MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runarberg | 2025-07-10 21:19:16+00:00
Invoking personality is to the behavioral science as invoking God is to the natural sciences. One can explain anything by appealing to personality, and as such it explains nothing. Psychologists have been trying to make sense of personality for over a century without much success (the best efforts so far have been a five factor model [Big 5] which has ultimately pretty minor predictive value), which is why most behavioral scientists have learned to simply leave personality to the philosophers and concentrate on much simpler theoretical framework.

A much simpler explanation is what your parent offered. And to many behavioralists it is actually the same explanation, as to a true scotsm... [cough] behavioralist personality is simply learned habits, so—by Occam’s razor—you should omit personality from your model.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-10 21:20:02+00:00
I was on a United flight that was using Starlink to provide internet access during the flight.

It wasn't any better than the old provider. Yes, it was faster. But it cut out every few seconds. The old provider was slower but the signal never dropped.

EDIT: United's issues with Starlink are a known problem and Starlink has been working to fix them. But I suppose the Elon fanatics can't handle criticism, however mild.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-10 21:20:18+00:00
> The sci-fi writes itself. Having averted climate catastrophe by switching to renewables 23rd century humans face the imminent catastrophe of disrupting the entire solar system dynamics after wrecking Earth-Moon orbital stability with their reckless energy extraction.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will merely advise anyone interested in a story with similar themes and content to read Signal to Noise and its sequel A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund. You may know him from his work on the Halo franchise or other popular games. I don’t really know his other work, since I first discovered him via his original works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Nylund
by evanelias | 2025-07-10 21:20:23+00:00
Sure, it's a common point of confusion specifically because a few major Linux distros did that. But SREs / DBAs / DBREs will generally take a much more rigorous approach to database version upgrades. Companies just don't tend to upgrade their important databases in that fashion, and ditto for operating systems if they self-host.

And then there's all the users of managed cloud database offerings (RDS, Cloud SQL, etc) who definitely don't accidentally switch database vendors in that manner. Google Cloud doesn't even offer managed MariaDB, and Azure is retiring their managed MariaDB product.

Also keep in mind MariaDB hasn't been fully drop-in compatible with MySQL for over a decade. They've increasingly diverged in features and minor syntax differences over time.

Just to be clear, I'm not bashing MariaDB, I quite like it as a database. But there's a lot of misconceptions about the relative usage levels of MariaDB vs MySQL among FOSS circles.
by williamdclt | 2025-07-10 21:20:45+00:00
I found recently that you can write directly to the WAL with transactional guarantees, without writing to an actual table. This sounds like it would be amazing for queue/outbox purposes, as the normal approaches of actually inserting data in a table cause a lot of resource usage (autovacuum is a major concern for these use cases).

Can’t find the function that does that, and I’ve not seen it used in the wild yet, idk if there’s gotchas

Edit: found it, it’s pg_logical_emit_message
by ruszki | 2025-07-10 21:21:01+00:00
Maybe it depends on the task. I’m 100% sure, that if you think that type system is a drawback, then you have never code in a diverse, large codebase. Our 1.5 million LOC 30 years old monolith would be completely unmaintainable without it. But seriously, anything without a formal type system above 10 LOC after a few years is unmaintainable. An informal is fine for a while, but not long for sure. On a 30 years old code, basically every single informal rules are broken.

Also, my long experience is that even in PoC phase, using a type system adds almost zero extra time… of course if you know the type system, which should be trivial in any case after you’ve seen a few.
by tonymet | 2025-07-10 21:22:44+00:00
i like grok because i don't hit the obvious ML-fairness / political correct safeguards that other models do.

So i understand the intent in implementing those, but they also reduce perceived trust and utility. It's a tradeoff.

Let's say I'm using Gemini. I can tell by the latency or the redraw that I asked an "inappropriate" query.
by jfengel | 2025-07-10 21:23:13+00:00
Thank you. That is much more compelling than the press release.

Sadly, at £143.00, I'm not that compelled. But I suspect I'll get what I wish to know eventually, perhaps from a podcast. (I'm more interested in the English language than British history, but I do end up listening to several podcasts who will certainly find this in their domain of interest.)
by dieortin | 2025-07-10 21:23:27+00:00
I’m not going to keep all of them locally, but that doesn’t mean I lose access to any of them. I can instantly access all my emails from 20 years ago.

As you mentioned I do access my email from several different devices, and each one having a different subset of my emails would be absolute hell.

