MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elcritch | 2025-07-20 08:01:07+00:00
The system does generally push towards a duopoly. Still there's more influence of voters inside the parties at the local levels than it seems at first. Many important issues are handled at the state level. There's more variation of the parties beliefs as well at that level. A Wyoming Republican can have fairly different views and priorities from a South Carolina Republican. Side note, personally I believe that the growth of the scope of the federal government reduces representation significantly.

A big difference with China or Russia's one party systems is that the presidential candidates are chosen in primaries, which can have a large effect. Both Obama and Trump were relative outsiders who were able to win their parties primaries without being heads of their parties.

To me the USA's executive branch system allows more choice in representative leadership than parliamentary systems where the parties choose the prime minister.
by aw1621107 | 2025-07-20 08:02:36+00:00
Concepts are basically a half solution - they check that a type has some set of properties, but they don't check that the implementation only uses those properties. As a result, even with concepts you can't know what types will work in a template without looking at the implementation as well.

Example [0]:

#include <concepts> template<typename T> concept fooable = requires(T t) { { t.foo() } -> std::same_as<int>; }; struct only_foo { int foo(); }; struct foo_and_bar { int foo(); int bar(); }; template<fooable T> int do_foo_bar(T t) { t.bar(); // Compiles despite fooable not specifying the presence of bar() return t.foo(); } // Succeeds despite fooable only requiring foo() template int do_foo_bar<foo_and_bar>(foo_and_bar t); // Fails even though only_foo satisfies fooable template int do_foo_bar<only_foo>(only_foo t);

[0]: https://cpp.godbolt.org/z/jh6vMnajj
by lelanthran | 2025-07-20 08:02:36+00:00
Have you also heard about calculators?

Every single finance person uses a calculator. How effective do you think a person in any aspect of finance would be if they had never learned what multiplication is? Would they perform their job adequately if they don't know that `X * Y` is `X repeated Y times`?

IOW, if you gave a finance person (accountant, asset manager, whatever) a non-deterministic calculator for multiplication, would you trust the person's output if they never learned what multiplication is?

This is the situation I am asking about; we aren't talking about whether deterministically automating something that the user already knows how to do is valuable, we're talking about whether non-deterministically generating something that the user is unable to do themselves, even if given all the time in the world, is valuable.

All those examples you give are examples of deterministic automation that the user could inspect for accuracy. I'm asking about a near-future where people managing your money have never learned multiplication because "Multiplication has been abstracted away to a tool that gets it right 90% of the time"
by navane | 2025-07-20 08:02:48+00:00
I admit I dont know Bayesian, but isn't the only way to check if the future teller is lucky or not to have them predict many things? If he predicts 10 to happen with a 10% chance, and one of them happens, he's good. If he predicts 10 to happen with a 90% chance and 9 happen, same. How is this different with Bayesian?
by recursivecaveat | 2025-07-20 08:04:51+00:00
Reminds me of that talk on steel mills: https://bhc3.com/2009/05/11/when-being-rational-kills-your-b... You give up the low-end of your business over and over until one day you wake up trying to compete on quality for a tiny share of the market with no revenue left to fund it.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-07-20 08:05:16+00:00
> The Matrix Foundation is currently massively underfunded (contributing significantly to many of the complaints in this thread, especially around Trust & Safety) and even then losing money. It gets no money from folks like France or NATO despite their use of Matrix. You can see the list of financially contributing projects at https://matrix.org/support - there are only two governmental entities who support Matrix directly today; Gematik in Germany and another unlisted European govt.

That some specific organization is underfunded does not mean that whole Matrix was built by a few volunteer developers here and there.

> Element on the other hand does have a bunch of customers like NATO, but is also losing money, thanks to governmental Matrix deals often going to system integrators who win contracts with Element's FOSS software and then don't contribute any $ back to Element. I explained the mess at FOSDEM: https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=740 and there's a good article about a typical instance of this (in German) at https://www.heise.de/news/Wie-Behoerden-und-ihre-Auftragnehm...

That's kind of the point of FOSS. Everyone can crete their own forks, and do not have a duty to contribute money, especially not to an another for-profit company. That happens to all major Free Software projects. Many users of, say, Linux kernel, do not contribute any money at all. Some even refuse to abide by the GPL license (which is less okay), but Linux still not only survives, but thrives.

> (by the way, you seem to spend a a lot of time telling everyone how shit Matrix is; don't you have anything better to do? :)

What is a "lot of time"? A few short messages online?

I think I have explained a realistic user perspective on Matrix. It works, but it has some problems. I have even told that the abuse spam problem has been gotten under control, in the recent threads concerning that.

You have gotten to the point where people care about Matrix. That's a big deal. Matrix is quite possibly a bigger thing now than IRC was at its very peak. That is a big achievement. Unless there is something big I don't know about, your situation is far from hopeless. There is no need to play a victim, give up or to start insulting your users.

