attention to the definitions he is using, and not assume that your definitions are the whole story.
by voxelghost | 2025-07-07 05:50:00+00:00
I don't have LLM/AI write or generate any code or document for me. Partly because the quality is not good enough, and partly I worry about copyright/licensing/academic rigor, partly because I worry about losing my own edge.

But I do use LLM/AI, as a rubber duck that talks back, as a google on steroids - but one who needs his work double checked. And as domain discovery tool when quickly trying to get a grasp of a new area.

Its just another tool in the toolbox for me. But the toolbox is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you are going to get.
by mrob | 2025-07-07 05:50:26+00:00
I don't see how measurement helps. The ASI correctly calculates that collapsing the system maximizes its reward function before it measures the result. We already see degenerate solutions in toy models, e.g. playing Tetris forever by leaving the game paused. The real world has many more degrees of freedom. It's unreasonable to think an inferior intelligence can predict and patch all the exploits on its first attempt (and we only get the one).
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-07 05:50:48+00:00
You can force agency, ironically, by applying subjective labels that require irrational amounts of hard work to shake off (not just a change of perspective, tho a permanent one also requires undue amounts of schlep)

Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"

In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!

*"Sick" is now a term of endearment, alas
by rtpg | 2025-07-07 05:50:52+00:00
Well GP mentioned that there _wasn't_ USB printing support, right? If USB over IP "just worked" and the sunray had USB over IP support then there's USB printing support right?

But I just realized the "USB printing support" stuff was maybe less about USB printers themselves and more about being able to have, say, 30 thin clients with 30 different printers hooked up but the application would know which printer was the right one (instead of showing 30 printers available, for example)
by cess11 | 2025-07-07 05:51:17+00:00
No, it's used for "ancient monument", fornminne. It might be a early modern ruin or something that isn't ancient in some scientific sense but still is a place of historical or archaeological interest, while properly old remains, at least pre-reformatory ones, i.e. older than early 1500s, are often marked with a futhark 'r'/'ᚱ'.
by energy123 | 2025-07-07 05:52:38+00:00
This is the rhetorical tactic of false equivalence. State censorship by an autocracy with the objective of population control is not the same thing as a private company inside a democracy censoring their product to avoid bad press and maintain goodwill for shareholders. If you want solid proof that it's not the same thing, see all the uncensored open weights models that you can freely download and use without fear of persecution.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-07-07 05:52:56+00:00
Indeed, if LLMs are just distilled training data, their perspective will be quite human. Makes me think it could be interesting to train them on data from set periods instead, to get varied perspectives, and then see how their perspectives change. What would a conversation between a 1900s LLM, 2000s LLM, and 1600s LLM look like.

Or maybe some kind of mix and match, eg Train fully on Buddhist texts, and then a language dictionary from original material language to English. Maybe someone's already making hyper focused LLMS. Could be a nice change from know it all - but resultantly no unique perspective - LLMs I use now.

Well... enough thinking out loud for now.
by collinmcnulty | 2025-07-07 05:56:04+00:00
Offshore oil rigs beg to differ. For almost any set of circumstances, there’s a salary that will entice people to fill the role. They just don’t want to shell out the mid six figure salary that would be required. It’s only a “breakdown” because we collectively feel entitled to have people fill the role but don’t want to actually pay what it costs.
by self_awareness | 2025-07-07 05:58:58+00:00
INI format a "custom format"? It dates back to the 80's, maybe before that. It was the configuration file format.

OTOH, JSON is not a configuration file format. XML might be, but when I see what some people do with XML (ant, maven builds are abysmal, although msbuild xml files are managable), then I want to click unsubscribe.

I'm happy they've chosen INI.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-07 05:59:03+00:00
> No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible.

I never once advocated for the war on drugs approach, and I made that crystal clear in my comment. Proper policy != war on drugs. It means making sure that drugs get properly certified and its distribution controlled. It means focusing on treatment rather than aggressively punishing those who get addicted. It means addressing the underlying social issues that pushes people towards drugs rather than pouring all money into militarizing the police.

> Opioids are actually not all that dangerous

Victims of the epidemic would beg to differ. The epidemic highlighted the need for proper control of drugs through certification and prescription. It showed how far the pharmaceutical industry will go if left unregulated.

> But with the street you get varying purity.

I never advocated for this either. It should be illegal to sell drugs without a license.

> There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal.

Which is why regulation has increased for tobacco all around the world. We could do more to limit the exploitation of people by tobacco companies.

> I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal.

