MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-30 03:08:51+00:00
> neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).

I like how you imply that celebrating the space program, the Age of Discovery and math Olympiads is neo-fascist. Tells a lot about what neo-fascism apparently is.
by don-code | 2025-08-30 03:09:40+00:00
I wrote a web application in an internship, circa 2011. I had no existing platform/framework to work with, no mentorship (the team wasn't really prepared to support an intern), and most importantly, an Apache web server running in Cygwin, with no PHP runtime installed. No one as much as told me what language I'd be writing at this job.

The Web development I'd done up to that point consisted of raw HTML/CSS, with some ASP.NET or PHP running on the backend. I'd never written a line of JavaScript in my life.

It was at this point that I "discovered" a winning combination: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in the user's browser. The backend was a set of C# applications which wrote to standard out, which could be invoked directly by Apache's mod_cgi, since C# compiles down to Windows executables. There were countless better other solutions at this point - ASP.NET/PHP (as I'd already used). FastCGI, WSGI, and others were all a thing at this point, but I'd never heard of them.

I outputted a JavaScript object (I had no idea what JSON was at the time, or that I was effectively outputting it) and read it back into the browser using a thin wrapper around XMLHttpRequest. I then iterated over the outputm and transformed the data into tables. JQuery was a thing at that point, but likewise, I'd never heard of it.

Say what you will about the job, the team, the mentorship (or lack theorof) - it took them three months before they realized I'd written C# at a Java shop, and at that point the thing was already being used widely across engineering.

The important takeaway here was, that "winning combination" of some minimal JavaScript and CGI was the perfect ratio of simple, approachable, and powerful, to enable me to finish the task at hand, and in a way that (at least until anybody saw the architecture) everybody was thrilled with. It didn't require a deeper understanding of a framework to bootstrap it from nothing. Write an HTTP response to standard out, formatted as an object, and you were on your way.
by nerdsniper | 2025-08-30 03:10:29+00:00
Generally, in a cognitive context it's only possible to "do thing" or "do other thing". Even for mammals, it's much harder to "don't/not do thing" (cognitively). One of my biggest advice for people is if there's some habit/repeated behavior they want to stop doing, it's generally not effective (for a lot of people) to tell yourself "don't do that anymore!" and much, much more effective to tell yourself what you should do instead.

This also applies to dogs. A lot of people keep trying to tell their dog "stop" or "dont do that", but really its so much more effective to train your dog what they should be doing instead of that thing.

It's very interesting to me that this also seems to apply to LLMs. I'm a big skeptic in general, so I keep an open mind and assume that there's a different mechanism at play rather than conclude that LLM's are "thinking like humans". It's still interesting in its own context though!
by m463 | 2025-08-30 03:13:27+00:00
ios allows the following permissions for your phone photo library:

- no access

- add photos only - can add photos to the library, but not access photos in the library

- limited access- the app can only access the photos you select

- full access - the app can access everything

Canon used to allow limited access. Now it refuses to work without full access to your photo library.

Honestly, it should allow any of those.
by andy99 | 2025-08-30 03:13:45+00:00
This is the opposite of a world model and is very much how machine learning works. It's purely correlative without some underlying theory (the world model). The article's (absurd) example of a person not being a mushroom gives a simple example of a "violation" that having a world model about the kinds of organisms that exist would catch. It's not at all pattern matching, nor is it science in any sense about understanding things from first principles, it's about having an understanding of how you imagine things work that you can sanity check against.
by surajrmal | 2025-08-30 03:14:33+00:00
That doesn't sound anything like what fuchsia is or ever was. Fuchsia takes a different set of tradeoffs with respect to baseline primitives and built a new stack of low level user space on top of those new primitives. This gives the software fundamentally different properties which might be better or worse for your use case. For consumer hardware products I think it comes out ahead, but only time will tell.
by malfist | 2025-08-30 03:14:36+00:00
That's the tolerance paradox. Things can be disinformation without playing games with equivocation.

