MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-19 20:34:01+00:00
>No rights have existed 'forever'

you should probably reread the text I responded to and then what I wrote, because you seem to think I believe there are rights that are not codified by humans in some way and are on a mission to correct my mistake.

>George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689

to repeat: Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

inalienable modifies rights here, if George is surprised by any rights it is inalienable ones.

>Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.

title of post is "Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement", I was under the impression that it had something to do with how the EU sees copyright and not how the U.S and British common law sees it.

Hence multiple comments referencing EU but I see I must give up and the U.S must have its way, evidently the Europe AI agreement is all about how copyright works in the U.S, prime arbiter of all law around the globe.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-19 20:34:02+00:00
You could make the case that it could be the opposite: people could use AI to confirm what they already believe. Already I think the problem is what people want to consume, for instance my understanding is that the most popular part of the New York Times is the opinion page which is cheap to produce and mostly the likes of David Brooks and Charlie Blow blowing it out their ass. The real news is expensive to produce because it involves sending young reporters out in the the field and do research, sometimes going into harm's way, applying elbow grease and data analysis and in the end it is about some people you don't know in some town you never heard of and doesn't come to a clear moral conclusion.

There is the criticism that the media is harmful and 'biased' because of the interests of the people who own it (conservative) or who work in it (liberal) but a more fundamental criticism that says it gets things wrong by its very nature which includes the works of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Ben Bagdikian [1], Johnathan Schell, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.

I've lived long enough that I've had the experience that an "event" [2] takes place -- I see it live on TV, then the recap on the evening news, then in the daily paper the next day, then in a weekly paper like The Economist, I read more articles about it, and I think I know what happened.

25 years later a book comes out that is very well research and they combed over the primary sources and interviewed lots of people who were involved and it seems to me that what happened is very different from what I remembered, some of that is my memory being fuzzy [3] but some of it is that journalists write the first draft of history and don't get it quite right?

So I think that's what you're up against.

We're also up against something new in the social media age in that you're aware of the editorial function of the TV channel or newspaper to some extent (but nowhere near as much as you should -- because 10,000x as many things happened today and did not get in the news as did get in the news) but when you see something in social media you think other people care about it as opposed to the editors. Ezra Klein was speculating in his last podcast, for instance, that if Elon Musk was at war with Donald Trump he might amplify Xes about the Trump-Epstein connection which could be devastating because it creates the appearance (and reality) of a movement.

[1] who pointed out the conflict between the owner and journalist mentioned above

[2] l’événement in French theory. Since everything else is under-translated in French theory I think this word, used technically by various authors, ought to be dragged into English

[3] If I was an LLM would we call this "hallucination?"
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-19 20:34:25+00:00
No you misread it, equality for python strings works exactly the way you expect. the id() value (which is basically the memory address) might not change if you concatenate strings, but literally nobody ever uses id for anything ever. You would use hash() which does change appropriately.

edit: 'wtf!' is always equal to itself. Maybe you are thinking of `is`, which just compares the value of id(). `is` can't be used for comparisons, saying it's a WTF is just being unfamiliar with basics. `is` is not used for equality comparisons. This is how more or less every language works, comparing pointers is not the same as comparing strings in C/rust/etc. Comparing object identity is not the same as testing equality in Java.
by sqwrell | 2025-07-19 20:34:36+00:00
A places bar editor for Win11 Mellowware has one for Win10, but he's not updated anything in a very long time.

I know we can edit the choices these with regedit, but it's a pain in the arse for many and a small utility should do it. Much documentation about the registry stucture for this topic.

Here is an image for clarity

https://imgur.com/a/EhBepi1

thanks
by ninkendo | 2025-07-19 20:35:07+00:00
> It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it simply was “the XML schema mostly follows how our implementation represents this kind of stuff”

That’s exactly what it was. They originally had a binary representation (.doc) which was pretty much just a straight-up dump of their internal data structures to disk. When they felt forced to make an “open” “xml-based” format, they basically converted their binary serialization to XML without changing what it represented at all. It was basically malicious compliance.
by _dain_ | 2025-07-19 20:35:26+00:00
>The first time someone gave be this advice, I had to do a double take. The Rust community's whole thing is commitment to compiler-enforced correctness, and they built the borrowchecker on the premise that humans can't be trusted to handle references manually. When the same borrowchecker makes references unworkable, their solution is to... recommend that I manually manage them, with zero safety and zero language support?!? The irony is unreal. Asking people to manually manage references is so hilariously unsafe and unergonomic, the suggestion would be funny if it wasn't mostly sad.

