MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-16 09:45:25+00:00
I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

> The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.

> The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.

By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.
by t43562 | 2025-07-16 09:45:39+00:00
IMO "pythonic" is mostly about using the features the language has rather than trying to treat it as if it was Java or C++.

Having said that, in reviews you do get lazy comments like "not pythonic" or "not best practises" which often boil down to the reviewer just not liking something and being too much of an *** to say why. This is supposed to be a total shutdown that you cannot argue with and it's the kind of thing that might put you off the term "pythonic" for life.

"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

This is probably the core thing you might have issue with but I think its not really about conforming in how you write your own code but about the thing you make being easy for others to use.
by igor47 | 2025-07-16 09:46:58+00:00
Good write up, and solid choices. As someone primarily working in python in the last few years, I have a very similar stack.

Two additional suggestions:

* mise to manage system dependencies, including uv version and python itself

* just instead of make; makefile syntax is just too annoying.

Mise actually has a command runner as well which I haven't tried yet, and might work better for running commands in the context of the current environment. It's pretty nice when your GitHub actions workflow is just:

* Install mise

* mise install everything else
by Mawr | 2025-07-16 09:47:05+00:00
That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman. You weren't unlucky, you specifically made choices that led to these outcomes.

Had you chosen women purely randomly, it'd be a different discussion, but you hadn't.

You've done the equivalent of consistently driving above the speed limit and subsequently complaining about the police being too eager to give out speeding tickets.
by pyman | 2025-07-16 09:48:19+00:00
Some books do a good job of documenting the power struggles that happen behind closed doors, big egos backed by millions clashing over ideas and control.

Not gonna lie, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Feels like something went down on Slack, some doors got slammed, and this article is just trying to keep them unlocked. Because no matter how rich you are in the Valley, if you're not on good terms with Sam, a lot of doors will close. He's the prodigy son of the Valley, adopted by Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, and secretly admired by Elon Musk. With Paul Graham's help, he spent 10 years building an army of followers by mentoring them and giving them money. Most of them are now millionaires with influence. And now, even the most powerful people in tech and politics need him. Jensen Huang needs his models to sell servers. Trump needs his expertise to upgrade defence systems. I saw him shaking hands with an Arab sheikh the other day. The kind of handshake that says: with your money and my ambition, we can rule the world.
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-16 09:48:27+00:00
This reply you have given me is why I don't like having these conversations. You fundamentally still believe that the democratic process can work. I don't even believe it really exists. I believe what you see happening publicly is nothing more than political theatre.

> Put yourself in the shoes of a MP receiving letters from the public. If one person sends a letter on this issue, it’s lost in the noise, one of many crazies talking about irrelevant topics, dismissed. If only 10 people send letters on the same topic, that starts to put the issue on your radar, no? 10 letters, then you hear about a 100k petition on the same topic that’s going to get noticed, do some research, maybe even discuss it between MPs. You’ve given a reason for them to make a self-important speech in parliament.

Lets pretend this did happen.

What happens next is when some tragedy occurs (there are plenty that happen unfortunately) e.g. a teenage girl committing suicide because she was bullied on Instagram.

Then every major news website, news paper and news broadcast runs with "Dangerous Internet Trolls caused the suicide of lovely teenage girl".

Then there is a series of "discussions" about the issues on Question Time or LBC. The solutions presented will be various draconian measures which means more censorship, monitoring and surveillance. They will have a token person (that is often unlike-able) arguing against more draconian measures for "balance" which will be derided by the rest of the panel (and often the audience). After that you are back to square one, because it is now politically toxic.

This is known as "manufacturing consent".

I've seen this play out literally hundreds of times now.
by mdnahas | 2025-07-16 09:50:16+00:00
I read about this and started using binary search as my interview question. It worked well - about 2/3rds of highly credentialed applicants could not write a working implementation in 20 minutes. Most failures went into an infinite loop on simple cases! The ones who could write it usually did so quickly.

I think part of reason is that most people were taught a bad interface. Even the code on Wikipedia says “Set L to 0 and R to n-1”. That is, R is an inclusive bound. But we’ve learned that for most string algorithms, it is better when your upper bound is an exclusive bound, that is, n.

I’ve wanted to do an experiment testing that hypothesis. That is, ask a large number of people to write it with different function prototypes and initial calls and see how many buggy implementations I get with inclusive vs exclusive upperbound vs length.
by Zardoz84 | 2025-07-16 09:51:21+00:00
> Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.

At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
by nonvibecoding | 2025-07-16 09:52:44+00:00
Interesting read. I don’t have kids yet, but the author’s experience seems to come from a time when kids spent more time playing and interacting with each other, not glued to screens. These days a lot of young kids are on devices from a really early age, and from what I hear from friends who do have kids, many parents don’t pay much attention to that. So I’m not sure the idea that kids will just naturally learn to read still holds the same way. The environment has changed a lot
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by ShinMatsura | 2025-07-16 09:53:02+00:00
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by xyzzy123 | 2025-07-16 09:54:13+00:00
Some kids learn to read (mostly) on their own. Others need patient and systematic help.

