MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mehrant | 2025-08-22 08:15:43+00:00
Thanks! yeah, SQLite's write lock is painful for concurrent apps. I'm comfortable with kernel development, so I brought some of those patterns here - RCU-style lock-free reads, per-CPU inspired sharded buffers, and io_uring for kernel-bypass I/O. would love to hear your thoughts if you had the chance to give it a spin :)
by sjducb | 2025-08-22 08:15:57+00:00
I’m unsure how the risk compares to an e-bike.

Assuming speeds are equal I think the consequences of a crash are better on a scooter. You don’t have a crossbar between your legs to trip you as you fall, and you start in a standing position, so you’re more likely to land on your feet. Also your head and shoulders are above the cars so you’re less likely to end up under the car.

Having said that I think scooter crashes are more likely given the tiny wheels and less stable frame. Try riding an e scooter without hands. It doesn’t self balance like a bike.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-22 08:15:59+00:00
this entire endeavor is a fools errand, and any who has used coding agents for anything more complex than a web tut knows it.

it doesn't matter how much jargon and mathematical notation you layer on top of your black box next token generator, it will still be unreliable and inconsistent because fundamentally the output is an approximation of an answer and has no basis in reality

This is not a limitation you can build around, its a basic limitation of the underlying models.

Bonus points if you are relying on an LLM for orchestration or agentic state, its not going to work, just move on to a problem you can actually solve.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-22 08:16:17+00:00
> For example, while looking at biometric samples with up to thousands of observations, Karl Pearson declared that a result departing by more than 3 standard deviations is “definitely significant.”

Wait. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at basically the exact same time as this Karl Pearson.

Is that why the Sherlock Holmes stories had handwriting analysis so frequently? Was there just pop science going around at the time that like, let's find correlations between anything and anything, and we can see that a criminal mastermind like Moriarty would certainly cross their T's this way and not that way?
by rkomorn | 2025-08-22 08:16:35+00:00
Most of what I remember of my high school education in France was: here are the facts, and here is the reasoning that got us there.

The exams were typically essay-ish (even in science classes) where you either had to basically reiterate the reasoning for a fact you already knew, or use similar reasoning to establish/discover a new fact (presumably unknown to you because not taught in class).

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.
by avar | 2025-08-22 08:17:08+00:00
every HTTP session was commonly a forked copy of the entire server in the CERN and Apache lineage!

And there's nothing wrong with that for application workers. On *nix systems fork() is very fast, you can fork "the entire server" and the kernel will only COW your memory. As nginx etc. showed you can get better raw file serving performance with other models, but it's still a legitimate technique for application logic where business logic will drown out any process overhead.
by account42 | 2025-08-22 08:17:20+00:00
> An LLM trained on the Internet-at-large is also presumably suitable for a clean room design if it can be shown that its training completed prior to the existence of the work being duplicated, and thus could not have been contaminated.

This is assuming that you are only concerned with a particular work when you need to be sure that you are not copying any work that might be copyrighted without making sure to have a valid license that you are abiding by.
by ryzvonusef | 2025-08-22 08:17:24+00:00
BlueSky and Mastodon are as relevant and useful as Blogger.com; Threads meanwhile has leeched itself to Instagram and somehow existing.

There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.

Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place.

Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-22 08:18:56+00:00
I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.

Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)

Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
by felipeerias | 2025-08-22 08:18:58+00:00
At the moment, AI tools are particularly useful for people who feel comfortable browsing through large amounts of text, intuitively nudging the machine this way and that until arriving at a valuable outcome.

However, that way of working can be exasperating for those who prefer a more deterministic approach, and who may feel frustrated by the sheer amount of slightly incorrect stuff being generated by the machine.
by umajho | 2025-08-22 08:19:43+00:00
If you want to get the grapheme length in JavaScript, JavaScript now has Intl.Segmenter[^1][^2].

> [...(new Intl.Segmenter()).segment(THAT_FACEPALM_EMOJI)].length 1

[^1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[^2]: https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_intl_segmenter_s...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-22 08:21:24+00:00
Yes lets tax these small transactions so that we can go back and give the tax cuts to the billionaire class.

I think that capitalism has strayed away from its original goal. We have basically parasites in the current ecosystem leeching off of either land rent or being billionaires imo.