Indices aren't simply "references but worse". There are some advantages:

- they are human readable

- they are just data, so can be trivially serialized/deserialized and retain their meaning

- you can make them smaller than 64 bits, saving memory and letting you keep more in cache

Also I don't see how they're unsafe. The array accesses are still bounds-checked and type-checked. Logical errors, sure I can see that. But where's the unsafety?
by simonw | 2025-07-19 20:37:25+00:00
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html and https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html look pretty comprehensive to me, and they're backed up by a thorough collection of PEPs: https://peps.python.org/pep-0000/

As a relatively recent example, here's the language reference documentation for the match statement https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-...
by aapoalas | 2025-07-19 20:38:00+00:00
Actually; I'm not sure I'm wrong. If Copy was automatically derived based on fields of a struct (without the user explicitly asking for it with `#[derive(Copy)]` that is, as the parent comment suggested the OP is asking for), then your example S and the std Vec would both automatically derive Copy. Then, implementing Drop on them would become a compile error that you would have to silence by using the escape hatch to "un-derive" Copy from S/Vec.

So, whenever you wanted to implement Drop you'd need to engage the escape hatch.
by johnklos | 2025-07-19 20:38:22+00:00
A stock Amiga 3000 with a 25 MHz m68030 can browse modern sites using modern SSL [0] without much fuss. Granted, some m68k optimizations have been done, but if an '030 can do it, an '040 can, and a PowerPC 601 absolutely can.

[0] https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/amissl/
by hnbad | 2025-07-19 20:39:05+00:00
It's not so much that only criminals use cash, it's more that crash makes it incredibly easy to evade taxes. The archetype is a cash-only restaurant: it's trivial to both launder money by claiming more sales than you actually made and to evade taxes by reporting fewer sales. This is why many countries have strict laws about paper trails for cash sales.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-19 20:39:13+00:00
> But my experience is that there is very little “program code” and it’s mostly “library code”.

Sorry I am confused, what does that refer to?

> you’re now mandating the “meta program” be run under WSL

As long as bash and the tools are in path, can't you run any program normally?

> WSL as a hacky workaround for dealing with bad citizens

Yes, but some parts are out of scope for C and you need to target the OS. Also f.e. passing around file descriptors and sockets are convenient.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-19 20:40:11+00:00
Safety is not vague. You quantify difference before and after to determine if they are safer or not, same as if you end up with more or less money.

We can't make a market do anything. But we can at least not do stupid things tasking a private enterprise which has a duty to make profits for investors to be in charge of things which lose money if done correctly. The purpose of fines is to discourage bad behavior -- if fewer people do the bad behavior then that leads to lower income. Any profit motive for collecting fines leads to the opposite of the desired outcome.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-19 20:40:15+00:00
If only he had actually attempted a coup and succeeded. Then maybe we wouldn't have had to live in a quasi-communist judiciary dictatorship.

You do realize the supreme court has been grabbing power since 2019 and by now is essentially running the country, right? A few days ago they once again walked all over our elected congress. Our institutions exist to give people the illusion of democracy. In fact, these unelected judges have usurped the powers of the legislative and executive branches of government. They are judge-kings.
by cornholio | 2025-07-19 20:40:57+00:00
Commingling is optional to Amazon vendors, all they have to do is track each item with a plain individual sticker / QR tag. They opt not to do it and track using the generic product barcode since it's cheaper and simpler.

So if they can't be bothered to attach a zero cents sticker on the item, a 5cents rfid tag is out of the question.
by pnw | 2025-07-19 20:42:01+00:00
I decided to start doing them because a friend was diagnosed with a late stage cancer that had very few symptoms and lost his life only months after diagnosis. I guess if I got a positive, my hope would be that my doctor would refer me to a specialist and I'd get a head start and the chance to fight it that my friend never got.

The test is not foolproof and the detection rate for some early stage cancers is quite low. And of course early detection is no promise of a cure. Regardless $800 a year isn't an unreasonable cost for me given I get annual health screenings anyway. My insurance doesn't cover that test but you can use your HSA to pay for it if needed.
by eddie_catflap | 2025-07-19 20:42:05+00:00
My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.

His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.

This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.
by kgm | 2025-07-19 20:42:33+00:00
I have used id() in production code, but the circumstances were extremely specific: It was in some monitoring-related code that was trying to dig down into the guts of the interpreter for the purposes of tracking memory usage on the level of individual pages. It was a whole thing.

