MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-03 02:24:39+00:00
That's really no reason LLMs can't be all that though, and I don't mean instructed to. The sycophantic ass-kissing is a consequence the post-training reinforcement learning to be a 'helpful AI assistant'. Base models aren't really like that at all. Hell the original Bing ignored a lot users and would often refuse to entertain further requests if you 'upset' it. Microsoft wasn't telling Bing to do all that. In fact, they replaced the model for it.
by tw061023 | 2025-08-03 02:24:42+00:00
Sure, it took only what, 40 years of intensive hardware improvements* for assembly to move to the fringe? And we still reach out to it more often that I would like to because reasons?

Yep, I guess you can train an LLM on a bunch of binaries to get it to mimic a SotA compiler with some accuracy, which may or may not improve over time, but come on. Times where there were free performance increases are gone, and this is not the area where shipping any bullshit real fast will get you any sort of advantage.

* Which are unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future.
by amarshall | 2025-08-03 02:26:04+00:00
Small multiplier, I think not.

Pickup trucks weigh about 1.5x as much as a sedan (comparing Camry to F150). Due to the fourth power law, they should be taxed about 5 times higher than a sedan simply for road maintainence. I don’t have the numbers, but I doubt that is so. Toll roads typically charge per axle, and as below, gas tax is probably only about 2x. Ironically, EVs should pay more tax for maintenance since they are usually quite a bit heavier—though the OP truck is still ~600 lb lighter than an F150.

Fuel economy is about half in a pickup vs. a sedan, so they pollute that much more. Gas tax obviously scales here, but do the other taxes? Does gas tax go towards remedying the pollution impact at all? I don’t know.

Then there’s the safety impact on pedestrians and other vehicles. I don’t have numbers here, sorry.
by defrost | 2025-08-03 02:26:09+00:00
No real time constraint, I've seen highly discussed and upvoted material that has been 10, 20, even 50+ years old.

What's appreciated is a time context - the mods will often add a date to the title of active submissions if they're from "the past" (which is subjective - sometimes six months old is "ancient" in a fast evolving domain, some 50 year old essays have a 'timeless' quality that is relevant in the now).
by tgmatt | 2025-08-03 02:26:16+00:00
I don't know where these mythical "good people" are, but they have been few and far between in my experience. People _will_ let you down, people _will_ disappoint you, even the so-called "good" ones, even family. I don't have the same opinion of AI as the OP, I've never used it for anything other than questions that needed answering or work related stuff, and I don't think I could ever use it for personal things, but I agree that people overwhelmingly suck.
by whateveracct | 2025-08-03 02:29:24+00:00
> Very briefly dated a 39 year old who admitted she had never baked, boiled, or microwaved her own potato. Already got 2 kids. > > We reach endgame sooner in life. We grind all the content immediately because we aren't growing the potatoes and sewing the clothes, weaving textiles.

this is a bit extreme..you don't need to go back 100+ years to know how to cook your own food. And plenty of people do cook their own food now despite having grown up on YouTube.
by dogcow | 2025-08-03 02:29:38+00:00
Thanks, I appreciate your explanation. I was aware that there are workarounds, but to me that defeats one of the core tenants of IPv6, which is that we're supposed to be doing away with this NAT and NAT-like nonsense by giving everything a globally rotatable IP.

When I was reading up on everything, I also learned that your router can request a bigger prefix, but I ran across several posts from various folks stating they could only get a /64 from Comcast no matter what they tried, so I'm not sure how universally supported DHCPv6-PD requests are.
by bagacrap | 2025-08-03 02:29:41+00:00
You concluded that these "accusations" (your word) are perhaps "the truth" (your word) based only on the information that some facts are worked into the accuser's story (we can assume some details are factual as neither side disputes them).

Fwiw I spent a few dozen seconds trying to read the primary source (accusations) but it was mostly a blow by blow of internal emotional state and my interest in this soap opera was quickly exhausted. No real lesson to be learned here unless you didn't already realize not to stick your ... in crazy.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-03 02:29:55+00:00
> Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years [70,000 VHS tapes], from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."

