MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by castigatio | 2025-07-16 05:54:58+00:00
Google search + LLM based search is far more effective than Google search alone. Google's stated mission has been to organize the world's information. Being able to ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for - and getting mostly useful responses - is more useful. Just one example among many. Simple natural language interaction with computer systems is huge. Just look at what LLM's are doing for robotics.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-16 05:56:10+00:00
The study doesn’t provide data that can be extrapolated in any way to any statement about anybody slowing down or speeding up.

1. They used Cursor, which makes you spend your whole day saying “yes” to code changes. Cursor is the windows vista “cancel or allow” of agentic coding.

2. Every user was a Cursor beginner.

The study measured developers’ effectiveness at writing code during the ramp up period while they were learning to use a bad tool.
by K0balt | 2025-07-16 05:56:27+00:00
The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents is to not be in one.

I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage.

There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk.

A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
by smcin | 2025-07-16 05:56:32+00:00
Jumbling social, economic and environmental considerations [0] into one overall score seems like a terrible methodology, and politicized. Why not just rate them on three (or more) separate scores? If we did this on a country level, we'd similarly get inaccurate overall scores for UAE, Qatar and Singapore (or HK SAR or Macau).

Also this methodology is very much for employers not people in general, since it weights infrastructure/power generation (16.2%), way more than cost-of-living/ affordability of housing (2.4%).

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/how-we-are-choosing-americas...
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-16 05:57:14+00:00
Interesting points.

1. Expanding in more detail, my feeling (absent correct truth obviously) is that we'll find a Pareto Optimal point of intelligence. At that point my feeling, again unproven, is that with available hardware fine tuning open weight models would not be too difficult.

Training from scratch? I'm really not sure that's something an individual can do. But at some pareto optimal point I do think small organizations can train models.

I'm okay with that threshold. This world I envision is like today's open software which runs on closed hardware or interacts with closed systems like networks that use proprietary hardware.

2. I'm not sure the tendency to convert everything into financial capital is as all subsuming as folks like Doctorow make it out to be. The sentiment certainly drives engagement among a certain demographic, usually a college educated progressive one, but while I see evidence of its truth in some spaces I don't in many others. PCs are a good example. PCs continue to offer more functionality to the end user. Despite endless avenue to lock down and monetize the idea of a PC, it doesn't happen. Firms like Apple and Lenovo remain fairly committed to offering strong consumer experiences.

I suspect this sort of financialization is more prevalent for services or goods that are difficult to meter. Search is a great example.
by komali2 | 2025-07-16 05:57:28+00:00
Texan as well here.

> I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas.

I don't share your optimism. Where will the budget for this come from? We both know our state, and how it votes.

https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-...

We'll get the 1 million now of course, for this region, for this type of disaster, for now. In 8 years if another million is needed to upkeep the system, I don't think we'll get the funding again, unless some more kids died.

Actually... maybe we won't even get the 1 million now. How many kids died at Uvalde, for example? My mom's a Texan teacher. The post Uvalde response: her principal asked her how she'd feel about carrying a handgun in school. My experience is if an issue is politicized, then Texas will make the wrong choice, every time.

I have no hope for my state anymore. If you can maintain optimism, I admire you and hope you stick around, we'll need more people like you.
by kqr | 2025-07-16 05:58:50+00:00
I don't think the Ada story is particularly interesting:

(1) It was very expensive to licence at a time where C was virtually free.

(2) It was a complicated language at a time where C was (superficially) simple. This made it harder to port to other platforms, harder to learn initially, etc.

(3) All major operating systems for the PC and Mac happened to be written in C.

Ada had virtually nothing going for it except being an amazingly well-designed language. But excellence is not sufficient for adoption, as we have seen repeatedly throughout history.

