MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by analog31 | 2025-07-06 20:19:33+00:00
Indeed, the voters do all sorts of stupid things, yet are still collectively smarter than an autocrat at promoting human welfare when their democracy is reasonably robust. It takes more than just the failings of voters -- it takes a concerted effort over the span of decades to erode a democracy to the point where it's in danger of slipping into fascism etc.

If the AGI's figure out how to achieve democracy amongst themselves, then we're in trouble.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-06 20:19:37+00:00
> The economy of the scale favors monoculture

I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.

Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.

If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.

If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)

But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 20:19:55+00:00
Roads are already extremely loud and unpleasant.

Part of the reason the US has a problem with too many people being fat and dropping like flies is because nobody wants to go outside. Outside is hot, outside doesn't have enough shade, outside is actively hostile to humans trying to do human things.

Oh? What's that? You want to go walk and get a cup of coffee? How about you go fuck yourself instead?

You want to sit outside and enjoy your meal? Well guess what, it smells like diesel and you won't be able to hear your own thoughts.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-06 20:19:56+00:00
This behavior became common in the Indian market after the newer HFTs (Edit: hedge funds. Thanks for the callout avvt4avaw) in the Indian market like Millenium, Jane Street, Citadel, and others setup shop, and explains a LOT of the market weirdness that happened last year. DE Shaw India has been a much smarter player in Indian equities.

Jane Street's kvetching about Millenium showed the spotlight and now everyone will be getting the hammer ("iss hamam mein sabh nange hain"). Jane Street was also dumb enough to do this during the General Election, so now Indian regulators have to do something. This plus the Adani prosecution is a quick win to restore confidence in SEBI.
by AngryData | 2025-07-06 20:20:43+00:00
Ehh, im not sure I agree that arms production is that difficult. Yes you need machine shop equipment, but machine equipment from any time in the last 75 years would be more than capable and there is plenty of unused equipment sitting around and new cheap chinese equipment you can buy that would be workable even if it isn't great. Even the US where guns are about as legal as they get, there are illegal gun manufacturing shops busted basically every week. Half of them are probably just making trash that is super easy to do like giggle switches and mostly publicized as pure propaganda for police departments, but that still leaves a significant number of people producing working illegal arms even in a market where guns are dirt cheap.

And now you got an entire online community dedicated to 3d printing firearms and sharing models and designs, and it is REALLY easy to go from 3d printer design into sintered or casted metal parts that require little to no actual machining to operate.

In my opinion, 99% of the barrier to obtaining firearms in this era is purely a lack of desire and them already being so cheap to get. It doesn't require a craftsman of 20 years to produce working fierarms nor even specialized or unusual equipment or materials. But even if someone did order more specialized machinery from China to produce say cold hammered barrels at a factory scale, a chinese tool making company isn't going to think twice about shipping it and taking the money, and if the producers can run it for just a few months it would have paid for itself.
by 010101010101 | 2025-07-06 20:20:48+00:00
I don’t have any empirical evidence to refute you, but it connected with me as a 17 year old kid living in a mobile home in Mississippi. Almost 25 years later, and in a much different socioeconomic state, it still does.

Stories steeped in humanity aren’t biased - less confident about you to be honest.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-06 20:22:06+00:00
I think you might be right. It was such a juvenile and petty squabble.

And on top of that - don't make such squabbles public during a GENERAL ELECTION, thus forcing politicans to cleanup shop.

Same thing happened to Adani Group, as their scandal hit during the run up of the 2024 GE.

Now both Adani Group and the HFT industry are under severe scrutiny due to the upcoming Bihar Elections, which is used a sandbox to test messaging by the opposition and incumbents in preparation of the next General Election and other state elections.
by jrflowers | 2025-07-06 20:23:49+00:00
Do you have any references to support your “The USSR fell because of bad luck” theory?

It is clear that you do not believe that it fell because of something inherent to communism, as by your own reasoning there was no external force on earth that could have taken it down — even decades of antagonism by the richest and most powerful country on earth and all of its allies. It isn’t possible to say that a system is the single most durable thing on earth but also so fragile that it it’ll obviously just collapse, those are mutually exclusive statements. You can be 4’11 or 7’2 but not both.

