MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-11 21:55:31+00:00
When Revel first came to New York their drivers were all employees. That, for me, was the compelling reason for paying up.

Then they, like everyone else (except Waymo so far), abandoned the premium part of the market and converted their drivers to contractors and seemingly pulled the plug on customer service. One horrible service experience later and I deleted the app.
by toshinoriyagi | 2025-08-11 21:55:41+00:00
I think there is an important third category beyond "avatar of techno-optimism" vs "advocate of caution". Artists typically oppose GenAI because the models are trained on huge swaths of copyrighted works. They certainly aren't supporters of the tech, and they aren't concerned about the risks of a new, not-entirely-understood technology either. They think it's outright stealing, copyright infringement, etc.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-11 21:55:41+00:00
Every recursive algorithm can be made into an iterative algorithm if you use an explicit stack instead of the implicit call stack. It's not always cleaner.

In tail recursive algorithms, there is no stack, it's just a straight loop.

def foo(state, acc): # if acc is needed if base-condition(state): return acc return foo(next(state), f(state, acc))

Is simply:

def foo(state): acc = initial while not base-condition(state): acc = f(state, acc) state = next(state) return acc

If it's not tail recursive you introduce a stack, for instance a DFS on a binary tree:

def search(node, val): if node is None: return False # empty tree, only need this check once stack = [node] while stack: n = stack.pop() if n.val == val: return True if n.right: stack.push(n.right) if n.left: stack.push(n.left) return False

Note the insertion order is reversed from the recursive calls in a typical DFS. We want left to be searched first and then its children and then we "recur" back to right and deal with its children, so we need to push right into the stack first and then left.

When you have multiple mutually recursive functions (as is likely the case in a recursive descent parser) then things become more complicated, but it's still feasible.
by acdha | 2025-08-11 21:55:47+00:00
That’s more complicated because the alleged harms are quite limited (it’s not like Android or desktop users are using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the unalloyed good of “the web” not being synonymous with the Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from proposed specs with significant negative privacy and security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how much the negatives outweigh the positives here.
by quesera | 2025-08-11 21:55:54+00:00
I wasn't either, believe it or not! :)

But I was responding specifically to "in Ruby, so the chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near zero", which does not address the real issue.

It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not the best example of that.

If OP had said ~"... and the GitLab codebase is large and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in contributions to ... also I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages" :) ... then I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
by robots0only | 2025-08-11 21:56:23+00:00
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).

Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
by sfpotter | 2025-08-11 21:56:35+00:00
The author is describing less a theory and more a framework or system of heuristics bases on extensive practicap experience. There's no need for rigor if it's practical and useful. I think your desire for grounding in something "scientific" or "mathematical" is maybe missing the forest for the trees a bit. Saying this as someone with loads of practical software development experience and loads of math experience. I just don't find that rigor does much to help describe or guide the art of software. I do think Ousterhout's book is invaluable.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-11 21:57:01+00:00
Clojure does it this way because the JVM stupidly doesn't support tail call optimization.

It is true that TCO messes up your stack traces. It is also true that loops mess up your stack traces, because they don't even create a stack trace. In many languages that support TCO, TCO can be turned off for debugging and enabled for production, so Guido's characterization of the issue is ridiculous.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-11 21:57:43+00:00
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.

The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.

You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)

Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.

Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
by flakiness | 2025-08-11 21:58:21+00:00
> We are using mistral-common internally for tokenization and want the community to use it to unlock full capacities of our models. As mistral-common is a Python library, we have opened a PR to add a REST API via FastAPI to make it easier for users who are not in the Python ecosystem.

A cpp binary depending on a python server is a bit sad.

I hope this is a stopgap measure and someone port it to C++ eventually:https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-common/blob/main/src/mi...
by stego-tech | 2025-08-11 21:58:32+00:00
Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...

Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.

And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
by twoodfin | 2025-08-11 21:59:01+00:00
It’s kind of wild that neither IBM (who got beat to the hardware punch by Compaq) nor Microsoft (who targeted the NT effort at everything except x86) initially grokked how revolutionary the 80386 was: A “decent enough” 32-bit architecture with a huge preexisting ecosystem that would be able to ride the rocket ship of commodity PC scale.
by codedokode | 2025-08-11 21:59:14+00:00
I don't understand your comment, the government knows which sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic.

The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't need to send your ID to random companies, doesn't need to verify at every website, and website operators and app developers do not need do anything and do not need to do verification - they are banned from unverified devices by default. It is better for everyone.

Also, as I understand the main point of the Act is to allow removing the content the government doesn't like in a prompt manner, for which my proposal is not helpful at all.
by camgunz | 2025-08-11 21:59:21+00:00
> I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point

Nope, deliberately not saying this. I super don't care what the "whose fault is this" tally is. I'm only interested in saving lives and figuring out what's next.