The idea that citizens should just shut up about a software project partially built on public money is completely ludicrous.
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-07-20 08:05:19+00:00
More and more I feel like Apple’s SW division is dropping the ball. It’s starting to show more and more that the software is lagging behind the hardware, especially with macOS. macOS is their power user friendly OS. For once they could do a release that actually improves on that front. The list of things to improve is so long and endlessly repeated. Just imagine what an amazing OS macOS could be if Apple actually cared.
by fho | 2025-07-20 08:05:19+00:00
I mean... That's definitely a "why not both" situation.

1. make the (compressed) Wikipedia searchable better as a knowledge base 2. use the LLM as a "interface" to that knowledge base

I investigated 1. back when all of (English, text-only) Wikipedia was about 2 GB. Maybe it is time to look at that toy code base again.
by majkinetor | 2025-07-20 08:05:28+00:00
Exactly. Nature is there mostly to kill you, that is only natural, and thinking otherwise is basically resorting to divine. No living being wants to be food. There can be symbiotic behavior and plants can produce certain chemicals that attract animals that do some things for them like helping reproduction, but its huge stretch to claim that evolution optimizes for health by proxy. Most off beneficial effects of plant chemicals are due to shared pathways and hormesis.
by karlgkk | 2025-07-20 08:05:51+00:00
> If china succeeds in leapfrogging ASML

they wont. full stop. they've even admitted as much in industry. they'll be extremely happy if they're (only!) a few years behind tsmc

at this point, what will be a real earthshaker is if china manages to get past 7nm. smic has gotten a long way but even that company's 7nm process has serious limitations (much higher cost and worse yields)

and anyways, aside from a handful of use cases (ai being one tbh), 7nm chips are more than viable for any general purpose task. a "leapfrog" is quickly diminishing from a "need" to a "want", and the resulting governmental support is fading as well. of course, it'll still be a high priority for the chinese, but it's not like top of the list.
by makingstuffs | 2025-07-20 08:06:30+00:00
The problem with Beyond Meat is that it is insanely expensive. I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.

Don’t get me wrong, as a vegetarian, I think they taste nice. They are just too damn expensive and not particularly healthy which goes against why I am a vegetarian. In Europe we have so many alternatives that are insanely cheaper and, as an Indian, we have so many alternatives that haven’t been processed to within an inch of their life.

One thing I found to be a great homemade burger maker is simply getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty. Tastes great, holds it shape and has a burger like texture.
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-07-20 08:06:32+00:00
Maybe it’s just psychology at work, but I see a huge difference between that time 15 years ago when I wrote my first useful script, and that time last week when an LLM spat out a piece of code to solve an issue I had.

The former made me so proud. My learning had paid off, and maybe there was nothing I couldn’t do. I had laid my pattern of thought onto the machine and made it do my bidding through sheer logic and focus. I had unlocked something special.

The latter was just OpenAI opaquely doing stuff for me while I watched a TV show in the background. No focus or logic was really necessary. I probably learned something from this, but not nearly as much as I could’ve if I actually read the docs and tried it myself.

I’ve also dabbled in art and design over the years, and I recognise this as the same difference as between painting something you’re truly proud of and asking Midjourney to generate you some images.

Then again, maybe that’s just how technological progress works. My great-great-grandmother was probably really proud and happy when she sewed and embroidered a beautiful shirt, but my shirts come from a store and I don’t really think about it.
by aydyn | 2025-07-20 08:06:43+00:00
Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.

It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.
by yawboakye | 2025-07-20 08:08:30+00:00
if the wealth isn’t inherited then it obviously requires extraordinary effort to amass. i’m not a billionaire and it’s not from a lack of trying to be. the fact that my efforts over the years—which are non-trivial btw—haven’t made me one is a clear signal.

starting and running a successful business is extraordinary effort. my life is better thanks to founders of all the companies whose good and services i depend on. i’m full of gratitude for their extraordinary efforts because they’ve made life worth living.
by cloudbonsai | 2025-07-20 08:08:45+00:00
So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years:

That’s a problem given that $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027. Beyond Meat has no way to repay that debt, and the credit markets know it: The bonds currently trade at about 17 cents on the dollar.

To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net operating loss of $156M. Their total assets are $600M, and the market capitalization is only $260M as of today.

If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
by phire | 2025-07-20 08:08:58+00:00
It was expensive because they only built 14 aircraft (plus 6 prototypes).

And the overflight bans were a large part of the reason for all the sales to fall though. If the development/maintenance costs had been split over hundreds of craft as planned, they would have been much cheaper to both buy and maintain.