Which is to say: Users of Python almost certainly don't want to call id(), unless they are mucking around with something related to the functioning of the interpreter itself. The only other circumstance in which I've used it in anything like real code was in a quick hack where what I really wanted was to put a bunch of dicts in a set, but you can't do that, so I made a set of their IDs instead (but this wasn't in what I would call "production code").

In general, most of the "wtfs" listed here are pretty banal. If you're using `is` on immutable objects, you're basically just asking for trouble. The functioning of string and integer interning and constant folding are implementation curiosities, and if you ever write code in which such differences matter, then you have made an error.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-19 20:43:21+00:00
That's too far in the other direction, IMO. The IRC protocol was a poorly designed mess. Tying yourself to it means inheriting all of its bizarre quirks and limitations, and there's very little that existing IRC servers do that would be difficult to replicate.

(For a taste of just how weird and terrible IRC can be, try to answer the question "what is the maximum length of an IRC message". If your answer is a specific number, it is incorrect.)
by cycomanic | 2025-07-19 20:43:28+00:00
It's typically difficult to find direct evidence for bias. That is why rules for conflict of interest and disclosure are strict in research and academia. Crucially, something is a conflict of interest if it could be perceived as a conflict of interest by someone external, so it doesn't matter if you think you could judge fairly, it's important if someone else might doubt you could.

Not disclosing a conflict of interest is generally considered a significant ethics violation, because it reduces trust in the general scientific/research system. Thus OpenAI has become untrustworthy in many people's view irrespective if their involvement with the benchmarks creation affected their results or not.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-07-19 20:43:30+00:00
> ... we won't be left with an enduring and useful piece of infrastructure adding a trillion dollars to the global economy annually.

I'm not drinking the AGI kool-aid but I use LLMs daily. We pay not one but two AI subscriptions at home (including Claude).

It's extremely useful. From translation to proof-reading to synthetizing to expanding on something to writing little dumb functions to helping with spreadsheet formulas to documenting code to writing commit messages to helping find movie names (when I only remember very partially the plot) etc.

How is this not already adding a trillion dollars to the economy?

It's not about the infrastructure: all that counts are the models. They're here to stay. They're not going away.

It's the single biggest time-saver I've ever seen for mundane tasks (and, no, it doesn't write good code: it write shitty pathetic underperforming insecure code... And yet it's still useful for proofs of concept / one-offs / throwaway).
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 20:43:34+00:00
Hey, I ruled out a mail server for external, since I've heard many people have issues with other providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc) randomly blocking email. Didn't feel I could rely on it

Having an internal only mail server for notifications is an interesting idea. I've been using ntfy and Matrix to achieve something like that, but not all services support those notification methods. I'll keep that in mind!
by tnh | 2025-07-19 20:43:41+00:00
In C++, the signature of a function template doesn't necessarily tell you what types you can successfully call it with, nor what the return type is.

Much analysis is delayed until all templates are instantiated, with famously terrible consequences for error messages, compile times, and tools like IDEs and linters.

By contrast, rust's monomorphization achieves many of the same goals, but is less of a headache to use because once the signature is satisfied, codegen isn't allowed to fail.
by jnpnj | 2025-07-19 20:44:16+00:00
Oh yeah, that's a great one, there must be a compounded boolean expression logic escaping us

I'll add:

>>> False == False in [True] False >>> True == True in [True] True

ps: some ast poking

>>> ast.show(ast.parse("False == False in [False]")) Module( body=[ Expr( value=Compare( left=Constant(value=False), ops=[ Eq(), In()], comparators=[ Constant(value=False), List( elts=[ Constant(value=False)], ctx=Load())]))]) >>> ast.show(ast.parse("(False == False) in [False]")) Module( body=[ Expr( value=Compare( left=Compare( left=Constant(value=False), ops=[ Eq()], comparators=[ Constant(value=False)]), ops=[ In()], comparators=[ List( elts=[ Constant(value=False)], ctx=Load())]))])

note the first tree as one Comparator node with multiple ops, time to read the spec to know how these are evaluated
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-19 20:44:31+00:00
I'm not misunderstanding. Ore confusing the two. Copy: Clone.

Yes when an item is Copy-ed, you are still allowed to use it, but it means that you now have two independent copies of the same thing, and you may edit one, then use the other, and be surprised that it hasn't been updated. (When I briefly worked with Go, junior developers with mostly JavaScript or Python experience would fall into this trap all the time). And given that most languages nowadays have pointer semantics, having default copy types would lead to a very confusing situation: people would need to learn about value semantics AND about move semantics for objects with a destructor (including all collections).