I personally haven’t read any books that say that the Cold War was unnecessary and if the US had simply sat back and done nothing, communism would never have posed a threat to anybody since it would just end on its own. I would absolutely love to read more about Whoopsie Theory though, it is a fascinating proposition even if “communism was so chill that the world would’ve been better if nobody fought it” sounds like something you’d read on tumblr.
by skydhash | 2025-07-06 20:24:41+00:00
> Why write code in Go where I have to stop and look things up every few minutes when I could instead of use Python where I have to look things up about once an hour

My workflow is different. Whenever I can't remember something, I look it up. And for something that I'm not familiar with, that usually means a lot of browser tabs. But I try to retrieve it from my memory first (and it usually exists in my short-term memory). And after some days, it has become part of my long-term memory and I don't need to look it up again. If I don't touch the language and its ecosystem for a while, I forgot some details, but they are refreshed with a quick read.

> If those generated examples are wrong I find out about 30 seconds later when I run the code

I would be grateful if those were the only kind of wrong I encounter. Writing code that does the stuff is usually easy. The difficult part is to ensure that the data fits the definition of correct at every stage of the process. And there's not some corrupting action somewhere. Doing so exhaustively is formal verification and it is costly (mostly in terms of time). So what you do is other kind of testing which only covers the most likely places and dimensions where thing can go wrong.

The stressful part is when you have to change some part to fit a new use case. You then have to carefully revise both the change and the other parts so that their definition of correct is consistent. And sometimes there's some decoupling mechanism which makes the link non-obvious.

That's the definition of wrong that I'm fearful of. Where two part are internally correct, but their integration is not consistent.
by deaddodo | 2025-07-06 20:26:14+00:00
Sure, and we also still have people coding in K&R-style C. Some people are hard to change in their ways, but that doesn't mean the community/ecosystem hasn't moved on.

> Another one is C++ "libraries" that are plain C with extern "C" blocks.

Sure, and you also see "C Libraries" that are the exact same. I don't usually judge the communities on their exceptions or extremists.
by necovek | 2025-07-06 20:26:24+00:00
I've talked about this in a few places, but there is a simple way to get to higher testability and trust in the automated tests being done with little to no extra effort for complex systems — this slightly tunes how you define the testing pyramid, but it's important to always test exactly enough, or you hit maintenance burden that kills you down the line.

All it takes is for a component developer to build a fully functioning component by having proper fakes for all the external dependencies. If this is religiously applied through the org, then all components in the org will have all of their real business logic and integration points sufficiently tested.

Then, your end-to-end tests can work against a very complex system that is extremely fast, but which uses the actual business logic, other than the very extreme boundaries to external systems not under your control.

However, AI is usually not much of a help here, because most software is not written in the way to easily construct either a fake or real production component from the same component — and AI is trained on existing source code.
by xnx | 2025-07-06 20:26:32+00:00
> Then there’s the other thing that nobody talks about, the massive greenhouse-gas load that all those data centers are going to be pumping out.

This is discussed ad nauseum, and the carbon accounting is very poorly done.

Looking at the capital and operating expenses of datacenters is the right way to think about it. Nothing about that tells me that AI is environmentally worse than driving a big vanity pickup truck bigger, owning a large house, having lots of offspring, or taking many international flights.
by YZF | 2025-07-06 20:26:50+00:00
I haven't looked at much at the quality of unit tests generated by AI but I would imagine it would suffer from the same general problems as humans. That is that most of these unit tests would be bad tests. They would include assumptions about implementation and make changes to the code harder.

Yes- black box and end-to-end testing. Better forced by the nature of the black box to test the behavior of the system. It's still possible to test the wrong things (behaviors you don't care about) but that tends to stand out more. Also still difficult to make these tests reliable.
by balderdash | 2025-07-06 20:27:33+00:00
Having formerly worked for an NYSE Specialist firm the role of market making is incredibly important, but many large-scale HFTs today operate in ways that either stretch the legal boundaries or exploit regulatory gaps. Many practices arguably amount to market manipulation in spirit, even if technically legal. Candidly, the regulators are either too lazy, stupid, ill equipped or uninterested to do anything about it.
by bobbob27 | 2025-07-06 20:28:11+00:00
I truly believe you're right on that. Apple seems to be the most visible example of a company using LLMs in a way that will make long-term sense.

The most logical future of AI is strictly on-device, capable enough to understand the user and making sense of the algorithmic-anarchy that is our phone.

THAT is something exciting and practical, that doesn't require magical-thinking to desire.
by pseudo0 | 2025-07-06 20:29:28+00:00
That's not what the article says.