Today? Virtually nothing stops you from using Ada. For lower level code, it's hands-down my favourite. Picking up Ada taught me a lot about programming, despite my experience with many other languages. There's something about its design that just clarifies concepts.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-16 05:59:15+00:00
Good catch. From the methodology link, this is the only description of how the states in the article are ordered:

We rate the states on livability factors like per capita crime rates, environmental quality, and health care. With studies showing that childcare is one of the main obstacles to employees entering the workforce, we consider the availability and affordability of qualified facilities. We look at worker protections including livable wage policies, paid leave, and rights to organize. We look at inclusiveness in state laws, including protections against discrimination of all kinds, as well as voting rights and secure election systems. And with surveys showing a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion, we factor reproductive rights in this category as well.

Out of over ten metrics listed, only one or maybe two are quantitative analysis of what a resident might be exposed to. The rest are an analysis of the states' policies. From that methodology, the expected result would be a direct correlation to which political party dominates, regardless of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the parties' policies.

The article is ranking which states employers should not consider moving to, and matching the political preferences of employees is well worth considering, but this is a very roundabout way of presenting it, and calling it a quality of life ranking is inaccurate.

Also, the variation within a state can be significant, so any business looking to relocate would get much more useful information by comparing between cities or counties, regardless of the state.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-16 05:59:42+00:00
>> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad

Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs.

> I mean, it was a thing for most of human history.

During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place.

For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone.

Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-07-16 05:59:43+00:00
Murati was CTO. Whilst Brockman and Altman may have bypassed or undermined her on some occasions, she can take large credit for OpenAI’s technical success. Brockman can take credit for his extremely hard work, increasing cadence. Altman for incredible fundraising and (often polarising) visionary leadership.

From what I’ve read, Murati was an excellent CTO.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-16 05:59:56+00:00
Collision occurs when there is some sort of interaction between massy particles that try and fail to occupy the same space. Whatever stops you from passing through the floor counts as "collision".

An event horizon has no mass or other existence and cannot collide with anything. Within the black hole, there is mass somewhere, but generally not at the event horizon. If you're not comfortable assuming that, we can make it a definition - take this to be an example where none of the internal mass lies within the region of overlap.

What is the obstacle to the black holes separating again?
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-16 06:00:43+00:00
I always found hammering attacks to be extremely satisfying, even from a meta-physical pov.

You escape a closed virtual universe by not "breaking out" in the tradidional sense, exploiting some bug in the VM hypervisor's boundary itself, but by directly manipulating the underlying physics of the universe on wich the virtual universe is founded, just by creating a pattern inside the virtual universe itself.

No matter how many virtual digital layers, as long as you can impact the underlying analog substrate this might work.

Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe?
by lqstuart | 2025-07-16 06:01:03+00:00
“AGI” isn’t a thing and never will be. It fails even really basic scrutiny. The objective function of a human being is to keep its biological body alive and reproduce. There is no such similar objective on which a ML algorithm can be trained. It’s frankly a stupid idea propagated by people with no meaningful connection to the field and no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
by Xx_crazy420_xX | 2025-07-16 06:01:40+00:00
Did you try to ask it to provide data of the company, by explicitly invoking hallucination in the model?

Right now there is no real proof, untill you confirm that the data it provided cannot be hallucinated (which could be not feisable).

Also, acknowledging the response fron OpenAI staff dismissing it, would you mind sharing PoC?
by a_bonobo | 2025-07-16 06:02:00+00:00
I think this refers to encapsulation in Python, 'private' methods aren't really private, any user can poke around in there.

Old justification: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2003-October/025932....

>Nothing is really private in python. No class or class instance can keep you away from all what's inside (this makes introspection possible and powerful). Python trusts you. It says "hey, if you want to go poking around in dark places, I'm gonna trust that you've got a good reason and you're not making trouble."

>After all, we're all consenting adults here.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-16 06:02:08+00:00
> put the recurring per launch costs of SLS at $2.5 billion per launch

I think the current administration puts it at $4B, but those estimates seem to include current and future development costs.

IMO, there are plenty of subsystems of SLS that weren't a waste to develop, and it surely fostered a generation of talented individuals, bolstered other companies, etc.