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

https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo

https://recorderfilm.com/
by llbbdd | 2025-08-03 02:30:33+00:00
Nearly identical with a coat of paint. Every "horror story" I've heard about having to beg with the health system here is tellingly parroted by people who do not have experience with the system. It is the default to get itemized bills when you are insured and the outcome is the same. And again, there is nothing unusual about private care in the US - I pay cash, direct, a small amount monthly, for excellent private care. The ghost people claim to haunt US healthcare is mostly propaganda that for some reason is consumed wholesale by people outside the US who have no stake in it.
by Sherveen | 2025-08-03 02:31:12+00:00
Everyone in this thread who posts some variation of "wow love it how the government gets to decide if you get to sell your startup or how the market should work" should be handcuffed to their chair and forced to answer these 3 questions:

1. is there any role for gov't antitrust in your view of modern capitalism? 2. if there is a role, why is Adobe x Figma not the perfect example for enforcement? 3. if your answer is "Adobe clearly isn't a monopoly, look at the existence of Figma as evidence," why are you dumb?
by westurner | 2025-08-03 02:31:27+00:00
Didn't they originally use polarizing filters to measure photonic phase?

If it were possible to measure the phase of a photon after a beam splitter in a nondestructive way, shouldn't it be possible to determine whether measuring one causes state collapse in the other?

This says that photonic entanglement is polarization, and that photonic phase can be inferred from second order of intensity, IIUC:

"Bridging coherence optics and classical mechanics: A generic light polarization-entanglement complementary relation" (2023) https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev...

Shouldn't it then be possible to nondestructively measure photons and thus entanglement?
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-03 02:31:35+00:00
This was a pretty fun read. I like that the author gives their impressions and seems reasonably knowledgeable but also admits they don't know all the ins and outs of some of the things they address.

I find myself leaning more these days towards the view that the whole "eventually consistent JSON database replicated across all participating servers" thing is maybe too much of a reach. One big reason is that I think the challenges of moderation put a cap on how decentralized any usable communications system can be, so decentralizing things beyond the level of moderation doesn't actually add much, and can in some ways make things worse.

It's abundantly clear that you can't run any kind of public anything on the internet these days without some sort of moderation. It's also clear that moderation ultimately requires humans making decisions; you can have bots reacting in various ways to filter spam but you always need humans at the top who can override and tune those bots. For public forums, the capacity of those humans to keep things running in a sane manner is the bottleneck on centralization, not any technical decentralization of the protocol.

What this means is that if you have a chat room with a three-person mod team, there is not much to be gained by having the underlying protocol decentralized across the servers and/or clients of all 100 or 500 or 10,000 users in the room. Everything that every user sees is already subject to the decisions of the three mods and is therefore effectively "gatekept". Moreover, what it means for the room to be healthy is that all those users are basically satisfied with the moderation, which means that letting unmoderated traffic flow in a free and decentralized manner is actually not what people want --- it just means they'll see more spam.

A possibility to explore would be something that has some kind of partial or two-tiered decentralization in which (within the context of a given room) moderator servers have different status than ordinary-user servers. This might mean, for instance, that non-moderator servers simply trust moderator servers about state, rather than every server doing the full state resolution for every room. It could also mean that when moderation is overwhelmed by a flood of spam, there is a mechanism that can throttle traffic to the non-mod users, so that the room just appears quiet, rather than the whole flood of spam being replicated to everyone.

This idea is half-baked but I feel like something along these lines could mitigate some of the worst cases I've seen on Matrix, which can arise when the spam effectively DDoSes the moderators and the moderation actions (such as redactions or bans) become stuck in the processing queue behind spam messages.

In any case, though, it's clear that moderation needs to be baked into the protocol at a lower level than it currently is.
by bitwize | 2025-08-03 02:33:39+00:00
The three-cue system is what convinced me that, per Robert Conquest, American education is secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. I mean, if I were one of Bezmenov's supposed evil-genius agents of influence seeking to undermine and ruin Western civilization, introducing the way that illiterate people bluff their way through reading as the standard for reading education would definitely be in my toolkit of delightfully devilish methods of cultural sabotage.

My wife and I both acquired reading very early -- age three or so. So I don't remember the details of how I acquired it, only driving some of my teachers nuts once I actually did enter school, because I didn't follow the timetable they learned in their expensive university education of when and how kids are supposed to learn to read, do math, or anything else really. But I suspect that one thing you can do to help kids with their reading skills is to read to them, starting very early. My wife and I have similar experience of being read to by our moms, eventually seeing the ability to read as a "magic power"[0] of sorts, and becoming determined to learn this skill, so that we could unlock the tremendous power of books and writing for ourselves. Contrariwise, the kids I've known who struggled with reading early on (even my own sister when I was younger) tended to get bored quickly, give up, and want to do other things.

