MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajmurmann | 2025-07-12 17:48:53+00:00
The vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. I'm sure there are other things that could be cut and there is always room for more efficiency but it's always gonna be a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and military.

That said, regulations that make the economy less dynamic and slow stuff down have a high opportunity cost. While it's bureaucrats that write the implementation details and enforce them, it's congress who requires it to happen with AFAIK often little regard to how it would be executed in practice.
by mystraline | 2025-07-12 17:48:54+00:00
1. The US government refused to accept this in evidence

2. These aren't 'nobodies'. These people are highly connected in criminal enterprise, corruption, and government, along with victims.

3. There were claims by the DOJ of what the redacted version contained and didn't. Those claims are lies, as proven here.

4. This is metadata of who Epstein was connected with, and connections. This is metadata, and high quality at that.

5. Doxxing isn't a crime. But, child rape kind of is. And so is conspiracy, money and influence laundering, along with corruption.
by ossopite | 2025-07-12 17:49:14+00:00
What?

The visitor pattern is a technique for dynamic dispatch on two values (typically one represents 'which variant of data are we working with' and the other 'which operation are we performing'). You would not generally use that in recursive descent parsing, because when parsing you don't have an AST yet, so 'which variant of data' doesn't make sense, you are just consuming tokens from a stream.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-12 17:49:54+00:00
heh, including "for diffing" is selling short when our new job as software developers now seems to be reviewing code, of which looking at a diff is only one tiny part. That goes infinitely more for dynamically typed languages, where there is no compiler to catch dumb typos. If I have to actually, no kidding, review code then I want all the introspections, find references, go to declaration, et al for catching the intern trying to cheat me
by gavinray | 2025-07-12 17:50:41+00:00
> "First off, where is the code and how do you build it? This requires you to have all the relevant dependencies. Much of my work is on a Postgres extension. This meant having a local Postgres development environment, having gcc, gmake (on mac), Perl, and so on. And furthermore, PGD is a pretty mature product so it supports building against multiple Postgres distributions. Can I build against all of them?"

This is egregious. This has to have a tangible negative effect in terms of lost revenue due to developer onboarding and potential contributor turn-off, right?

It's 2025, I can't think of a good reason why any non-personal code project shouldn't have a Dockerfile in the repo that sets up the prerequisite dev environment.

It's reproducible, and the Devcontainer spec means that coding inside of these sorts of environments is well-facilitated.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-12 17:51:44+00:00
The US are by far not the only ones with satellites in orbit. Making it a UN body would make sense, just like the International Telecommunications Union coordinates telephone service and the International Postal Union coordinates international mail, and both are now UN bodies (despite predating the UN).

I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
by leakycap | 2025-07-12 17:52:03+00:00
Despite LLMs being decent at generating text (which has loose, messy rules), applications like PCB layout and coding with clearly-defined constraints make much more sense.

Having well-established, unambiguous rules that must be followed for functionality seems to be a key predictor of AI success. The more constrained and rule bound the domain, the better LLMs perform.
by ekr____ | 2025-07-12 17:52:13+00:00
The usual argument against clothing restrictions (see also supershoes in running and various aero stuff in cycling) is that you want the sport to reward the best athletes rather than turning into a technological arms race. This is especially complicated in sports where people don't get to choose their own gear and so (for instance), whether you have access to the best shoes depends on who your sponsor is. Back when Nike was first rolling out the first supershoes, you would sometimes see athletes sponsored by other brands actually wear Nikes with the logo blacked out, because it was just such a big advantage.

As another comparison point, look at Formula 1, where technology is a huge part of the competition, with the result that a driver can be dominant one year and then fall way back the next because of some technological shift. Of course, even F1 does tinker with the rules a lot to try to preserve competition, as when they banned electronic stabilization.
by throwaway2056 | 2025-07-12 17:52:20+00:00
I know some webhosting provider that used one VM for every user. Now they moved to using this. Firstly low resource usage. If one uses ZFS or btrfs then one can save storage as in common bits are not duplicated across system containers. Note this is a system container - not traditional container. This one can be rebooted to get the previous state. It is not ephemeral.
by atombender | 2025-07-12 17:53:16+00:00
I had the opposite experience. I bought a C64 at a flea market and hooked it up to an old Sanyo TV I had found in a dumpster. Loaded up Time Pilot, Drop Zone, and H.E.R.O., and had an incredibly fun time playing them together with a date.