I doubt the Artemis program (as planned) survives a full four years of this administration anyway. The majority of "good work" for SLS seems to be completed, and hopefully, the talent, knowledge, resources, and so on will (has?) spread elsewhere.
by brucehoult | 2025-07-16 06:02:36+00:00
Nice! Looks like an interesting mid-point between xv6 (modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix from 1975 e.g. Lion book) and a full Linux kernel.

Great to see it runs on the LicheeRV Nano, a $9 RISC-V board with 1.0 GHz 64 bit CPU (C906) with MMU, FPU, 128 bit vector unit (RVV draft 0.7.1) and 256 MB of in-package DDR3. That's comparable to a midlife Pentium III or PowerPC G4.

It should be a very easy port to the Milk-V Duo 256M (same SG2002 SoC) or Duo S (SG2000 with 512 MB RAM for $9.90) or original Duo (closely related CV1800B with 64 MB RAM for $5).

No network or block device support at present, and no multi-core either, by the looks.
by fsh | 2025-07-16 06:02:55+00:00
These are optical clocks, so their rates are in the hundreds of THz to PHz range (1.121 PHz in the case of the Al+ clock). A 1e-18 shift corresponds to a ~mHz frequency deviation which a decent frequency counter can resolve in around 1s. However, no optical clock is actually that stable at short time scales, and the averaging is required to get rid of these fluctuations.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-16 06:03:08+00:00
Its a fun concept but the community around it had a strong tendency to want to proselytize their values to you. I enjoyed playing around with it in the beginning but it introduced me to too many tech preachers each with their own similar but slightly different philosophies that they felt like I must know about.

It may have changed but that's what largely turned me off from it. I find other networking projects to have a less preachy mix of people.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-16 06:03:53+00:00
Manned space flight in generally is a hugely wasteful money sink. It eats up about 50% of NASA's budget, and there's no real reason for it other than "we're putting people into space because we want to put people into space." People vigorously defend these boondoggles, then finally admit they were a huge waste years after the fact (as we've seen with the space shuttle, and as we're now starting to see with the SLS).
by nodesocket | 2025-07-16 06:04:22+00:00
I used to configure 1.1.1.1 as primary and 8.8.8.8 as secondary but noticed that Cloudflare on aggregate was quicker to respond to queries and changed everything to use 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Perhaps I'll switch back to using 8.8.8.8 as secondary, though my understanding is DNS will round-robin between primary and secondary, it's not primary and then use secondary ONLY if primary is down. Perhaps I am wrong though.

EDIT: Appears I was wrong, it is failover not round-robin between the primary and secondary DNS servers. Thus, using 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 makes sense.
by K0balt | 2025-07-16 06:05:20+00:00
>Is an imagined VM Turing complete?

Fascinating question. My “vibe” opinion is that it is, but there are limits on the meaning of Turing completeness that do not apply within traditional computing paradigms, vis a vis scaling costs. My intuition is that scaling costs in imaginary VMs would be quadratic rather that linear, e.g. a task that takes twice the memory takes ^2 compute instead.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-16 06:07:13+00:00
Also, Utah was ranked #1, for quality of life, by US News: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

Something's definitely fishy here. Neither US News nor CNBC have very good methodology, but US News seems to have put a bit more work into finding metrics that directly represent quality of life, instead of just analyzing regulations, and assuming their effects on quality of life.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-16 06:07:50+00:00
I do think though that just using a pinephone as just a password manager might make sense for some people (I think) but at the price of pinephone and the features you can get with it, this is really underselling it (I think)

Maybe I don't have enough money to buy a pinephone just for this purpose but even if I would have, I would personally look more into soldering (esp32?) or some single board chip (SOC?) with a touch screen sounds nice too.

Now I am not kidding, there was this dumb phone which I was using and its cost was like 12.5$ and it had the features of camera, mic , text , messaging, audio, file manager and so much more... Basically it just didn't had a browser or ability to add apps ofc since it wasn't android. But yeah I do believe that something niche could be developed for people like you at maybe 1/10th the price
by saghm | 2025-07-16 06:09:18+00:00
Everyone writes code that has bugs in it, but no one intends to write code that has bugs. The bugs occur because there's a disparity between what you think your code is doing and what your code is actually doing. The quote you give is an suggestion for how to reduce how often this occurs by considering why you should be confident about your intent being properly conveyed by the code you've written.