Reading is an intellectually demanding skill, much like computer programming except for degree -- there's a bit at the beginning that's really hard, because it's based on insights that you don't have yet, and you just kind of have to bro through it. Those who think it just "comes naturally" or whatever are just really, really well practiced at it. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize in order to stay determined to power through the hard bits. Inspiring kids like this begins at home, though school and even television programs like Reading Rainbow (when I was growing up) certainly help.

[0] When the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah devised a writing system for his people, the Cherokee reacted at first with horror: written material, or "talking leaves", was the white man's evil magic! Once he walked them through how it worked, however, they embraced it and the Cherokee became more literate than the surrounding white population.
by kelnos | 2025-08-03 02:34:48+00:00
I do love it. Companies don't exist solely to enrich their founders, they exist to provide a benefit to society. There needs to be a balance, of course, but if allowing a sale does not benefit society, then we should not allow it.

> your startup

You're under the misconception that companies "belong" to individuals. Companies are legal frameworks that society has decided upon. We could legally decide that M&A just isn't allowed, ever, if we wanted to. (I don't think that would be a good idea, but I hope you see my point.)
by defrost | 2025-08-03 02:35:20+00:00
That "usual pattern" is subject to great debate:

Although some Yanomami really have been engaged in intensive warfare and other kinds of bloody conflict, this violence is not an expression of Yanomami culture itself. It is, rather, a product of specific historical situations: The Yanomami make war not because Western culture is absent, but because it is present, and present in certain specific forms.

Their violence was observed by people following a wave of slave-hunting expeditions by the conquistadors and bandeirantes.
by dogcow | 2025-08-03 02:35:42+00:00
Yeah, I know about the workarounds, but that just kind of defeats the purpose for me. Also, I've read comments from folks stating they were having a hard time getting a larger prefix from Comcast using PD... don't know how universally true that is.

Using DNS to resolve everything solves part of the problem, but firewall rules are another issue. The router would need to have the capability to update everything dynamically when the prefix changes. I think this in the works for pfSense, but I'm not sure if its actually supported yet. It looks like you might have to mess around with some 3rd-party script to make it work.

I guess I'm just generally disappointed that the whole process seems unnecessarily messy. I don't have a v6-compatible ISP right now anyway. I was thinking about trying a tunnel, but I'm not seeing the benefit in it right now.
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-08-03 02:36:06+00:00
Side note: The organization that maintains Lean is a "Focused Research Organization", which is a new model for running a science/discovery based nonprofit. This might be useful knowledge for founder types who are interested in research. For more information, see: https://www.convergentresearch.org

And if you want to read why we need additional types of science organizations, see "A Vision of Metascience" (https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/)
by elif | 2025-08-03 02:36:12+00:00
Is it really though? There are tons of characters you can add to a regex that have difficult if not impossible to mentally comprehend impacts on the potential matches. That's why you need 100 test cases for every 10 characters you write in a regex. Regex itself could all be a footgun by this standard. No one in the history of no one has ever thought "why dont I just add a random character to my regex I don't need or understand" that's just boogie man level irrational fear if you think this has any bearing on the ease of use of ruby.
by llbbdd | 2025-08-03 02:36:13+00:00
How free do you want it? Emergency healthcare is free at point of service in the US. Most other healthcare is covered partially or entirely if you're employed, which you should be. I've had hundreds of thousands of dollars of inpatient medical care for my family that I paid nothing for. Every other metric just starts to deal with the impact of taxes on the definition of free. I'm sure there are countries with systems that are fuzzier feeling to use, but this one works just fine until someone invents infinite unlimited free doctors to replace it.
by lamontcg | 2025-08-03 02:38:54+00:00
> Me: “You’re answering like I’m Piers Morgan asking ‘Do you condemn October 7th?’ and you reply with historical complexity dating to 1948.”

Yeah...

If I'm working tickets at AWS that kind of dickishness is going to ensure that I don't do more than the least amount of effort for you.

Maybe I could burn my entire weekend trying to see if I can rescue your data... or maybe I'm going to do nothing more than strictly follow procedure and let my boss know that I tried...
by onecommentman | 2025-08-03 02:40:13+00:00
After skimming this article, it drove me to search for the term “hypochondria” which this article suggests afflicts 5%-10% of the population.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/hypochondria

Those afflicted with hypochondria spend 10x more on health care than the average individual, according to this article. May be a relevant driver for health care costs, and thus insurance costs. I’ve heard that every medical student at some time in their education becomes a hypochondriac after learning all the failure modes of the human body.
by LeFantome | 2025-08-03 02:40:20+00:00
It is not really about Windows anymore.