> Adani, the nephew of Gautam Adani, was sent a notice by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) last year which alleged he shared information about Adani Green's (ADNA.NS), 2021 acquisition of SoftBank-backed SB Energy Holdings with his brother-in-law before the deal was announced, according to a source and the document.

Some Adani relative is getting a slap on the wrist for a $100k insider trading violation. This has nothing to do with the main issues raised by Hindenburg.
by Juliate | 2025-07-06 20:29:34+00:00
I thought this was going to be about fixing our trajectory on Earth, and species/ecosystems survival, and it starts, again, with AI and projections that are effectively far beyond the horizon of most of the current species on Earth, within the next 50 years.

Less talk about AI and space exploration please. More talk about humanity as an integral part of Earth ecosystem, and about the economics and politics required for that (hint, capitalism brought us so far, with the side-effect of destroying the very tree on which we sit).
by avvt4avaw | 2025-07-06 20:29:48+00:00
This is a very weird use of terminology. None of Jane Street, Millennium or Citadel are High Frequency Traders (HFTs). Jane Street is a prop trading firm who engages in market making, but is not primarily known for HFT - they are grey box (i.e. human-in-the-loop) which on the spectrum of market making strategies, is pretty much the opposite end from HFTs. Other firms in this bracket include SIG and DRW.

Millennium and Citadel are both hedge funds, who do not engage in market making at all. They are most similar to other multi-strategy hedge funds like Balyasny or Point72.

You may be thinking of Citadel Securities, who are a market making firm and do engage in high frequency trading. Other large and well known HFT firms include Hudson River Trading, Tower Research, Jump Trading, Virtu, IMC and Optiver.
by necovek | 2025-07-06 20:29:49+00:00
It's cool to learn about Verilator: I've been proposing our HW teams give us the simulations based on their HW design for us to target with SW, but I am so out of the loop on HW development, that I can't push them in this direction (because they'll just give me: "that's interesting, but it's hard", which frustrates me to no end).

Can you perhaps do a write-up of what you've done and how "slow" it was, and if you've got ideas to make it faster?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-06 20:32:17+00:00
> Those are the interesting questions.

Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.

The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-06 20:33:10+00:00
Seriously? The technology that doesn't exist will use a discredited theory to access a poorly defined concept from the early 1800's?

What possible use can this level of speculative fiction masquerading as a think-piece possibly have? I'm trying to be charitable, I'm trying to be fair, but so help me I don't see a kind way to interpret this. I suppose the least damning version I can come up with is that this is more FUD-marketing that attempts to use the back door to make claims about future capability that the technology is unlikely to achieve; at least that's only cynical, not stupid.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-06 20:33:56+00:00
Exactly. People say "Oh, I'm not affected by advertising, and I ignore sales pitches. I am very smart and do my own research!" But what are they researching? Marketing literature! They think they are informing themselves, but in reality, they are just seeking out marketing disguised as impartial facts.

I laugh when people say "I use site:reddit.com to scope my Google searches for product information because I'm getting impartial information from real people."
by bumby | 2025-07-06 20:35:11+00:00
>How do you ensure everyone does their homework?

To your point, I think this tone has to be set by the senior person or else it won't take. It has to be ingrained culturally.

Correct me if I'm off, but it seems like you're saying these things are true:

1) There are certain high-level decisions that must be made and only certain people can make them because of the risk.

2) Those people are busy and in meetings almost all of the day.

3) Because they are busy they can't do the homework.

All of that points to the decision-maker as being the bottleneck. Certainly I'm missing the nuance, but that doesn't sound like an organization that delegates effectively. Real delegation, where people are delegated the authority to make important decisions, could reduce the need for all of the above. What exactly are they being delegated if not the authority to make high-level decisions? It's sounds like delegation in name only, or a more superficial version of delegation. Sometimes I think leaders think of “delegation” as “allowing someone else to do the stuff I don’t really want to do.” That’s not the type of delegation I’m alluding to.
by jemmyw | 2025-07-06 20:35:45+00:00
Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies.

Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
by MalbertKerman | 2025-07-06 20:36:42+00:00
I did get a lot of that in the lower level math courses, where it kinda felt like the math faculty were grudgingly letting in the unwashed masses to learn some primitive skills to apply [spit] to their various fields, and didn't really give a shit if anybody understood anything as long as the morons could repeat some rituals for moving x around on the page. I didn't really understand integrals until the intermediate classical mechanics prof took an hour or two to explain what the hell we had been doing for three semesters of calculus.