There is still the issue of high fuel costs, but fun fact, most of the cancellations came in months before the 1973 oil crisis.
by jurip | 2025-07-20 08:09:09+00:00
Cheese uses lots and lots of milk. There are questions of ethics (the treatment of dairy cows is often less than stellar) and carbon footprint (cheese is worse than pork, for example.)

I'd really love to see some good alternatives, too. I don't really expect to give up all cheese anytime soon, but having a substitute for at least some of it would be helpful.
by microtonal | 2025-07-20 08:09:33+00:00
I recently moved from a 60Hz 5k Apple Studio Display to a 120Hz 4k Dell display for my main work desk. I was surprised that on macOS (on an M3 Pro), the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable (mostly in the control center slide animation), whereas my ThinkPad with GNOME is super smooth at 120Hz. Window dragging, browser scrolling, etc., are all much smoother on the 120Hz display.
by joegibbs | 2025-07-20 08:10:21+00:00
When things go wrong with AI people seem to often make it prostrate itself, explain why it went wrong and promise to never do it again - which it does, but there’s no point, it’s not going to remember because it doesn’t have memory, and the reasoning as to why it went wrong is usually more hallucinated than regular conversation - like saying that it panicked (which it doesn’t do) or that it ran tests locally, which it can’t.

Perhaps getting something wrong puts in a state that makes it more likely to give wrong answers. It seems like GPT is the most likely to do this.

Also I don’t think you should be letting an LLM just make up commands and run them, that seems like a recipe for disaster, you should at the very least have to see what it’s going to do yourself.
by Degorath | 2025-07-20 08:11:26+00:00
Nowhere in this quote are these fresh grads equated to "lousy programmers", though (which the flamebaity comment did).

And interpreting the quote charitably I'm going to have to agree with it - I don't think many of my coworkers care enough to get to the point where they'd appreciate everything something like Haskell can do for them.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-20 08:11:29+00:00
That is a crazy idea, not because it's unique but because we already did that and "the definition of crazy is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result" (clearly idempotence was something the universe protected during this era of pithy saying making). And as usual HN has the teenage angst responses of "THEY don't want to give up THEIR power" and shit like that. Christ.

Anyway, the dockworkers were already paid off in 1977 because containerization obviated most of their jobs. So the deal we gave them was "You get paid whether you work or not". The problem with paying people when they don't work is that they can then work and use their extra money to extort you even more. Which is exactly what they did this last year. That's right, half of the striking guys weren't guys who'd be working if there wasn't a strike.

If you want to create various mobs that eat you alive while a bunch of useful idiots parrot some platitudes about unions, you should pay the unions even more money for less work.

Kipling wrote a poem here that is illustrative for all these guys who think they have "one crazy idea that solves everything" that is always this same old idea. I shall give you two lines to meditate on:

> once you have paid him the Danegeld

> You never get rid of the Dane
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-20 08:11:47+00:00
Yes, it takes an existing model and fine tunes it. ChatGPT would be basically extensively prompt engineering in a session. Maybe using their API? I have never tried it personally.

When I fine tuned a Mistral 7B model it took hundreds of examples in Alpaca style

It’s a lot of work. Maybe OpenAI has a more efficient way of doing it because in my case I had to manually adjust each prompt
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-20 08:12:21+00:00
I have been involved with AI for over 40 years. I assure you anyone being shown a current frontier model in operation 10 years ago would have been blown off their socks.

Yet here we are. Rather than exploring this fantastic new tool, so many here are obsessed with pointing out flaws and shortcomings.

I get the angst of a world facing dramatic change. I don't get the denial and deliberate ignorance flaunted as somehow deep insight.
by torginus | 2025-07-20 08:13:31+00:00
There has been a lot of people in the C# community that think like you - that want to make the C# syntax more minimalist, the code shorter, so that they their microservice code is as terse as they'd write in node or Go.

I think the changes they implemented were a mixed bag. True, they did a lot to clean up the corporatey 'design-pattern' mindset of the API, and some of the syntax is nice.

But there's a lot of stuff I dislike - top level statements are nightmare to use, as they interact weirdly with the rest of the language, implicit usings are just straight up magic in a bad way.

If you're comfortable with the IDE workflow (what's an IDE anyways? everyone's using VS Code/forks and AI nowadays), then it takes care of the boilerplate for you, and it's not an impediment when reading, as your eyes just skip over it.

C# is 25ish years old, and it's a testament to how well-designed it is that it's still used in almost every domain.

Go is an awesome language, but part of its awesomeness comes from the really small feature set, and trying to retrofit Go-like syntax into C# makes the language worse in many ways.
by delegate | 2025-07-20 08:13:44+00:00
Doesn't Clojure already support all of those features ?

Eg.

> transducer-first design, laziness either eliminated or opt-in

You can write your code using transducers or opt-in for laziness in Clojure now. So it's a matter of choice of tools, rather than a feature of the language.