But no it feels like we don't discuss it, we will all be ever so radicalized about something that happened on twitter etc. that we are forgetting the issue of classes.
by camgunz | 2025-08-22 08:22:00+00:00
> For a large LLM I think the science in the end will demonstrate that verbatim reproduction is not coming from verbatim recording

We don't need all this (seemingly pretty good) analysis. We already know what everyone thinks: no relevant AI company has had their codebase or other IP scraped by AI bots they don't control, and there's no way they'd allow that to happen, because they don't want an AI bot they don't control to reproduce their IP without constraint. But they'll turn right around and be like, "for the sake of the future, we have to ingest all data... except no one can ingest our data, of course". :rolleyes:
by rramadass | 2025-08-22 08:22:38+00:00
Jacques Ellul's two classics The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (wikipedia has an excellent overview - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...) should be required reading for every educated person today. With the rise of AI and its unconstrained applications his works seem even more prescient than before.

Technology and "Technique" have become so inherent and intrinsic to modern society and life today that hardly any intellectual is able to stand apart from it and critique it like Ellul was able to. We are already in the early stages of a social dystopia but are unable to recognize it since the paintings of it (by vested interests) are so very seductive.
by thisislife2 | 2025-08-22 08:23:12+00:00
I hear this a lot online - buy used enterprise stuff online, it'll be cheaper and lasts long (at least you get your money's worth). But when you start to explore the online market for these used enterprise hardware, you find that nobody really sells it for cheap any more, at a price that makes sense to buy it. For example, if a new enterprise class SSD is $250, you may find a used one for $125. But then, brand new consumer SSDs of the same capacity are also available for $125 with warranty. At that point, it doesn't make any sense to buy used hardware, enterprise or otherwise, with no real guarantees of how usable it is. I feel the used hardware markets has also been cornered and monopolised by a few sellers, and you really have to hunt hard for a true bargain. (Maybe on Craigslist?).
by bob1029 | 2025-08-22 08:23:45+00:00
I like to look at these things in terms of kinetic energy. 100mph is roughly 100x more KE than at 10mph.

Assume I hit a car with enough energy to break my leg and the car's windshield. This seems plausible at 10mph. Now, we scale this by 2 orders of magnitude. You could cripple lots of people with this thing in one shot. Bollards wont stop a guy with a scooter.
by Gareth321 | 2025-08-22 08:24:49+00:00
It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-08-22 08:25:31+00:00
If I recall correctly (and I might not), the idea that moderate drinking is healthy came from a faulty study where people who didn't drink at all were less healthy.

But the people who didn't drink at all often didn't drink because they self-excluded because of alcoholism or disease.

They weren't less healthy because they didn't drink, they didn't drink because they were less healthy.
by b3orn | 2025-08-22 08:25:53+00:00
No, at least in Erlang a variable is assigned once, you can then match against that variable as it can't be reassigned:

NotFound = 404, case Status of NotFound -> "Not Found"; _ -> "Other Status" end.

That snippet will return "Other Status" for Status = 400. The Python equivalent of that snippet is a SyntaxError as the first case is a catch all and the rest is unreachable.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-22 08:26:13+00:00
Man I wanted to write about georgism (see my comment on the parent's post where I talk about land parasites)

I am such a big georgist. Seriously, I might genuinely cry seeing how georgism isn't being implemented. it is one of the most superior policy systems but the parasites own so much that we don't even discuss about it

I was talking to my friend about georgism when he asked me if I was a capitalist/communist.. Basically in the end he just said, that he doesn't know about economics... so he doesn't know and they wanted to change the topic I feel like this might be a major hurdle where people think that economics is some huge mumbo jumbo when I feel like georgism and (index funds?) are two things that almost everyone should know given how simple they are.
by abhaynayar | 2025-08-22 08:27:55+00:00
I like CBT. I just don't do it enough. I do like it when I do it though. (behavioral experiments). I think it is important to have goals and results and feedback, as without those, you'd be wandering aimlessly challenging your thoughts/beliefs to no end. I hope to get more consistent in it.

I am generally very good at forming and maintaining habits, but often life gets in the way. Also, it is good to have an external view, sometimes you feel like you're doing shit when you're not. I need an accountability partner I guess. Let's see how it goes. Thanks.
by reify | 2025-08-22 08:28:07+00:00
As a practicing Psychotherapist for over 25 years, I never came across anyone who practiced DBT.