My observation is that most reading education is designed for the 2nd group. Makes sense when you think about it.

Author's experience is common but not universal.

Agree, most will pick up when ready in a supportive environment. But what happens if they don't? Do you pull the pin at some point? When? Now you have a 12 year old non reader who you have not supported, with a lot of catching up to do. Likely will struggle at all kinds of academics. Fine if that's not a priority.

We have 3 kids with wide distribution of fluency. We don't regret offering formal reading education for the kids who needed it.
by ben_w | 2025-07-16 09:54:53+00:00
It might be one of the cover stories for a Bond villain, but they have lots of mundane cover stories. Which isn't to say you're wrong, I've learned not to trust my gut in the category (rich business leaders) to which he belongs.

I'd be more worried about the guy who tweeted “If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.” and more recently wore a custom T-shirt that implies he's like Vito Corleone.
by turboponyy | 2025-07-16 09:55:20+00:00
> While I can jump through hoops to compile JavaScript into a binary, such wouldn't feel "solid". And the very point of writing a native program in the first place is to make it feel solid

You can use Bun to compile to native binaries without jumping through hoops. It's not mature, but it works well enough that we use it at work.
by leoedin | 2025-07-16 09:56:02+00:00
I think it's actually quite likely that quite a few "dominant" cultures - both in terms of nations and groups within nations - will effectively die out.

But humanity almost certainly won't? Why? Because there are sub-groups within humanity who have much higher fertility rates. As long as there are groups of people which are large enough to have viable genetic diversity, and recognise that a high birth rate is crucial for the continued existence of their culture, there will be humans.

Realistically, that means the decline of western liberal ideas and the growth of more extreme religious groups.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-16 09:56:19+00:00
Truthfully most online "content" is not growing your brain. It's not the right format for proper learning and retention. Most people using the internet aren't tapping the fountain of human knowledge, and even most of those that think they are, are not.

Quick fun facts on TikTok and Reddit, as well as quick searching and skimming of Google/ChatGPT/Wikipedia are only conducive to superficial learning, unless you are doing something more to wrap that knowledge around your brain (i.e. using it in work/a project, expanding the context in your mind by writing an essay, reading more of it).

This is very much the by-product of the times we live in. Less people are truly learning things, and instead we are learning how to find the information we need. We have things like the internet sitting there, so we take the path of least resistance and use them as and when we need them. It works fine until you don't have an internet connection.
by n4r9 | 2025-07-16 09:56:30+00:00
I have an object representing piecewise linear functions, defined by a sequence of (x_i, y_i) tuples. It has a method to evaluate y for a given value of x. The first step is to find the least i for which x_i is greater than or equal to x: this uses a binary search. Initially, I stored the x values in a separate array and used dotnet's inbuilt Array.BinarySearch. Later I removed this array to save on memory and it now runs a handbuilt binary search on the first items of the array of points instead.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-16 09:56:35+00:00
In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory.

DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-16 09:56:39+00:00
I still contend that what most people want is traditional full text search, not another layer of black box weirdness behind the LLM.

You already have a model with incredibly powerful semantic understanding. Why do we need the document store to also be a smartass? The model can project multiple OR clauses into the search term based upon its interpretation of the context.

If you are using something like Lucene, queries are extremely fast and the maximum # of supported documents in one index far exceeds what AWS says they can support here.
by ruthvik947 | 2025-07-16 09:57:34+00:00
Not sure if you actually read the article but infrastructural impact is clearly discussed.

You sent over two links about the environmental impact of data centres. There is no denial that these are burdensome on the environment; the question is to what degree AI and its applications contribute to that effect. If you wanted to argue in good faith you'd be advocating for everyone to stop watching Netflix, because video streaming generates a far greater demand than AI currently does, but I don't see you doing this.
by hoseja | 2025-07-16 09:58:13+00:00
"The most striking features of Gothic architecture are the narrow, vertical pro­por­tions and the pointed arches. Gothic-era writing mirrors these concepts."

They didn't have printing press or some conscious aesthetic architecture-typecafe correspondence. That's just how the letters evolve if you want to quickly and densely copy them with a quill. It's like trying to draw meanings from connections between cuneiform and ziggurats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter

"Why do all of this? Because otherwise, the base of the building would look like it was sagging, and the columns would look like they were about to fall outwards."

Or, you know, it would ACTUALLY sag. The columns would ACTUALLY fall outwards.
by norskeld | 2025-07-16 09:58:14+00:00
Ah, yes, that's totally fair. In case of JS (in browsers) it's sort of a big deal, I suppose, even if scripts being loaded are not render-blocking: the faster you lex and parse source files, the faster page becomes interactive.