Yes, the specifics of regulation should vary depending on the dangers of each drug. I'm against all drugs being unilaterally legalized.
by azakai | 2025-07-07 05:59:03+00:00
> Yeah, my suspicion is that current-style LLMs, being inherently predictors of what a human would say, will eventually plateau at a relatively human level of ability to think and reason.

I don't think things can end there. Machines can be scaled in ways human intelligence can't: if you have a machine that is vaguely of human level intelligence, if you buy a 10x faster GPU, suddenly you have something of vaguely human intelligence but 10x faster.

Speed by itself is going to give it superhuman capabilities, but it isn't just speed. If you can run your system 10 times rather than one, you can have each consider a different approach to the task, then select the best, at least for verifiable tasks.
by janaagaard | 2025-07-07 06:00:02+00:00
A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the manuscript, that the chatbot could help him with. His conclusion about artificial intelligence was this:

“We thought we were getting an accountant, but we got a poet.”

Frederik Kulager: Jeg fik ChatGPT til at skrive dette afsnit, og testede, om min chefredaktør ville opdage det. https://open.spotify.com/episode/22HBze1k55lFnnsLtRlEu1?si=h...
by alternatex | 2025-07-07 06:00:41+00:00
I mentioned elsewhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat

Seems like people in this thread are inspired by this novel concept that isn't novel at all.

FireChat was in fact used against dictatorial governments during protests in Iraq and Hong Kong. So it fits the aspired goal for the apps suggested here perfectly, and yet still failed as a product.
by musicale | 2025-07-07 06:01:22+00:00
> it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players

This is the metagame: game designers vs. every single player in the game. I kind of like it, though once the players win (by figuring out a strategy that works) the solution (often not exactly what the developers had intended) tends to be enshrined in youtube videos, wiki pages, and common practice.
by djaychela | 2025-07-07 06:02:57+00:00
Just trying this out on iPhone on Firefox, and found something. If the phone is rotation locked in portrait mode (which mine normally is) I don't see buttons to install, try etc.

But if rotation lock is off, it's fine. Maybe there's something in the way the resolution is read that is different if the lock is on? Nothing appears in the menu bar at the top so there was no way to do anything.

Amazing efforts here though, now I can actually use it! Truly impressive.
by vkou | 2025-07-07 06:03:01+00:00
First of all, 11 billion is 0.17% of the federal budget. (Which is ~6 trillion). You were looking at a quarterly budget, not the annual one.

Secondly, that 0.17% that is spent on food security has dramatically better ROI than the 1.7% of it that is spent on, to pick a random line item... maintaining 5 (of 11) carrier strike groups[1].

---

[1] For contrast, the entire rest of the world put together has exactly 2 carrier strike groups. Somehow, I'd have to prioritize people getting three meals a day over nearly anything else the government could be doing.
by defrost | 2025-07-07 06:04:04+00:00
Hard to say whether the big ferris wheel approach brings any substantial advantage over automated strawberry operations of two years and three months past:

* First, breed strawberries well suited for "robot" harvesting: $11.5M effort to deliver bot-ready strawberries https://www.horticulture.com.au/hort-innovation/news-events/...

* Grow on tables in polytunnels and automate harvest: Strawberry-picking robots ease worker shortage during harvest at Tasmanian fruit farm https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/fruit-picking-robots-...

Burlington Berries at Cressy, in northern Tasmania, has shipped out a fleet of 16 robots from the UK to help with picking over the summer. The farm trialled its first robot in collaboration with British company Dogtooth Technologies nearly seven years ago.

Both writeups from Feb/March 2023

https://dogtooth.tech/

Dogtooth is a Cambridge-based technology start-up building state-of-the-art intelligent robots for soft fruit pickin Working closely with UK and Australian growers, we have been developing commercial robotic harvesting solutions since 2016. Our fifth generation robots are available to buy now.

Innovate UK on Dogtooth (one year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLt0pogdkU
by devjab | 2025-07-07 06:04:55+00:00
Well yes, considering NASA wanted it in theirs. There are a lot of advantages in immediately failing when your software does something you don't want it to do rather than trying to continue in a corrupted or invalid state. As for how you deal with it, it depends. Erlang has a lot of "self-healing" supervisor/actor models which are widely used, but I don't have a lot of experience with those.

We use a form of recovery oriented computing in our solar plant components, though to be fair, we only use a very tiny part of it since we basically reboot to the last known valid state. Which isn't exactly 100% safety, but it's not like anyone dies if an inverter or datalogger goes offline for an hour.

I'm curious to know how you would deal with errors in these sort of things without runtime assertions or similar. Maybe my knolwedge is outdated?
by pabs3 | 2025-07-07 06:04:59+00:00
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