It might help to think of this almost as debugging your program as you write it rather than only after you run it. Debugging a program is essentially the same process of trying to figure out why the program isn't doing what you think of doing. While there's information you can get by inspecting a running program or its outputs, there's often some amount of consideration you need to do in order to figure out why you think certain behavior might be happening. There's no fundamental reason this consideration can't happen before you actually run the program; even as you're writing the code, you can think about all the ways it could potentially go wrong, and why you're confident that this isn't the case. If you can't come up with a strong argument for that, it's a good sign you might need to reconsider your approach!
by boogieknite | 2025-07-16 06:09:19+00:00
i CERTAINLY agree that theres tons of new literalism in Oppenheimer. i was mentioning that Oppenheimer is not catering to the lowest common denominator in order to get an Oscar. Oscars trade on belabored basic character drama and many of the things you listed. mostly depends on directors who the academy think are "deserving" at the moment

Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
by kqr | 2025-07-16 06:09:33+00:00
I'm not convinced. Which languages have Perl influenced, really? All the things that other languages seem to draw from Perl could just as well have come from e.g. awk, Smalltalk, and other languages that came before Perl.

Most of the uniquely Perly things (topicalisation, autovivification, regexes in the language syntax, context sensitivity) haven't been picked up by other languages.

The only really Perly thing that was picked up elsewhere is CPAN, but that's not part of Perl-the-programming-language but Perl-the-community.

(Oh I guess PHP picked up sigils from Perl but misunderstood them and that was the end of that.)
by II2II | 2025-07-16 06:09:34+00:00
I was going to say that different people have different needs, but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part, tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the browser to open a link in a new window.

Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
by MrVandemar | 2025-07-16 06:09:39+00:00
> The modern web is opt-in. I build and use sites that aren’t SPAs and shitted up with 3p resources and images and code.

That is a microscopic subset of the modern web.

I don't use Gemini— though I am highly tempted —but I expect some of the attraction is that you can click on any link and pretty much guaranteed not to be socked in the face with a sign-up-for-my-newsletter or cookies-accept-all-yes-later or paragraph-ad-paragraph-ad-paragraph-ad or fiddling with NoScript to find the minimum amount of Javascript that will let you read some article that looks interesting. In Gemini, all that friction just goes away.
by scuol | 2025-07-16 06:11:57+00:00
The way I always remember leftmost and rightmost binary search (the C++ equivalents-ish of lower_bound and upper_bound) is to always have a "prior best" and then move the bounds according to the algo

while (l < r)

{

//find the midpoint

auto mp = l + (l-r)/2;

if (nums[mp] == target) { prior = target;

#ifdef upper_bound

l = target + 1; // move the left bound up, maybe there's more up there we can look for!

#else

//lower bound, we found the highest known instance of target, but let's look in the exclusive left half a bit more

r = target - 1;

#endif

}

excuse the terrible formatting, it's been a long day grinding leetcode after getting laid off...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-16 06:12:12+00:00
My gripe with all procedural generated content in games, like e.g. Starbound. There's a tiny state space inflated via RNG, and it takes me just moments to map out the underlying canonical states and lack of any correlation between properties of an instance, or between them and the game world. The moment that happens, the game loses most of its fun, as I can't help but perceive the poor base wearing random cosmetics.
by komali2 | 2025-07-16 06:12:22+00:00
It's not just a strong central government in the PRC, technically the USA has that as well (just look at what ICE is allowed to do, and states may do nothing in return), it's also that the PRC is a single-party government, and more and more evolving into a Xi personality cult (to be fair, the General Secretary always had an extraordinary amount of influence, see Deng Xiaoping).

Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior.

Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption.

However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths.

If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.