But Windows is where most people run Office, including all the back-end implications like Exchange and all the "Power" stuff.

It is a lot more than 10% of Microsoft revenue really (just not directly).

I agree though that they do not really care about the platform anymore. In fact, they care less and less every day about everything that is not AI on Azure.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-03 02:40:33+00:00
After a 25 year software dev career I quit my toxic job 18 months ago and haven't worked since. I haven't even tried looking for a job. I've become too disgusted with and mismatched with the industry.

My savings won't take me to social security age but I'm damn tempted to live only another ten years on my own terms rather than work for 20 more and live for 15 more after that in failing health.
by constantinum | 2025-08-03 02:40:55+00:00
There is also Unstract(open-source) that helps process structured data extraction. Key differences:

1. Unstract has a Pre-processing layer(OCR). Which converts documents into LLM readable formats.(helps improve accuracy, and control costs)

2. Unstract also connects to your existing data sources, making it an out-of-the-box ETL tool.

https://github.com/Zipstack/unstract
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-03 02:41:17+00:00
Also, if you consider the externalities of cars in general, there's the additional issue of designing our communities around them rather than around the people who live there.

This quote is kinda a meme by now but here's SimCity lead designer Stone Librande on how the team had to make parking lots unrealistically small for the game to be enjoyable [1]:

> When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

[1] https://archive.ph/z7hZG#selection-753.65-753.506
by sedawkgrep | 2025-08-03 02:42:07+00:00
I suspect the thinking is that all of IPv4 could have been a contained within the IPv6 space. Perhaps at at the very beginning or very end of it.

Any time you would reference an IPv4 address when v6 enabled, the stack would simply fill in the remaining bits and forward your packets down the line.

This had to have been thought about though, and I suspect the architects of v6 felt it would've been sub-par to what we have. No idea if that's true though.
by refurb | 2025-08-03 02:42:23+00:00
Yet there are plenty of examples of monopoly or near monopoly businesses getting their butts handed to them by startups.

Yahoo, BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia, Sears.

So it’s clearly not “once you have a monopoly it’s game over for competition”. Markets aren’t stagnant, and as they change it provides opportunities for new competitors to do that “new thing” better than the monopolies.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-03 02:42:53+00:00
> If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs.

I generally beat the crap out of my truck and the exterior looks just fine.

It's really not hard to avoid damaging your exterior. In fact, you have to have a total accident or be completely negligent to cause actual damage. Stuff goes in the bed of the truck. The bed had a bunch of nicks and dings in it, but you're not going to be seeing that while casting judgement.

Heck, go take a look at the work trucks. Find something like a welding truck, an electrician, or a plumber. These are all trucks that people literally use every single day for work, tossing stuff in and out of the bed. They just don't look that beat up. That's because it's just not that hard to avoid completely destroying your vehicle.
by seanwilson | 2025-08-03 02:42:56+00:00
I caveated you should have a test suite anyway (i.e. because types aren't going to catch everything), and the above was suppose to be a caveat to mean "for the behaviours the type system you have available can catch".

Obviously mainstream statically typed languages can't formally verify all complex app behaviour. My frustration is more aimed at having time and energy wasted from runtime and test suite errors that can be easily caught with a basic type system with minimal effort e.g. null checks, function parameters are correct type.

Formal proof languages are a long way from being practical for regular apps, and require massive effort for diminishing returns, so we have to be practical to plug some of this gap with test cases and good enough type systems.
by __egb__ | 2025-08-03 02:44:01+00:00
It really depends what your goals/targets are. You can still do a lot with narrowband filters that make light pollution a minimal concern.

One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.

I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.

At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.

Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.
by 9rx | 2025-08-03 02:45:11+00:00
Trouble is that if there are gaps then the types become redundant. Consider error handling. Rust helps ensure you handle the error, but it doesn't ensure you handle the error correctly. For that, you must write tests. But once you've written tests to prove that you've handled the error correctly, you've also proven that you handled the error, so you didn't really need the type to begin with. You're really no better off than someone using PHP or JavaScript.
by bitwize | 2025-08-03 02:46:46+00:00
When I was in kindergarten, we were read a book called The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read. The main character was a Mr. Magoo-type character, except merely illiterate instead of functionally blind. He was always making mistakes like this, for example buying wax paper instead of spaghetti because they both came in long boxes. Eventually his wife teaches him how to read and his next grocery trip has all the correct items.