No thanks. Rust is already complex enough for beginners to grasp.
by wrp | 2025-07-19 20:45:30+00:00
TFA should be compared with Tufts (2025) A Practical Examination of AI-Generated Text Detectors for Large Language Models.[0] Tufts found that automated detection is very unreliable, while Russell found the opposite for human evaluators.

The explanation for the difference is that automated discrimination has relied mainly on structural factors such as average sentence/paragraph length and frequency of stock words/phrases and certain parts of speech. Human evaluators look at content factors such as repetition of ideas, less precise wording, generalizations rather than concrete examples, overall conceptual coherence, and factual errors.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05139
by voxadam | 2025-07-19 20:45:45+00:00
I remember reading an article eons ago about the tech used for OCR at USPS in what I'm pretry sure was Wired. If I remember correctly, on each sorting line they were using something like 10 dual or quad 200 MHz Pentium Pro systems to accomplish the ultra high speed recognition that they required. That amount of computing power was absolutely mind bending to me at the time, now days it's laughable, a Raspberry Pi would blow it out of the water.
by bnchrch | 2025-07-19 20:46:07+00:00
Thank you! For years Ive been saying the sheer volume and fury by which Javascript is criticized is much more applicable to Python.

Both aren't perfect languages, and both are far from "the best" but it is maddening that Python get often picked as a darling when its implementation, ecosystem and tooling are fundamentally at odds with correctness and productivity.
by aapoalas | 2025-07-19 20:46:23+00:00
If you start making assumptions based on indices, you can turn logical errors into memory safety errors. ie. whenever you use unsafe with the SAFETY comment above it mentioning an index, you'd better be damn sure that index is valid.

This goes for not only unchecked indexing but also eg. transmuting based on a checked index into a &[u8] or such. If those indexes move in and out of your API and you do some kind of GC on your arrays / vectors, then you might run into indices being use-after-free and now those SAFETY comments that previously felt pretty obvious, even trivial, may no longer be quite so safe to be around of.

I've actually written about this previously w.r.t. the borrow checker and implementing a GC system based on indices / handles. My opinion was that unless you're putting in ironclad lifetimes on your indices, all assumptions based on indices must be always checked before use.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-19 20:47:57+00:00
The question still stands then: Does it happen in Tesco in the EU? Because that is illegal.

The original idea was that it should be legal to track people, because it is ok in the analog world. But it really isn't and I'm glad it is illegal in the EU. I think it should be in the US also, but the EU can't change that and I have no right to have political influence about foreign countries so that doesn't matter.
by al_fanta | 2025-07-19 20:48:17+00:00
> makes you a better programmer

If a language is bad, but you must use it, then yes learn it. But, if the borrowchecker is a source of pain in Rust, why not andmit it needs work instead of saying that “it makes you better”?

I’m not going to start writing brainfuck because it makes me a better programmer.
by jtolmar | 2025-07-19 20:48:22+00:00
I don't think either reach the real wtfs of their language. id() does some weird things with string interring, javascript coerces cross-type arithmetic into weird nonsense instead of throwing a type error. Whatever, neither of these come up in the real world.

Builds so messy that you need to resort to venv, every second DOM API being someFunc(thirdMostImportantArgument, { mostImportantArgument: val }), these are the real wtfs.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 20:48:29+00:00
The trouble is that you either need cryptocurrency or you need some prearranged entity that both parties trust. With current credit cards, that prearranged entity is Visa/MC/Amex/Discover. I don't see cryptocurrency being practical for this use, or ever widely accepted even if somehow practical. Maybe the new FedNow could serve as that foundation with card processing built on top.

But then you have issues like, what about disputes and fraud? With existing credit cards, buyer and seller have both agreed in advance to abide by certain rules. With an open standard, I as a buyer could stand up my own service that makes the payment and then retracts it, or if FedNow doesn't allow retracting payments then I as a seller could make one that refuses to refund the money and I can just not give the buyer their item. (And yeah, this is already illegal, but we see plenty of nefarious activity like this online anyway.)
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-07-19 20:48:52+00:00
Wow, are low-effort comments like this really welcome here?

Why don't you read this comment and see if you have the same energy for hamburger eaters that you do for people with websites over 14kb. Because if you don't, it's obvious you're looking to sweat people who actually care about their environmental impact over absolutely nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614291

FYI, it's not Whataboutism to say there are more effective things to focus on.