The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options. We're not invading, Israel won't allow UN peacekeepers in, surrounding Arab states can't challenge Israel militarily and/or don't want to aid the Palestinians, there is no political will in any country to send troops, and Israel doesn't actually need our support militarily or otherwise so we have no leverage anyway. So, either a given person's naive to this and they have reading to do, or they're aware and using the situation to further their own ends. Maybe that's anti-Semitic propaganda from some Muslim states (Iran). Maybe that's Russian (et al) disinformation ops driving political wedges into the Democratic Party. Maybe it's the DSA demagoguing the issue to (try to) win elections. Maybe that's committed anti-Semites carpeing those diems. All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.

Also I'm not Jewish! I do have family down the block from where Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was shot up though, plus a fair number of Jewish friends. Appreciate the sentiment though.
by switchbak | 2025-08-11 21:59:33+00:00
"fatter, compiler is slower, code completion is slow as hell" - if that's all you want out of your programming language, then Java is probably a good choice for you.

For others that value the things that Kotlin brings over Java (even modern Java), and for the ways in which it delivers a simpler experience than Scala - I think it's a pragmatic and sensible decision.
by righthand | 2025-08-11 22:00:39+00:00
Below are some excerpts to their docs and licensing page. The TLDR of it is they have two build outputs for applications, one with the standard qml runtime that essentially bundles js+qml and another that will fully compile it down to a cached bytecode. Here is a summary [0].

> qmlsc will be used instead of qmlcachegen if the Qt Quick Compiler Extensions are installed. [1]

> Qt for Application Development Enterprise > INCLUDES: > … > Qt QML Script Compiler extensions for advanced software compiling [2]

[0] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qtquick-compiler-tech.html#summ...

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qtquick-compiler-tech.html#the-...

[2] https://www.qt.io/qt-licensing
by ehsankia | 2025-08-11 22:01:03+00:00
> If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bicycle.

That's irrelevant here, that was someone trying to convert one dish into another dish.

> your mind must perform so many contortions that it defeats the purpose

I disagree, what contortions? The only argument you've provided is that "LLMs don't have senses". Well yes, that's the whole point of an analogy. I still hold that the way LLMs interpret tokens is analogous to a "sense".
by TrueSlacker0 | 2025-08-11 22:01:13+00:00
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
by billy99k | 2025-08-11 22:01:25+00:00
This will work in the short term, but over time, less and less companies will want to fund something that will be taxed at such a high rate.

I also think that if this much tax money is going to enable people to not work, the people paying taxes should have more control over how the money is used.

If health care is universal, more control over foods consumed risky health-related activities.
by cricalix | 2025-08-11 22:01:44+00:00
In no particular order:

Marine mammals

Sunsets with no land in sight. Sunsets framing the land. Sunrises with no land in sight. Sunrises framing the land. Thunder and lightning rolling up one side of an island in the distance, putting on a show.

Dark skies and the stars.

The peace and tranquility of quiet places with just nature and you. Until the sod over the hill turns on their generator.

Fresh fish.

The feel of sea spray, wind in the ears, the connection to your boat, knowing if things are right just by the feel and sound.

And that's just from doing non-ocean-crossing sailing.
by dathinab | 2025-08-11 22:01:49+00:00
> Security audits are just theater.

It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and goals.

There are many audit companies which have a "under the hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates showing compatibility with industry standards).

So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for it, even if they don't have anything to hide).

Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit you, this is for boosting their publicity using your name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the other" situation where they won't overlook massive issues, but still judge issues leniently.

Lastly there are some automated partial audit services which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious after they pointed out, that there was a configuration error of a web gateway leading to some missing security headers.

(1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump for 90% of REST APIs)

Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only be focused at your deployment or code but the whole software live cycle, including fun questions like "what measurements have you taken in case one of your developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
by brailsafe | 2025-08-11 22:02:34+00:00
Ironically, I find greenfield projects the least stimulating and the most rote, aside from thinking about system design.

I've always much preferred figuring out how to improve or build on existing messy systems and codebases, which is certainly aided by LLMs for big refactoring type stuff, but to be successful at it requires thinking about how some component of a system is already used and the complexity of that. Lots of edge cases and nuances, people problems, relative conservativeness.
by kepano | 2025-08-11 22:02:57+00:00
I understand you're trying to be more precise, but what the average person cares about is whether the knife rusts easily or not.

I don't think the average person is going to understand what you mean by "immutable properties after measurement", though I'll concede "self-guaranteeing" is probably equally confusing.

"Verifiable and non-reversible" seems clear enough, but a bit long.
by Lerc | 2025-08-11 22:03:08+00:00
Oh far more deceptive than that.

"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"

Now let's play tldr with the law!

Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-11 22:03:43+00:00
This is a really stupid blog post, I’m not sure why someone decided to post it here other than to ridicule it.

A person in a low-income country would also need to work for 38.6 months ($2400?) to afford to hire one of my electricians for two days of labor. Things in high-income countries are expensive, who would’ve guessed??