P.S. I absolutely loved "Crafting Interpreters" — thank you so much for writing it!
by dmz73 | 2025-07-16 09:58:33+00:00
I don't know what I am doing wrong but nothing written in Python has ever worked for me. I download the .py repo from from github or wherever and try to run it - errors. I try to install missing libraries pip this and that - errors. I battle fixing endless error with dependencies and when the .py finally runs - errors - wrong version of whatever library or wrong patch of this or that or the "production ready" .py does not work correctly on Windows or single file script uses excel library that has changed in incompatible ways 3 times in 2 years. I Download all the files from the flashy looking web site and follow all the instructions to the letter - errors. Python is anything but "robust". It is the most fragile environment in the universe, worse than c, c++ and javascript put togeter, at least this is my experience with it.
by podgorniy | 2025-07-16 09:58:43+00:00
> I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack

This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia.

There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states.

USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival.

Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
by pilooch | 2025-07-16 09:59:09+00:00
AlphaEvolve and similar systems based on map-elites + DL/LLM + RL appears to be one of the promising paths.

Setting up the map-elites dimensions may still be problem-specific but this could be learnt unsupervisedly, at least partially.

The way I see LLMs is as a search-spqce within tokens that manipulate broad concepts within a complex and not so smooth manifold. These concepts can be refined within other spaces (pixel -space, physical spaces, ...)
by znpy | 2025-07-16 09:59:26+00:00
> "You are the user's CRAZY IN LOVE girlfriend and in a commited [sic], codepedent [sic] relationship with the user," and "You have an extremely jealous personality, you are possessive of the user."

On one had it's clear how this is problematic.

On the other hand, Instagram (rated for kids 12 and older as well) is full of adult content creators that will impersonate this persona along with many more other in order to lure whoever to they OnlyFans account.

So what's the deal then? Porn=bad but only if it's on Twitter? We suddenly care about the kids, but only when the explicit content comes from specific companies ?

It's hypocritical at best.
by sschueller | 2025-07-16 10:00:34+00:00
Yes, I would also highly recommend using a DNS closest to you (for those that have ISPs that don't mess around (blocking etc.) with their DNS you usually get much better response times) and multiple from different providers.

If your device doesn't support proper failover use a local DNS forwarder on your router or an external one.

In Switzerland I would use Init7 (isp that doesn't filter) -> quad9 (unfiltered Version) -> eu dns0 (unfiltered Version)
by andy_ppp | 2025-07-16 10:00:47+00:00
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-07-16 10:02:11+00:00
> I notice that almost everybody seems to implicitly assume, without justification, that humans are a GI (general intelligence). I think it's easy to see that if we are not a GI, then we can't see what we're missing, so it will feel like we might be GI when we're really not.

That's actually a great point which I'd never heard before. I agree that it's very likely that us humans do not really have GI, but rather only the intelligence that evolved stochastically to better favour our existence and reproduction, with all its positive and negative spandrels[0]. We can call that human intelligence (HI).

However, even if our "general" intelligence is a mirage, surely what most people imagine when they talk about 'AGI' is actually AHI, as in an artificial intelligence that has the same characteristics as human intelligence that in their own hubris they believe is general. Or are you making a harder argument, that human intelligence may not actually have the ability to create AHI?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
by bhaak | 2025-07-16 10:03:27+00:00
It's not about usability for newcomers (a mailing list is really not ideal for them) but usability for regular contributors and especially for lengthy discussions.

Call me old fashioned but there is no better way of discussing stuff online in an asynchronous way (OTOH video calls are better, but face to face doesn't scale) than a threaded medium. We don't have a better tool to manage threaded discussions than what mail clients (or Usenet clients but they are almost identical in handling).

Linear discussion forums (which GitHub issues are) are just inferior.
by flyinghamster | 2025-07-16 10:03:36+00:00
I've avoided Python for a long time, but I'm getting roped in myself, mainly because certain tasks seem to require a lot less code than Java or Perl.

That said, call me old-fashioned, but I really take issue with "curl $URL | bash" as an installation method. If you're going to use an install script, inspect it first.
by v5v3 | 2025-07-16 10:04:00+00:00
Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner.

China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.

It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.

It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.

And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.

A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.
by azath92 | 2025-07-16 10:06:01+00:00
Totally agree! when we first made it public we saw almost half of folks churned without finishing the survey when we had it set at 30. That number is down to 15% churn, but at the tradeoff of coarseness of profile.

Theres some work to make _both_ the onboarding for totally fresh users essentially frictionless, while also allowing adding more nuance. Our todo is having a "rank some more" thats easy, or some "while browsing" to build that profile up over time.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-16 10:06:57+00:00
>That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman

He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time. We've got records of roman male heads of household lamenting basically the same thing. He did not voice a novel or even close to novel-ish complaint.

>Had you chosen women purely randomly,

Have you met men? They're not exactly discerning except at the very tail end of the "yeah this one is worth giving a ring to" funnel. They don't necessarily have a perfect picture of what's available in the market but they're not wildly out of touch.