MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Reubend | 2025-08-12 02:52:37+00:00
Very cool, and I'm looking forward to using this. But unfortunately it seems like it's not actually released yet?

I'm a little surprised to hear that PlanetScale is doing the work to make this considering I thought their entire system was based on Vitess. Maybe the demand for Postgres compatible DBs is so high nowadays that they need to offer compatibility for customers that don't want to port their apps to MySQL's syntax?
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:54:01+00:00
What's a plain old data structure?

Linked lists are recursive, but you can use loops just fine to deal with them.

Similarly, it depends on what you do with your trees. If you want to go down a single path (eg to find an element in a search tree), loops aren't too bad.

And arrays don't necessarily ask for loops. Eg implementing quicksort or heap sort with loops is possible (and depending on your language, compiler and target machine might have performance benefits), but I'd hardly call it ergonomical.

Despite all my criticism you are hinting at a good point though: it's often useful to define your data structures together with combinators that work on them. So eg you want to define various tree traversals together with your tree. (Most people are familiar with the combinators 'map' and 'filter' for lists but that's a very small pool.)

Whether those combinators are implemented with recursion or loops is an implementation detail that the user of the combinator doesn't need to worry about too much.
by ayaros | 2025-08-12 02:55:14+00:00
The Windows XP tour was peak Luna and peak Microsoft and represents the high point of all human technology.

It should have been represented in this article and it wasn't. Truly that's a crime against those who have not had the opportunity to experience it.

I have the Windows XP tour music. I keep it in my library and listen to it. You can find WAV files if you know where to look. I keep the OOBE music in the same album (both the original and remastered versions).

Through this incredible multimedia presentation I had the opportunity to learn about wizards and how Windows XP is best for business. I think there was also something in there about how to open a window. Also, it had that beautiful compass icon and those unmarked Luna-style colored buttons that were used to select each section of the tour. They were my favorite part.

I miss those days.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-12 02:55:21+00:00
12-year-old me wasn't either, but he was noodling around on a computer that cost $2500 (more like $5500 in today's dollars). I think our parents loved us very much and must have had some means to afford the capital cost of a computer back then.

I don't see my 7-year-old paying $5 for each hour he wants to program (and no way in hell would I give him my credit card), but I could easily envision paying $20/month for a Claude subscription and letting him use it. We pay more than that for Netflix & Disney+.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-08-12 02:55:23+00:00
Windows XP was pretty amazing. I remember installing it on my work PC and it found all the printers on the network and automatically installed them.

Windows XP also had perfect timing for the beginning era of broadband and a generation spending hours on their computers.

You only need to look at the leadership at Microsoft who were in charge of Vista and Windows 8. They were “suits” who didn’t understand “mobile”, which was arguably confusing at the time. I vividly remember watching the release videos of Windows 8 and the interviews of the leadership clearly showed they had no concept of what they were doing.

An OS should be extremely boring. It’s an app launcher and file organizer. An OS shouldn’t be flashy. That’s why people have fond memories of Windows 2000 and XP.

Windows 10 can also be extremely boring if Open Shell is installed and some other tweaks. Same thing with Windows 11.
by t0lo | 2025-08-12 02:55:28+00:00
It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.

There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project. Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.

Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.

We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-12 02:55:35+00:00
I've been doing it since W10 was released, and continue to this day.

The consistency is quite good.

It's actually such a simple comparison anybody can try it and see for themself.

Now that you mention it I actually did drive (rental) cars back & forth between airports when I was a student. We went south packed into one car, then came back from the resort areas in a half-dozen or more cars so they could replenish the ones needed in the rental lots hours to the north.

We really would all reach the destination at the same time, traveling at virtually the same speed, but you could easily tell the difference when you had a V8 under the hood compared to a 6-cylinder.

Neither one was a show-stopper and plenty of people wouldn't know the difference anyway.

It's not like some had air conditioning and some didn't, that was by far the most important feature, not performance ;)
by leptons | 2025-08-12 02:55:56+00:00
>web apps sucked when Microsoft tried to do it with Windows CE, RIM tried to do it, Palm

Wow, that's quite the reach. Again, bad faith.

>wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android?

I do, YMMV. I even created one myself. But again, bad faith from you.

>because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware

"You're holding it wrong" proves you wrong.

>that do have subpar hardware performance.

None of this is about a hardware dick-measuring contest, but you sure are trying to move the goalposts that way. Again, bad faith from you.

>But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?

This is another logical fallacy. I'm done with you, you're comments are not grounded in anything except your hatred of anything not Apple.

>One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…

Again, just more bullshit from you.

"The complaint also alleges that Apple’s conduct extends beyond these examples, affecting web browsers, video communication, news subscriptions, entertainment, automotive services, advertising, location services, and more. Apple has every incentive to extend and expand its course of conduct to acquire and maintain power over next-frontier devices and technologies."

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

The "affecting web browsers" part is exactly the thing I described.