> protocols everywhere as much as practically possible (performance)

Again, it's a choice made by the programmer, the language already allows you to have protocols everywhere. It's also how Clojure is implemented under the hood.

-> first-class data structures/types are also CRDT data types, where practical (correctness and performance)

Most of the programs I worked on, did not require CRDT. I'm inclined to choose a library for this.

> first-class maps, vectors, arrays, sets, counters, and more

Isn't this the case already ? If Clojure's native data structures are not enough, there's the ocean of Java options..

Which leads to a very interesting question:

How should the 'real' AGI respond to your request ?
by weatherlite | 2025-07-20 08:13:54+00:00
> This is indeed a problem, but it's a different problem from just making shit up, which is an AI specialty

It's a bigger problem than AI errors imo, there are so many Wikipedia articles that are heavily biased. A.I makes up silly nonsense maybe once in 200 queries, not 20% of the time. Also, people perhaps are more careful and skeptical with A.I results but take Wikipedia as a source of truth.
by crinkly | 2025-07-20 08:14:12+00:00
Lazy solution here that has worked fine forever through a complete hardware failure and burglary. Scratch disk inside desktop. External disk kept in house. External disk kept off site. All external disks are Samsung T7 Shield.

Robocopy /MIR daily to scratch or after I’ve done something significant. Weekly to external disk. Swap external disk offsite every 1 month.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-20 08:15:03+00:00
> Have you also heard about calculators?

Yup, my mom used to say "you need to be able to do it without a calculator, because in life you won't always have a calculator with you"... Well, guess what mom :)

But on a serious note, what I'm trying to say (perhaps poorly worded) is that this is a typical thing older generations say about younger ones. They'll be lost without x and y. They won't be able to do x because they haven't learned about y. They need to go through the tough stuff we went through, otherwise they'll be spoiled brats.

And that's always been wrong, on many levels. The younger generations always made it work. Just like we did. And just like the ones before us did.

There's this thing that parents often do, trying to prepare their children for the things they think will be relevant, from the parent's perspective. And that often backfires, because uhhh the times are achanging. Or something. You get what I'm trying to say. It's a fallacy to presuppose that you know what's coming, or that somehow an entire generation won't figure things out if they have a shortcut to x and y. They'll be fine. We're talking about millions / billions of people eventually. They'll figure it out.
by elcritch | 2025-07-20 08:15:49+00:00
> Total Wealth Gains of Forbes 400 by Presidential Administration The Forbes 400 total wealth grew considerably more during Democratic administrations (+57.1%) compared to Republican administrations (+16.5%)

Wow, the last jump of the wealth of the Forbes 400 by 64% under Biden is insane. I'm guessing largely due to covid-19. Oddly under Trumps first term the Forbes 400 went up and then decreased a fair bit to end up at only 15% growth overall.
by microtonal | 2025-07-20 08:16:15+00:00
Asahi only supports M1 and M2 Macs well (and you will still miss support for some functionality, like Thunderbolt or USB-C DP-Alt mode displays). Ryzen APUs have indeed narrowed the gap and if you want to run Linux, it's probably much better to get a recent Ryzen ThinkPad than a Mac (or get a Strix Halo Ryzen once it lands in the good ThinkPad models).

(I am a longtime Mac user, but I recently got a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and all the hardware works out-of-the-box and very well on Linux.)
by kybernetikos | 2025-07-20 08:16:28+00:00
I've been carrying around a local wikipedia dump on my phone or pda for quite a bit more than 10 years now (including with pictures for the last 5 years). Before kiwix and zim, I used tomeraider and aard.

I do it both for disaster preparedness but also off-line preparedness. Happens more often than you'd think.

But I have been thinking about how useful some of the models are these days, and the obvious next step to me seems to be to pair a local model with a local wikipedia in a RAG style set up so you get the best of both.
by ath3nd | 2025-07-20 08:17:39+00:00
I would challenge you to use LLMs to prove me wrong, then LLMs to prove me right. Cause they will gladly invent stuff up to agree with whatever you ask them to do.

Hard pass on spending time debating with the fanbase of a tool which claim to fame is the dubious benefit of allowing its users to avoid critical thinking for themselves.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-07-20 08:20:01+00:00
>Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity

Human brains cannot monitor gravity. We're actually very bad at it.

Also you're failing to understand the scaling involved here, so to speak. I'm actually really not interested in trying to explain this if you can't be bothered with spending a few minutes on how nervous systems work.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-20 08:22:20+00:00
If the most critical current issue for humanity is the climate and environmental crisis then we must accept that letting the population decline is also the most beneficial thing we can do for a sustainable solution.

Of course the problem there is that our whole economic system and thinking relies on an ever growing population. We have reached the limit of that on this planet but it is easier to refuse to accept it than to face the challenge head on.