I’m curious, do you log onto your computer from your smartphone in order to access your email?
by UltraSane | 2025-07-10 21:23:30+00:00
Again, Hunter Biden is completely irrelevant and hyped up by the GOP Propaganda machine to distract people from Trump's blatant corruption. Biden was 1 million times less corrupt as President than Trump. This is a really standard part of the GOP playbook, they did it with Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. They did it with the "migrant caravan of DOOM".
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-10 21:24:22+00:00
Yes, they do. Full stop. The constitution is not ambiguous about this, at all. The Bill of Rights starts, right out of the gates with:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "

Note the wording. It's not in the business of granting rights (those are natural and inalienable). It restricts Congress's ability to pass any law that infringes upon those rights.
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-07-10 21:24:28+00:00
Also in July 1962, the United States detonated a high-altitude nuclear bomb known as Starfish Prime 400 km above the Pacific Ocean. The blast pumped the Earth’s magnetic field full of radiation, creating artificial belts of charged particles around the planet.

Unfortunately, this newly electrified environment was bad news for satellites. Telstar 1, launched just a day later, became an unintended casualty. As it passed through the radiation-charged Van Allen Belts, its delicate electronics began to degrade. By November 1962, Telstar was faltering, and by February 1963, it fell silent.

Amazing slice of science history.
by iLemming | 2025-07-10 21:24:32+00:00
Doom is in all respects Emacs. It's a relatively thin layer of abstractions on top of Emacs. I've lived through a fair share of emacs.d bankruptcies until finally settling down on using Doom, and I almost don't even use "the official" modules — I use the core of Doom with a set of my own modules. You can easily scroll through early-init.el to understand what Doom adds on top of vanilla Emacs; what's there really to even "learn about"?

I have thought about rebuilding my config from scratch once again, with all the knowledge I gained over the years, but every time I think about it, I conclude that I inevitably would end up replicating some nice macros that Doom has, which do considerably reduce otherwise unavoidable boilerplate I'd have to write.

Doom may have improved discoverability of Emacs — a major complaint of newbies known for decades — but it can't magically make Emacs "something else entirely". I don't even get what you're talking about, it's like finding any complex package written in Elisp and lament that it doesn't even feel like an Emacs thing.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-10 21:24:49+00:00
Like the Apex boats in Operation Dragoon.

https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-...

"On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it."

One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
by taeric | 2025-07-10 21:24:49+00:00
I'm curious who you are routinely interacting with that they care about your car keys. :D

I do think the writing is on the wall for old fashioned keys, though? For one, they don't really give you that much protection. As laughable as poorly done key fobs are, a physical key is a pretty low bar as far as deterrence goes.

It can be annoying to consider, but cultural norms protect cars far more than anything else. Is why many in suburban areas can get away with having their keys in the cars at all times.
by FiatLuxDave | 2025-07-10 21:25:12+00:00
This is the best answer. The area of the plane is 0.0196 m^2, so the heating of 10^5 W/m^2 is actually around 2 x 10^3 W, which seems much more reasonable.

Also, I noticed that I missed that the plane is made from 4 sheets of A4 paper. Table 1 lists the mass as 4 grams, but 4 grams is typical for a single sheet of A4 paper, so the listed mass is probably for a single sheet. The actual plane mass is likely 16 grams. This means that the kinetic energy is likely closer to 480 kJ.

Thank you to afeuerstein for pointing out that I was missing the potential energy! However, that is not enough to make a huge difference. A quick estimate because I'm lazy is 9.8 m/s^2 * 480 km * 0.016 kg = 75.2 kJ. Yes, gravity decreases slightly as you get farther out, so this is an over-estimate.

So a total of around 550 kJ, and a power around 2 x 10^3 W gives a duration of 275 seconds or... a couple of minutes. I feel much better about the numbers now.
by why_at | 2025-07-10 21:25:42+00:00
That's pretty cool. I figure this is explained in some of the videos but I can't watch them right now.

I'm reading more about the "OS" Realtalk

>Some operating system engineers might not call Realtalk an operating system, because it’s currently bootstrapped on a kernel which is not (yet) in Realtalk.

You definitely couldn't fit the code for an LLM on the wall, so that makes sense. But I still have so many questions.

Are they really intending to have a whole kernel written down? How does this work in practice? If you make a change to Realtalk which breaks it, how do you fix it? Do you need a backup version of it running somewhere? You can't boot a computer from paper (unless you're using punch cards or something) so at some level it must exist in a solely digital format, right?
by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-10 21:25:48+00:00
No worries.

GGUF is more suitable for the latest open-source models, i agree there. Quant2/Q4 will probably be critical as well, if we don't see a jump in ram. But then again I wonder when/If mediapipe will support GGUF as well.

PS, I see you are in the latest YC batch? (below you mentioned BF). Good luck and have fun!
by dspillett | 2025-07-10 21:25:59+00:00
> Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain)

One. Single. Click.