Apple already lost that exact thing in Europe, because Europe sued them for it too, and now you can use alternative browser engines on iOS in Europe. Apple's going to lose that one in the US too.

You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-08-12 02:57:20+00:00
Existing big-city police forces already have the resources to stop crime in their respective cities. They just choose not to do it. If you want to see how capable they are of stopping crimes that are of interest to them, try setting up an illegal food stand or parking without paying the meter. You'll be busted within hours.

They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?

I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.
by immibis | 2025-08-12 02:58:30+00:00
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.

Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?

Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
Randomness as a Control for Alignment
by perryspector | 2025-08-12 02:59:28+00:00
Main Concept:

Randomness is one way one might wield a superintelligent AI with control.

There may be no container humans can design that it can’t understand its way past, with this being what might be a promising exception—applicable in guiding a superintelligent AI that is not yet omniscient/operating at orders of magnitude far surpassing current models.

Utilizing the ignorance of an advanced system via randomness worked into its guiding code in order to cement an impulse while utilizing a system’s own superintelligence in furthering the aims of that impulse, as it guides itself towards alignment, can be a potentially helpful ideological construct within safety efforts.

[Continued]:

Only a system that understands, or can engage with, all the universe’s data can predict true randomness. If prediction of randomness can only be had through vast capabilities not yet accessed by a lower-level superintelligent system that can guide itself toward alignment, then including it as a guardrail to allow for initial correct trajectory can be crucial. It can be that we cannot control superintelligent AI, but we can control how it controls itself.

Method Considerations in Utilizing Randomness:

Randomness sources can include hardware RNGs and environmental entropy.

Integration vectors can include randomness incorporated within the aspects of the system’s code that offer a definition and maintenance of its alignment impulse and an architecture that can allow for the AI to include (as part of how it aligns itself) intentional movement from knowledge or areas of understanding that could threaten this impulse.

The design objective can be to prevent a system’s movement away from alignment objectives without impairing clarity, if possible.

Randomness Within the Self Alignment of an Early-Stage Superintelligent AI:

It can be that current methods planned for aligning superintelligent AI within its deployment are relying on the coaxing of a superintelligent AI towards an ability to align itself, whether researchers know it or not—this particular method of utilizing randomness when correctly done, however, can be extremely unlikely to be surpassed by an initial advanced system and, even while in sync with many other methods that should include a screening for knowledge that would threaten its own impulse towards benevolence/movement towards alignment, can better contribute to the initial trajectory that can determine the entirety of its future expansion.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-12 03:00:12+00:00
> Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth?

No

> Is it infinite?

Yes

> Are there any limits to its creation?

Government trying to crush it.

> Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?

The only value it has is what someone else is freely willing to pay for it. There is no such thing as "inherent" value.
by jasonjayr | 2025-08-12 03:00:38+00:00
From my understanding, the security decisions around things like screen locking are the source of many of the pain points holding back X11 users from wayland.. Things like xtest(send input events from random sources), screen grabbing/video recording(allowing another app to see the contents of another window from a potentially different security domain), focus grabbing, input sniffing, are all difficult on wayland, specifically because they are serious security issues on X11, especially in light of a modern understanding of the risk profile.
by pj_mukh | 2025-08-12 03:01:17+00:00
I say this as an immigrant: But if you're not an immigrant, a medicare recipient or maybe in the military, your state and municipal governments have significantly more influence on your life than your federal government and most people rarely pay attention to this level of politics.

This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 03:01:32+00:00
I have no problem admitting that other cities have higher violent crime rates, though I have no particular knowledge of Marksville, LA. I'm not sure why you would suggest that. I would approve of stronger efforts of curbing violent crime in those places, as well. I feel terribly for the innocents who live in those cities, as much as do for those in DC.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 03:01:46+00:00
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section I, Clause 3[0][1] states (in part):

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted."

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
by aeon_ai | 2025-08-12 03:01:53+00:00
DC often serves as America's protest stage. Controlling its police means controlling what kinds of dissent are permissible at the symbolic heart of democracy.

Controlling the physical space around Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy means that every legislator, judge, and federal worker sees the Guard on their commute.

The message is environmental and atmospheric. Propaganda for the governing class. Power made visible to those for whom there is intent to intimidate.

Extending that, DC notoriously exists as an anomaly violating the foundation that the US was founded on. It is a city that isn't a city, a population with little representation in the federal apparatus that controls it.

DC's legal vulnerability makes it perfect for testing. What works there can be threatened elsewhere. "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.

The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-12 03:02:42+00:00
The person who owns it bought it from person who created it.

The person who bought it then manages it, maintains it, organizes it, advertises it, pays taxes on it, etc.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

If rentable places were not allowed to be sold, very very few would exist. This is because people specialize - some build rentals, some manage them. Both are productive enterprises.