I had heard that some Psychiatric nurses liked it.

I always understaood that it was a modern extention of CBT. The go to, cheap as chips, not very good, therapeutic self brainwashing technique.

Big claims of curing depression, eating disorders and a raft of other mentally distressing diagnoses in a miraculous 6 weeks, have all fallen by the wayside. After 10 weeks the symptoms always return and the client is not fixed in any way.

governments love it, because its cheap, and they can say they are addressing the mental health crisis in society, of which, they are solely and fully responsible for.

The psychologist undergraduate go to, to prove that CBT works and they are good at using graphs and figures.

A new client felt 10/10 depressed at his first session. At session 3 he was 8/10 depressed. At session 6 he was 6/10 depressed. clearly CBT cures depression by filling in a few forms. Write that up in your dissertation and get your degree.

Could this possibly be due to the fact that the client, for the first time in his life, actually had the opportunity to talk about his problems. Nothing to do with being taught how to use a CBT model.

The incessant form filling is totally, for me anyway, anti-therapy.

I worked in many different organisations over the years that banned outright the use of CBT.
by haute_cuisine | 2025-08-22 08:28:09+00:00
According to CEOs of leading AI companies, we're three to six months away from AI replacing software engineers and recruiters, although it isn't clear who recruiter AI agent will be interviewing by then.

Anthropic CEO, Mar 2025 - "AI will write 90 % of the code for software engineers within the next three to six months"

Perplexity CEO, Jul 2025 - "Recruiters will be history … AI agents will replace them in six months"
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-22 08:28:09+00:00
It really depends, and can be variable, and this can be frustrating.

Yes, I’ve produced thousands of lines of good code with an LLM.

And also yes, yesterday I wasted over an hour trying to define a single docker service block for my docker-compose setup. Constant hallucination, eventually had to cross check everything and discover it had no idea what it was doing.

I’ve been doing this long enough to be a decent prompt engineer. Continuous vigilance is required, which can sometimes be tiring.
by thyristan | 2025-08-22 08:29:17+00:00
There is a known maximum error introduced by those simplifications. Put the other way around, Einstein is a refinement of Newton. Special relativity converges towards Newtonian motion for low speeds.

You didn't really miss anything. The article is incomplete, and wrongly suggests that something like "false" even exists in statistics. But really something is only false "with a x% probability of it actually being true nonetheless". Meaning that you have to "statistic harder" if you want to get x down. Usually the best way to do that is to increase the number of tries/samples N. What the article gets completely wrong is that for sufficiently large N, you don't have to care anymore, and might as well use false/true as absolutes, because you pass the threshold of "will happen once within the lifetime of a bazillion universes" or something.

Problem is, of course, that lots and lots of statistics are done with a low N. Social sciences, medicine, and economy are necessarily always in the very-low-N range, and therefore always have problematic statistics. And try to "statistic harder" without being able to increase N, thereby just massaging their numbers enough to get a desired conclusion proved. Or just increase N a little, claiming to have escaped the low-N-problem.
by dig1 | 2025-08-22 08:29:17+00:00
> Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.

Really? Instagram, WhatsApp... the two most used apps & services in the world?

> Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube,

It's arguable how GCP is profitable, but chrome/android/yt are money-losing businesses if you exclude ad revenues.
by tomgag | 2025-08-22 08:29:32+00:00
Thank you for the detailed reply, your points make sense but many of these are, I think, too technical for the intended audience of my blog post, and do not change my overall impression of BlueSky. I will see if I manage to incorporate some of your points in a more digestible way, but reading the blog post you linked (which I didn't know, thanks) confirms my fears: 18 TB and 200$/month to run an instance which is basically serving one user is... insane? And with a lot of features not supported because closed source. I knew about did:web and did:plc and I agree that a future, better, fully decentralized implementation might possible, but at the current state I don't think BlueSky stands up to its promises compared to, e.g., Mastodon.
by traceroute66 | 2025-08-22 08:30:28+00:00
> do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?

Not the person you're asking, but yes, I do.

You know the biggest reason wny ?

Their no-bullshit returns policy.

Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode.

Hell, sometimes Amazon just refund you and don't even want the item returned !