Two if you go via one of the menus not clicking the main logo.

> because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words

As far as the writer is concerned, if you are looking at the blog you are already interested and know what you are looking at. Is it their fault that someone deep-ish linked without providing extra context for you?

> why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?

You could have just moved on and read something else, accepting that not everything is written for everyone, and not wasted more time moaning about it…
by jraph | 2025-07-10 21:26:07+00:00
You counter the facetiousness in a way it stops spreading and possibly even spark a constructive discussion is how I understand it (ESL though). I certainly observed this phenomenon myself (although as the person being facetious, I often feel like "I was joking, I actually agree, that's indeed what I was actually implying, but good you made it clear and explicit I guess")

I guess you'd disarm the person being facecious rather than the facetiousness, like you'd disarm someone about to cast you a magic spell.
by rmason | 2025-07-10 21:28:00+00:00
Learned a whole lot from my friend. The cell carriers never wanted this information public. But the Biden FCC released the information publicly based on actual signal measurements by an independent party. However once Trump's people took over the FCC it was pulled down and a map was produced based on carrier reported data that is highly inaccurate.

He told me that the map I found is 'optimistic' and based on proposed license data. He did say it was pretty close at the zip code level but he wouldn't trust it anywhere else. Hope that helps.
by bodzioney | 2025-07-10 21:28:57+00:00
Yes exactly. Aarhus had Martin-Löf, Nygaard, etc. Similarly, INRIA has had many influential researchers as well as OCaml and Rocq. Talent (and exciting projects) attracts more talent. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in US. Penn, Cornell, CMU, MIT and others have had historically very strong PL faculty. My understanding is due to the nature of grants in US it doesn’t give faculty the same freedom to work on what they choose as in Europe. So you get different research focuses because of that.
by ricksunny | 2025-07-10 21:30:21+00:00
A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science & history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read). Being 4000+ pages, I’ve found it works well as a reference to sci-technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back readthrough.

https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/
by npc_anon | 2025-07-10 21:30:44+00:00
My utopian vision is that people should largely be freed from work. The new job is to create families, raise them, and enjoy them. No coercion is needed for these families to be created, we'll produce them out of boredom. Similar to when there's a sustained power outage.

This won't happen though. Instead we'll combine neural-link and AI and will effectively become bionic beings. You'll be forced to join as to not become an obsolete sub-creature.
by leshow | 2025-07-10 21:30:50+00:00
I think you're missing the broader context. There is a lot of people very invested in the maximalist outcome which does create pressure for people to be boosters. You don't need a digital token for that to happen. There's a social media aspect as well that creates a feedback loop about claims.

We're in a hype cycle, and it means we should be extra critical when evaluating the tech so we don't get taken in by exaggerated claims.
by deanCommie | 2025-07-10 21:31:08+00:00
You can tell this was written by a technologist without a clue of the realities of social dynamics

* "finding diverse sources representing all parties"

Not all current events are subjective, not all claims/parties (climate change, holocaust etc.) require representation from all parties.

* "Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased."

this one is sad because I would've said that up until a decade ago this would've also been ludicrous. Most media was never as biased as the rising authoritarian right tried to claim.

Unfortunately over the years, it has become true. The rise of extremely biased right-wing media sources has made things like FOX news arguably centrist given the overton window move. Which made the left-wing sources lean into bias and becoming themselves complicit (e.g. hiding Biden's cognitive decline)

So annoyingly this is probably a good guidance...but it also just makes the problem even worse by dismissing the unbiased sources with journalistic integrity just as hard

* " The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect"

The next mistake is thinking that "politically incorrect" is a term used by people focused on political correctness to describe uncomfortable ideas they don't like that have merit.

Unfortunately, that term was always one of derision. It was invented by people who were unhappy with their speech and thinking being stifled, and thinking that they're being shut down because of political correctness, not because of fundamental disagreements.

There's an idea that racist people think that everyone is racist they are just the only ones honest about it. So when they express racist ideas and get pushback they think "ah well, this person isn't ready to be honest about their opinions - they're more focused on being POLITICALLY CORRECT, than honest"

Of course there's a percentage of these ideas that can be adequately categorized in this space. Subjects like affirmative action never got the discussion they deserved in the US, in part because of "political correctness"

But by and large, if you were an LLM trained on a corpus of human knowledge, the majority of anything labelled "politically incorrect" is far FAR more likely to be bigoted and problematic than just "controversial"
by ajcp | 2025-07-10 21:32:24+00:00
I'm trying to help you understand what "ground truth" means.