Sometimes the nostalgia doesn't kick in, and clearly many things were objectively bad in a way that hits differently now. I wouldn't want to sit long nights writing assembly code and battle bad sectors on floppy disks. But I still think it's a great little gaming computer.
by ekr____ | 2025-07-12 17:53:32+00:00
> I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.

This is arguably what race walking is, though it's over longer distances.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-07-12 17:53:35+00:00
You left one variant off, apparently:

"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "

Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
by kragen | 2025-07-12 17:53:47+00:00
One of the slides in Blow's talk about why he was starting work on Jai said, "If we spend a lot of time wading through high-friction environments, we had better be sure that this is a net win. Empirically, it looks to me like [that] does not usually pay off. These methods spend more time preventing potential bugs than it would have taken to fix the actual bugs that happen."

I think that's an overall good summary of the crowd's attitude. They think that mainstream programming environments err too far in the direction of keeping your software from being buggy, charging programmers a heavy cost for it. Undoubtedly for videogames they are correct.

Jai in particular does support array bounds checking, but you can turn it on or off as a compilation option: https://jai.community/t/metaprogramming-build-options/151
by timr | 2025-07-12 17:54:33+00:00
You balked at the idea of volunteerism, but then I gave you less...demanding...versions, and you criticize them as being imperfect. It's clear that I'm not going to convince you, and you keep cherry-picking the most expensive / burdensome examples I provide, so I'm done replying after this.

But since I didn't explain it explicitly, the principle is that while all travel is damaging, you can thoughtfully pick activities which:

1) Will help offset that damage (e.g. volunteering)

2) Require that you be in a place (e.g. seeing family / friends), or

3) Otherwise spread out your impact and/or engage with locals on a more authentic level -- even the horrible, very bad, "extremely artificial and damaging" yoga retreat (lol, come on) will put you in a small minority of travelers, many of whom will be locals themselves.

Despite your repeated mischaracterizations of my argument, it doesn't have to be expensive, and perfect is not the enemy of the good. It doesn't take much more than creativity and effort to do better with your travel.
by dehrmann | 2025-07-12 17:54:56+00:00
These sorts of comments always get downvoted to hell because HN are true believers in science, especially space and NASA. The arguments for funding extremely time-insensitive research are usually de minimis (we spend so much more on X) or to beat the Russians/Chinese. Mass transit proponents have a similar relationship with opportunity cost. Yes, we can build California High Speed Rail, but would there be more net benefit by using the money to improve Bay Area and LA transit? You have to value these things against where the money would otherwise go.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-12 17:55:41+00:00
Logue's War Music is easily the finest poetic work of the late 20th century, but it's not a full translation -- it only covers a few books, a fraction of the total Iliad -- and I think that it's better understood as a supplement to Homer. It works as a thing in itself, but it works 100x better if you're already familiar with the Iliad and are ready for a fresh perspective on a few select scenes.

Finishing the job would be a tremendous undertaking, on par with Ezra Pound's Cantos. It should eventually be attempted by somebody, though.
by ZebrasEat | 2025-07-12 17:56:09+00:00
In my embedded career I always assumed the value of a SW engineer was to cut costs, regardless of whether it was a few cents (and of course add to quality and reliability). It seems in embedded, it’s one of the only SW fields left where software can affect the cost of the system. By choosing a processor in a family with the least amount of memory and speed, you can achieve a lower system cost. In this world, the ability to write fast code in a minimal footprint matters. You still have to wrestle with development time/cost versus HW cost tradeoffs vs sales, but I think it still remains true that the coding practices we saw in 60s-80s are still valued in this space. My impression is these skills these days are being lost/ignored for the most part. When a HW limit is reached, the only way forward for quicker SW solution is optimization.
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-12 17:56:14+00:00
Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.

Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.

Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.

It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.
by IMTDb | 2025-07-12 17:56:57+00:00
Search engine are as well. At least in the eu they literally are the first thing a browser asks you when you launch it for the first time. On a dropdown you have 2 clicks to do to change. For search engine you are prompted to using Google is one click; using something else costs the same click.

Google is still managing an outrageous domination.

Being percieved as the best is still a huge headstart. 99% of the population is not using “last weeks llm that topped AIME and ARC-AGI“. They are using “ChatGPT” with the default model selected.

People are going to switch when “their tech friend tells them to switch”. The same way they switched from internet explorer to chrome. Once you reach that position you can afford being “not the best but good enough” for a long time.

xAI needs to convince investors that: OpenAI is struggling so there is an opening to take the crown and be popular enough to get people to switch. They have twitter to help make that happen.