You don't get that anywhere else. At most other vendors you have to fight to even get a returns label. And even if those other vendors give you a returns label without a fight, you have to wait until their warehouse has processed your return and hope that you don't get charged a restocking fee or they try to claim some bullshit excuse about you having lightly scratched something.

Oh, you want to know another reason too ?

I don't like spreading my personal data far and wide.

Yeah, sure I'm sure I could buy my widget from some random shop. Probably at a cheaper price than Amazon too, I'm sure.

But that means another place with my personal data on their database.

Open to that company spamming me, and the Russians hacking them and spaffing my personal data all over the darkweb.

Say what you like about Amazon. But I think their Infosec practices are pretty good.
by arcticbull | 2025-08-22 08:32:45+00:00
Taking this one step further -- there's no such thing as the context-free length of a string.

Strings should be thought of more like opaque blobs, and you should derive their length exclusively in the context in which you intend to use it. It's an API anti-pattern to have a context-free length property associated with a string because it implies something about the receiver that just isn't true for all relevant usages and leads you to make incorrect assumptions about the result.

Refining your list, the things you usually want are:

- Number of bytes in a given encoding when saving or transmitting (edit: or more generally, when serializing).

- Number of code points when parsing.

- Number of grapheme clusters for advancing the cursor back and forth when editing.

- Bounding box in pixels or points for display with a given font.

Context-free length is something we inherited from ASCII where almost all of these happened to be the same, but that's not the case anymore. Unicode is better thought of as compiled bytecode than something you can or should intuit anything about.

It's like asking "what's the size of this JPEG." Answer is it depends, what are you trying to do?
by Frieren | 2025-08-22 08:32:50+00:00
> The results has been...not great.

Sweden is the 19th country in the PISA scores. And it is in the upper section on all education indexes. There has been a world decline on scores, but has nothing to do with the Swedish education system. (That does not mean that Sweden should not continue monitoring it and bringing improvements)

From Swedish news: https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/swedish-students-get-hi...

- Swedish students skills in maths and reading comprehension have taken a drastic downward turn, according to the latest PISA study.

- Several other countries also saw a decline in their PISA results, which are believed to be a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
by xg15 | 2025-08-22 08:34:38+00:00
I think GP is really talking about extended grapheme clusters (at least the mention of invisible glyph injection makes me think that)

Those really seem hellish to parse, because there seem to be several mutually independent schemes how characters are combined to clusters, depending on what you're dealing with.

E.g. modifier characters, tags, zero-width joiners with magic emoji combinations, etc.

So you need both a copy of the character database and knowledge of the interaction of those various invisible characters.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-22 08:34:43+00:00
> There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers

There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case IP ownership will probably be split between songwriter and performer depending on their agreement).

(Not an IP lawyer myself so someone can correct me.)

Furthermore, in countries where I know how it works as a venue owner you pay the rights organization a fixed sum per month or year and you are good to go and play any track you want. It thus makes no difference to you whether you play the original or a cover.

Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

> It's parasitism of art

If we assume covers are parasitism of art, by that logic would your comment, which is very similar to dozens I have seen on this topic in recent months, be parasitism of discourse?

Jokes aside, a significant number of covers I have heard at cafes over years are actually quite decent, and I would certainly not call that parasitic in any way.

Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP, insert itself as a middleman and arbiter for information access, devalue art for profit, etc., I am not sure they are even close in terms of the scale of parasitism.
by Gareth321 | 2025-08-22 08:35:07+00:00
They can't really. This data is almost always self-reported. They can attempt to eliminate common confounds but the data is very noisy. People have a lot of bias and inaccuracies when reporting the primary data. Even questions like "how many cigarettes per day/week/month/year do you smoke?" is subject to enormous inaccuracies. And the more questions re confounds which are asked, the more the noise, and the lower the number of questionnaires returned. And no matter how many confounds are included in the questionnaires, there are likely a thousand more which also matter. It's a fairly major issue in health research, and why we so often see headlines with conflicting findings every few years. See research into the health of eggs, for example. One should be highly skeptical of correlative health evidence at this point (and this is what most of the clickbait studies are). Instead, try to focus on the causative research where they identify specific genes or chemical mechanisms which cause outcomes. This is much more difficult, of course, and sparse.