If I lived somewhere that the average income is $200/month, there’s a lot of things on Maslow’s Hierarchy that come before ‘ChatGPT Pro’… like um a stable electrical grid, clean water, sewer system, etc.
by silverquiet | 2025-08-11 22:03:50+00:00
Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are not the same thing. Presumably these people become more productive by moving to more developed countries; that's the general reason that people immigrate to particular places. My impression without looking at the data is that US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants during the Biden Administration. And given that these people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which would decrease their cost to the government.
by Spivak | 2025-08-11 22:04:17+00:00
I'm in your camp, recursive code is hard for the next reader, which might be you, to understand. It's a bit too magic looking for my taste. If you're looping it should look like a loop, if you're pushing onto a stack you should get to see the stack. It's also safe against modifications which might silently break the tail-call nature of it until you blow out the stack later. It also gives you much saner and more debuggable stack traces because all the state is in the current frame.
by MoltenMan | 2025-08-11 22:05:05+00:00
> But the push for daily learning-reflecting-etc is there.

But this is a good thing; if I waste a day without learning or doing anything, I feel bad about myself. And I want to feel bad! Always pushing to improve myself has helped me immensely. It's easy to keep telling yourself 'oh, I'll do better tomorrow'; it's harder to actually do better tomorrow.

That's not to say you shouldn't take it easy on yourself every once in a while. But figuring out those exceptions isn't what this article is about, and it's certainly not a 'tyrannical' article. As a society I feel we have gone way too far in this direction; sometimes life is hard! Sometimes you have to do hard things! And often it will pay off later in life and you'll be glad you put in the work.
by asdefghyk | 2025-08-11 22:05:33+00:00
This journalist was accused of being a spy or working with Hamas. I have absolutely NO IDEA about this accusation.

A journalist would be have to be perfect cover, as basically a journalist would have reason for going anywhere. Any person in a warzone is high risk.

It was said Israel should release their evidence - maybe this will not happen as they could want to not disclose their sources. This is only MY supposition
by xdavidliu | 2025-08-11 22:06:05+00:00
it's not entirely true that it does the same thing: even if it gives the same result. For many programming languages, fold and map can only act on non-lazy data structures, so require O(N) memory for the data that needs to be folded over, while tail-recursive functions usually only use O(1) memory, even stack memory.

Notable exceptions to the above are python3 with generators, which I believe truly use O(1) memory with map and fold. Haskell has lists that are lazy by default, but if you fold or map over them, it still "forces the thunk" for each element and thus you still end up using O(N) memory.
by oracleclyde | 2025-08-11 22:06:09+00:00
This thread is informative but boy, is that title Click-Baity. It isn't until the 7th post that he bothers to mention this:

"To be clear: as far as we know, AI doesn't cause psychosis. It UNMASKS it using whatever story your brain already knows."

Guess which part of the thread gets the headline. Also, this directly contradicts the opening line where he says "...losing touch with reality because of AI".

Which is it? I REALLY can't wait till commentariats move past AI.
by Animats | 2025-08-11 22:06:26+00:00
There is such a thing as "recursive AI", where conversations with the model alter the model. Remember Microsoft Tay, from 2016? [1] That was a chatbot which learned from its chats. In about 24 hours it sounded like a hardcore neo-Nazi. Embarrassing. How did that work, anyway? LLMs were not a thing back then.

It's noteworthy that the modern LLM systems lack global long-term memory. They go back to the read-only ground state for each new user session. That provides some safety from corporate embarrassment and quality degradation. But there's no hope of improvement from continued operation.

There is a "Recursive AI" startup.[2] This will apparently come as a Unity (the 3D game engine) add-on, so game NPCs can have some smarts. That should be interesting. It's been done before. Here's a 2023 demo from using Replika and Unreal Engine.[3] The influencer manages to convince the NPCs that they are characters in a simulation, and gets them to talk about that. There's a whole line of AI development in the game industry that doesn't get mentioned much.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

[2] https://recursiveai.net/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCWf2VGdfc&
by Herring | 2025-08-11 22:06:55+00:00
Agreed with due process, but look at how Germany treats Nazis. Speech and expression related to Nazism is heavily regulated and subjects you to imprisonment. Demonstrations/rallies are often banned. The Nazi party itself is banned. AfD is being monitored by intelligence agencies and might be banned in the future, etc. They do this defensively when groups demonstrate an "actively belligerent, aggressive stance" towards the democratic order. But yes, it would be better if all this in Brazil was formalized like in Germany.
by atombender | 2025-08-11 22:07:11+00:00
This is exciting. The announcement says it will be open source. I really hope that this includes a functionally complete control plane so you realistically self-host.

I looked Neon recently, and it appears that it's designed as a SaaS product from the outset; while it is technically possible to self-host the individual components of the architecture, it does not look trivial, in large part because the control plane is closed source (and probably extremely specific to Neon's SaaS operations).