And they need to convince that no one else is going so much better than they are anytime soon; they just need to be good enough
by oklder | 2025-07-12 17:57:25+00:00
Sticker shock to prior generations who feel fiat economics valuations aren’t just propaganda …this gossip really matters!

Shock to the sort who have seen inflation get to where $600k/yr buying power in 2025 is equivalent to $200k/yr in the 1980s and well beyond the tiny earnings that would have been quite common when Chuck Grassley was a wee lad.

It’s biological ossification. Physics is ageist. We should be reminding the elders rather than enable and ignore their ageism against youth they leverage through politics.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-12 17:57:33+00:00
> Either Guy doesn't know that such a move is beyond his legal power, or he knows but intends to do it anyway

Likeliest: He chooses to not believe what is clearly outside his authority.

Bolstering that are/is:

Numerous judges (inc SCotUS) that are overwhelmingly deferential to ongoing WhiteHouse abuses How the massive weight of burdens imposed upon WH victims tends to devastate their ability to defend themselves How the damage done by the WH is immediate and deeply destructive, while any relief is tentative, delayed and broadly insufficient
by Rebelgecko | 2025-07-12 17:57:38+00:00
If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead. And that's not even counting the negative externalities of unintended conjunctions. Kessler Syndrome is the boggieman of course, but even a few thousand pieces of debris from a single conjunction makes life harder for everyone who operates in space.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-12 17:57:50+00:00
The truth here is that bureaucracies are shit at implementing nuance -- they'll do DEI poorly; they'll do anti-DEI poorly.

The original point of merit exams wasn't that they were objective, but that they were outside bureaucratic control, which ended up producing better results than the status quo.

Anti-DEI especially is being implemented in such a rapid manner that it's no surprise incompetent people are making bad calls, because nobody will question them if it's "anti-DEI".

Such is the great harm of strong beliefs + groupthink: they justify bad decisions by covering them as compliant decisions.
by Athas | 2025-07-12 17:58:02+00:00
The greatest value brought by compiler optimisations is removing the overhead of convenience. Sometimes that is about avoiding the boxing that is a necessity in many high level languages, but in other cases it serves to allow a more modular programming style without overhead. Stream fusion is a good example: it lets you structure your program as small and composable units, without the cost of manifesting intermediate results. That is not merely about avoiding the inherent inefficiency of e.g. Haskell, but about permitting different styles of programming, and the argument is that a low level language simply cannot allow such a style (without overhead), because the required optimisations are not practical to implement.
by spankalee | 2025-07-12 17:59:13+00:00
I've always been curious why people think that models are accurately revealing their system prompt anyway.

Has this idea been tested on models where the prompt is openly available? If so, how close to the original prompt is it? Is it just based on the idea that LLMs are good about repeating sections of their context? Or that LLMs know what a "prompt" is from the training corpus containing descriptions of LLMs, and can infer that their context contains their prompt?
by krapp | 2025-07-12 17:59:25+00:00
It doesn't matter what he says, all that matters is what he tries, and what his sycophants in Congress and the Supreme Court let him get away with.

Rosie O'Donnell is a leftist and gay, so millions of Americans would have no qualms at all about putting her in a camp or shipping her off somewhere, regardless of her citizenship. But I suspect the Overton Window hasn't shifted far enough yet that her whiteness wouldn't make it political suicide even for Trump. Let the discourse about birthright citizenship percolate, though (although the courts are currently pushing against Trump in this regard,) and that might change.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-12 18:00:14+00:00
Sure, mosquitoes have, historically, earned your ire, but now you’re blaming the pigeon, again, for a disease you’re just as or more likely to get from another, very likely human, source.

Which is especially true when you realize that most mosquito species that have adapted to blood feed off avians don’t also tend to blood feed off mammals.

And, not for nothing, but what I was refuting was the idea you needed safety gear around pigeon poop to defend you from blood-borne viruses that aren’t known to transfer via that poop.
by mullingitover | 2025-07-12 18:01:02+00:00
> They are using “ChatGPT” with the default model selected.

Funny, because the OpenAI models are not the first or even second choice for anyone I know who uses Copilot for coding agents. Anthropic and Google are absolutely stomping them in this space.

Search engines are pretty different from LLMs, in any case: they all have different UX right in your face, different functionality, etc. The LLMs simply generate text, that's all they do, and the differences are far more subtle.
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-07-12 18:01:06+00:00
> Well, it's their platform and they're entitled to profit from it as they're pleased. Even the European Commission admitted that as well, because saying otherwise is akin to confiscating their intellectual property.