If, as it seems in the article, they are using COCO to establish ground truth, i.e. what COCO says is correct, then whatever COCO comes up with is, by definition "correct". It is, in effect, the answer, the measuring stick, the scoring card. Now what you're hinting at is that, in this instance, that's a really bad way to establish ground truth. I agree. But that doesn't change what is and how we use ground truth.

Think of it another way:

- Your job is to pass a test.

- To pass a test you must answer a question correctly.

- The answer to that question has already been written down somewhere.

To pass the test does your answer need to be true, or does it need to match what is already written down?

When we do model evaluation the answer needs to match what is already written down.
by chubot | 2025-07-10 21:33:00+00:00
What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people

The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose!

If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you can’t now, because of scaled corporate processes.
by singron | 2025-07-10 21:33:21+00:00
Polling is the way to go, but it's also very tricky to get right. In particular, it's non-trivial to make a reliable queue that's also fast when transactions are held open and vacuum isn't able to clean tuples. E.g. "get the first available tuple" might have to skip over 1000s of dead tuples.

Holding transactions open is an anti-pattern for sure, but it's occasionally useful. E.g. pg_repack keeps a transaction open while it runs, and I believe vacuum also holds an open transaction part of the time too. It's also nice if your database doesn't melt whenever this happens on accident.
by daneel_w | 2025-07-10 21:33:23+00:00
No reason to not say it plainly: he was regularly a total dickhead to people asking for help. But, also, he always gave people first-class expert help. They just had to "pay" by taking a bit of verbal abuse.

I spent over a decade in #perl on freenode/libera and saw so many abusive events that I eventually got tired of hanging out there, mostly due to him but in part also due to a handful of others displaying similar behavior. All the same I was always grateful for how tirelessly he spent so much of his personal time providing help, and I'm sad to learn of his passing.
by simonw | 2025-07-10 21:34:35+00:00
The massive jump in the last six months is that the new set of "reasoning" models got really good at reasoning about when to call tools, and were accompanied is by a flurry of tools-in-loop coding agents - Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor in Agent mode etc.

An LLM that can test the code it is writing and then iterate to fix the bugs turns out to be a huge step forward from LLMs that just write code without trying to then exercise it.
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-07-10 21:34:39+00:00
The whole point of C/C++ is knowing your environment. It's not Java, it's not TypeScript. It's one level above assembly, and if you change the compiler and things break, then it's your fault.

If the standards still don't have a proper replacement for include guards, then too bad for the standards. The C++ standard wasn't aware of multithreading before C++11, this didn't stop people from writing multithreaded programs.

As to why - #pragma once is just cleaner to look at.
by autoexec | 2025-07-10 21:35:23+00:00
I'd agree with you that the fact that the bug is still open after 17 years isn't the problem, but the issue is that people are still (as of 10 months ago) running into the issue of their mail being deleted. If they'd secretly implemented "safety measures" as you suggest that wouldn't be happening.

Looking at the timeline, it's possible that they've addressed a few of the bugs that result in data loss several years ago, and it's possible that the latest guy who ran into the problem within the last year triggered it in new ways or under new conditions but it's clear that the problem of thunderbird deleting messages from the server when copies haven't successfully been saved during a move operation wasn't solved by any "safety measures" 9 months ago and it's doubtful that it's been solved now.

My guess is that because thunderbird ultimately doesn't bother to make sure that messages are successfully and accurately copied before it removes them from the server it'll only be a matter of time before someone else stumbles on some other set of circumstances which results in data loss when messages are being moved.
by const_cast | 2025-07-10 21:35:46+00:00
Older cars are more likely to be things like coupes, a form factor more or less abandoned today. I know, I used to drive a coupe. Dear God, the rear visibility was the worse out of any car. And the side blind-spots. You'd think a small vehicle would have good side visibility but no, all you get are those tiny little back windows.

But, it was a beauty.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-10 21:35:47+00:00
A kid can break all the windows in your house, smash in your door, set your house, car, bike, clothing on fire. I guess all those things are bad

I'm not saying the system wasn't poorly implemented but, society doesn't work when people abuse everything either. Maybe that just means we're doomed but most of society works because people don't go around smashing and/or taking everything they possibly can.
by bradac56 | 2025-07-10 21:36:09+00:00
You do not have 'civil liberties' in the UK. There is no Miranda rights and there bill of rights is strictly based on the Magna Carta and is not as comprehensive and the US Bill of Rights which was based off of the UK version.

Per the wiki:

Civil liberties have been gradually declining in the United Kingdom since the late 20th century. Their removal has been generally justified by appeals to public safety and National Security and hastened on by crises such as the September 11 attacks, the 7/7 bombings and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.[4][5][6] The pandemic oversaw the introduction of the Coronavirus Act 2020, which was described by former Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Sumption as "the greatest invasion of personal liberty in [the UK's] history."