But when I did go past the required courses and into math for math majors, things got a lot better. I just didn't find that out until I was about to graduate.
by AngryData | 2025-07-06 20:37:18+00:00
I would say yes, but I would 100x more say yes to cocaine. Cocaine usage is statistically less deadly than alcohol usage, and the vast majority of cocaine deaths are due to mixing depressive drugs with cocaine to keep them awake and able to take more depressive drugs until the cocaine wears off and they die from the heroic doses of pills or heroin or alcohol they consumed. And a lot of that problem can be mitigated with education, knowledge, and clean source material that doesn't have other cheaper drugs mixed in already.

Despite the strong effects cocaine has on users, it isn't really especially dangerous or damaging except to people with heart problems who would have similar issues with other stimulants like caffeine. The most dangerous thing about cocaine might just be how obtaining it involves interacting with such serious and expensive criminal markets and the legal problems of getting caught with it. The War on Drugs has propagandized it seem to like some super-drug of the most dangerous order that drives people mad and turn into cannibals or some outlandish shit, but it is a huge mischaracterization; basically the same kind of thing they tried to do to marijuana in making people think it turns you into a rapist or makes you a drooling idiot.
by gxs | 2025-07-06 20:37:54+00:00
Who’s to say it’s saturated?

I’d say you can only say saturated relative to the historical popularity of other topics on HN throughout the years. There’s no real golden rule here

Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects

Would be curious to see the breakdown of this statistic
by yoz-y | 2025-07-06 20:39:13+00:00
Random people have no business of knowing what a “PWA” is. So of course they don’t ask specifically for that.

People asking for “I just want to have fully featured apps coming from wherever” are aplenty. Apple has pushed app snippets and in-AppStore one shot apps for a long time. These would be much better as PWAs.

Not because PWAs are inherently better. I believe native programs are superior. However history has shown that vast majority of apps are just poorly wrapped websites.

As an aside, iOS PWA support is really phoned in. For example they introduced environmental css variables for safe insets. And then provided no way to test them outside of real device or a simulator.
by AlexhsV | 2025-07-06 20:39:21+00:00
Uplodio’s AI agent, Amy, scales autonomously your affiliate program or your influencer paid partnerships by:

-identifying the most relevant nano-micro creators, -crafting hyper-personalized outreach and follow-up emails (driving ~40% response rates), -negotiating -collecting creator data for your CRM.

Saving you 30+ hours per week
by paulsutter | 2025-07-06 20:39:29+00:00
Mapreduce was a simple way to harness large clusters back in 2006

Today’s tools like Spanner are vastly more sophisticated, but were built by people who learned to work at petabyte scale developing in Mapreduce

We’re getting better AI tools every month, and the best way to be ready for next year’s tools is to work with the tools we have now
by watscho | 2025-07-06 20:39:44+00:00
You need to have some basic knowledge of programming, because AI can't create full projects on its own — it can only build what you want, and you have to know what that is. I started with the idea that you're my partner in crime, someone who wants to make a lot of money with me and is always trying to push me — give me ideas to build something valuable. Also, ChatGPT knows almost everything about me — I told it all this to help choose the right topic. You tell it what to do, and it does it. The key is knowing what to tell it.
by reillyse | 2025-07-06 20:39:49+00:00
I dunno, seems like a really confusing question. Communication is important but I can imagine that explaining this verbally on the spot to an interviewee would not be straightforward especially because the assumptions made around single threading get confusing. If it's just a Javascript question say that - because it seems it basically is. Writing this in go would be super easy so I think the question is just asking people how well they understand Javascript.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 20:40:42+00:00
Typically, computation you do in Python code costs you about 40× as much CPU as if you did it in C. But with Numpy I usually see only about a 4× single-core slowdown after a little optimization work. Many database-backed web services are bottlenecked on the database or text template instantiation, neither of which are really related to Python's CPU efficiency.

As a side note, the most popular databases are getting only a tiny fraction of the available performance on current hardware. I wrote a couple of comments with more details about this a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408654

In the manycore world, Python's GIL makes some approaches to scaling across cores unavailable, though that is changing. But I don't think those are usually relevant to web server throughput, just (potentially) latency.
by 998244353 | 2025-07-06 20:40:47+00:00
The set of all real->real functions is still a vector space.

This vector space also has a basis (even if it is not as useful): there is a (uncountably infinite) subset of real->real functions such that every function can be expressed as a linear combination of a finite number of these basis functions, in exactly one way.

There isn't a clean way to write down this basis, though, as you need to use Zorn's lemma or equivalent to construct it.