It is not a violation of someone's IP for a 3rd-party dev to make an app that interacts with that someone's OS. Software interacting with (and being compatible with/depending on) another doesn't touch the IP domain at all.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-07-12 18:01:08+00:00
> but I remember floppies as very unreliable

Well... floppies were pretty reliable enough if you cared for them.

Meaning for those sitting on your desk or in the cabinet you bought those fancy boxes with a translucent matte covers (and keylocks, of course).

And for those you got with yourself and actually cared about the data on them to reach the destination - you didn't stay around the high energy/high voltage machinery (like a trolleybus or the engine compartment on a motorized railcars)... or just used a 5th grade knowledge and used any tin box of succinct size for your usage.
by marojejian | 2025-07-12 18:01:10+00:00
Archive: https://archive.is/fW8sW

This is a valuable perspective.

The zero-sum mindset isn't always wrong, there are many situations where it applies.

But it doesn't always apply. And crucially, in systems where behavior can produce zero-sum or positive-sum dynamics, a prevalent zero-sum mindset can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

E.g. a workplace where everyone believes they succeed by exploiting others makes the strategy of cooperation weak, even if cooperation overall would be more productive.

Thus it behooves society to teach the next generation that positive-sum games not only exist, they are something they can foster.

Unfortunately, we've done a poor job at this for at least a generation now, and we're reaping the results.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-07-12 18:02:17+00:00
Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.

It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.
by sanufar | 2025-07-12 18:02:28+00:00
I love this book! I worked through a bunch of it during my winter break last year and found the incremental teaching style extremely rewarding. For readers of the book, Sandler’s reference OCaml implementation is super useful for getting your bearings. I was kind of thrown off by the use of TACKY as an IR, but it was nice to have a solid reference as I worked through the book. For those more experienced with compilers: what are some good resources for stuff like SSA and optimisation? I’ve looked at some of the resources here https://bernsteinbear.com/pl-resources/ but are there other canonical resources?
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-12 18:02:35+00:00
That's been a sub-strain of post election US Democrat thinking: that it should be more about poor vs rich and less about identity.

Unfortunately, there's a large cottage industry that hitched their careers / thought leadership to identity and are fighting it tooth and nail.

Imho, it's pretty obvious and simple. Two poor folks have more in common with each other these days than the poor with the rich, whatever combination of other identities.
by imiric | 2025-07-12 18:02:55+00:00
Good point. I suppose that if grifters can get in positions of power, then the bubble can just keep growing.

Though cryptocurrencies are slightly different because of how they work. They're inherently decentralized, so even though there have been many smaller bubble pops along the way (Mt. Gox, FTX, NFTs, every shitcoin rug pull, etc.), inevitably more will appear with different promises, attracting others interested in potential riches.

I don't think the technology as a whole will ever burst, particularly because I do think there are valid and useful applications of it. Bitcoin in particular is here to stay. It will just keep attracting grifters and victims, just like any other mainstream technology.
by CaptainFever | 2025-07-12 18:03:03+00:00
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

> The Kardashev scale (Russian: шкала Кардашёва, romanized: shkala Kardashyova) is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.

> Under this scale, the sum of human civilization does not reach Type I status, though it continues to approach it.
I Built a Testable Recursive Theory of Language Models Using GPT – It Works
by desjuangarrett | 2025-07-12 18:03:28+00:00
Over the past month, I developed what I believe to be the first complete symbolic model predicting and demonstrating recursive interpretive behavior in large language models (LLMs). I did it alone, with no funding, using only GPT and a recursive line of questioning. The result: a formal system that activates and halts symbolic recursion across models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.

The theory—called the Garrett Physical Model—defines symbolic operators for interpretive state, recursive transformation, observer-bound fields, and halting conditions. It has passed reproducible experiments using self-terminating artifacts and control cases. Models recursively interpret once, collapse if re-interpreted, and halt when symbolic limits are crossed.

All outputs are timestamped, all artifacts are inert to humans, and the theory is fully documented. A whitepaper, experiment logs, and a cross-model demo video are available here:

OSF Repository – Whitepaper, Artifacts, Videos

Whether or not this leads to institutional recognition, I’m sharing this because the behavior is real—and I believe some here will see what it means before others do. If you’re interested in symbolic systems, interpretability, or containment theory, I’d appreciate your thoughts