You can become a landlord if you want. Borrow the money, buy a rental, and rent it out. But you'll find out it's a lousy business.
by mcmoor | 2025-08-12 03:03:59+00:00
This article [1] claims that it's actually still quite higher than replacement, to make people around ancient Mediterranean have to resort to various kinds of birth control (be it violent or non violent). Medicinal revolution do lowers death rate significantly but I guess the reason why we haven't normalized late/late marriage pattern as birth control until recently is because of abundance of resource resulted by industrial and agricultural revolution.

1. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-12 03:04:15+00:00
He’s a narcissist that wants to stoke outrage.

He doesn’t have a plan* other than finding the button that keeps him in the news and generates narcissistic supply. When he gets bored of that button he backs off. Then he finds a new shiny button to press that freaks people out and generates headlines.

Social media posts where people are freaked out - like many on this thread - is to him like the best high possible.

The best you can do is respond to actual facts on the ground and ignore the bluster.

* it’s the people around him with plans to be worried about
by Alex4386 | 2025-08-12 03:04:18+00:00
tl;dr: If you are not directly affecting the "sales" of the product, you are good to go. But It seems perplexity did, and (as they might call it) directly trying to compete as a news source

Personally, About their news service, Their news summarization is kinda misleading with AI hallucination in some places.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 03:05:43+00:00
As an aside, I posted the text (Article II, Section I, Clause 3) of the Constitution (where this process is defined) as another reply to your comment.

Not as a "gotcha," but to clarify the process for others who may not be well informed about it.

I'd note that I was also incorrect. Sealed ballots from each state are sent to the President of the Senate, not the National Archives. My mistake.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-12 03:05:43+00:00
Imagine pipelineing lots of infra-scale GPU's, naive inference would need all previous tokens to be shifted "left" or from the append-head to the end-of-memory "tail", which would require a huge amount of data flow for the whole KV cache etc. Instead of calling GPU 1 the end-of-memory and GPU N the append-head, you keep the data static and let the role rotate like a circular buffer. So now for each new token inference round, the previous rounds end-of-memory GPU becomes the new append-head GPU. The highest bandwidth is keeping data static.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-08-12 03:05:56+00:00
Loops and functions can be physically represented as a stand alone, they can be physically carved onto a mechanical surface and observed.

They don't smuggle anything in conceptually, their abstraction doesn't leave anything critical to their structure out. They are real and can be physicalized as stand alone objects.

I see you've never tried to teach a software class to children or other learners, historically recursion is _very_ poorly taught by those who already understand the concept, but I'm not saying you have to care about that, a lot of people think there are too many programers already.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-12 03:06:15+00:00
I've been playing around with GLM-4.5 as a coding model for a while now and it's really, really good. In the coding agent I've been working on, Octofriend [1], I've sometimes had it on and confused it for Claude 4. Subjectively, my experience has been:

1. Claude is somewhat better at whole-codebase tasks, where you need to reason over a bunch of context and consider system interactions.

2. GLM-4.5 is somewhat better at being "honest" — i.e. I rarely see it doing the things Claude does like making broken tests pass by changing the test instead of fixing the bug.

Both are quite good though, and GLM-4.5 has found bugs that both Claude 4 Sonnet and 4.1 Opus have failed to catch. In general I think Claude wins a little more frequently on debugging tasks than GLM-4.5, but it's close.

Compared to GPT-5, both Claude and GLM feel like they're more consistent, although GPT-5 sometimes has long brilliant runs where it nails everything with subjectively higher code quality than either of the latter. However, once GPT-5 goes off the rails, it's hard to get it back on track, so it can be a bit frustrating to work with in comparison.

1: https://github.com/synthetic-lab/octofriend
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-12 03:06:41+00:00
The smaller the unit of government, the more it transcends politics and becomes about good governance and getting things done.

At least I thought that when living in GA and saw most of the modern governors both Democratic and Republican weren’t bat shit crazy.

Kemp (Republican) is still sort of trying to hold the line against the GA MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

But then I moved to Florida…
by eru | 2025-08-12 03:06:55+00:00
Loops and gootos are just a special case of function calls, that needed to be invented because back in the olden days we had no clue how to design language and write compilers.

I don't understand why someone would want to hold on nostalgically to restrictions we no longer face.

Controlled mutability is a step up, yes. Btw, even languages like Haskell give you plenty of mutability to play with, if you want to. (Eg MVars and TVars are a thing.)

You are right that replacing a loop one for one with a tail recursive version doesn't give you much benefit either way. (Though it does make my life easier, because you don't have to contort my brain around keeping track of mutation.)

However that's a bit of a straw man and misses the broader picture.

What you'd want to do is define combinators that encapsulate the specific pattern of computation you want to implement. The most commonly known combinators are things like 'map' and 'filter'. But there are plenty more useful ones you can define, like various tree traversals or whatever makes sense for use cases and data structures.

Whether those combinators are implemented with tail calls or with loops or gotos or whatever is an implementation detail that their users don't need to worry about.

I know of one major use case where you'd want to use tail recursion directly: state machines and interpreters. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076088 for an example of the latter. See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda:_The_Ultimate_GOTO for an example of the former.