If Phillip morris is running a bot farm or paying people to tell others that smoking is healthy and doesn't cause cancer, then we have a duty to call that disinformation and strive to correct it. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me about the growing lung cancer rates in nonsmokers or that lung cancer is more deadly in nonsmokers.
by giardini | 2025-08-30 03:15:23+00:00
No wonder Anthropic isn't working well! The "Moby Dicked" explanation of the state of AI!

But seriously, Why must someone search even a significant part of the public Internet to develop an AI? Is it believed that missing some text will cripple the AI?

Isn't there some sort of "law of diminishing returns" where, once some percentage of coverage is reached, further scraping is not cost-effective?
by simoncion | 2025-08-30 03:17:58+00:00
> [Y]our power block will go down.

So, it is my responsibility to prevent my neighbors from buying a high-end gaming PC for every member of their family, an induction stove, central A/C, and an electric car because my local power company might not be able to provide the contracted service. Right. The rest of your examples are just as poor as this one.

You seem to have confused "being responsible for" and "being affected by". I am affected by the effects that the geography of the region I live in has on the local weather. I am not responsible for that geography.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-30 03:18:19+00:00
Your definition ignores international recognition.

Ultimately, whether you get to act like a country (go to the UN, engage in diplomacy, hold territory) is in large part based on whether other countries recognize you as such. I don't know that it defines country-hood but it's part of the puzzle.

The Vatican is a fascinating example since it's clearly a very different sort of entity than the rest of the countries, yet is still recognized by most of the world's nations.
by spauldo | 2025-08-30 03:19:40+00:00
It's probably different if you're at a company that actually does what they should and keeps up with all the service contracts and whatnot. I wouldn't know because I always end up at the other type of company.

But I will never buy a NAS or SAN from a company that uses custom firmware on drives. Some dipshit beancounter will come along, "save" some money by not renewing the service contract, and then I'm off hunting for replacement drives on eBay.
by m463 | 2025-08-30 03:20:02+00:00
Honestly, this is how all computing works.

For example, chips just barely work.

If they work too well, you could shrink the chip until it barely works making it cheaper or faster or use less power.

That said, although this exercise is kind of interesting - like playing jenga - it might not be fun or satisfying.

better faster cheaper - sometimes you need to choose better.
by mpalmer | 2025-08-30 03:20:08+00:00
There's absolutely no problem with not knowing what you're doing! Just, you know, own it.

Part of what I find exhausting about projects like this is I can't see any evidence of the person who ostensibly created it. No human touch whatsoever - it's a real drag to read this stuff.

By all means, vibe code things, but put your personal stamp on it if you want people to take notice.
by skydhash | 2025-08-30 03:21:41+00:00
My current mental model is a car. If it’s a function or some other things you’re fully confident you captured the domain, add unit tests to capture that. Just like an engine. But the most important is integration tests that couple something like the engine, the ignition system and test that when the user press the start button, the engine start and the dashboard light up.

Unit tests are great for DX but only integration and above tests matter business wise.
by sorrythanks | 2025-08-30 03:21:53+00:00
Let her do something visually compelling in a medium she already uses to engage with the computer.

I've enjoyed success in getting people excited by having a person create an HTML button, and write a line of JavaScript that changes the background colour of the page to their favourite colour. After they have done that, and as such feel like a god, then some fundamentals via simple games.
by krapp | 2025-08-30 03:22:08+00:00
It seems like you're trying to argue that using AI makes you a protected class, a de facto separate species and culture, in order to justify the premise that blocking AI is discrimination in some way equivalent to racial or ethnic prejudice?

If so, no. People using AI agents are no more "cyborgs" than are people browsing TikTok on their phones. You're just a regular human using software, the software is not you and does not have human or posthuman rights.
by toastercat | 2025-08-30 03:23:13+00:00
So, we moved from:

* CDC was forcing everyone to get the vaccine

to

* Biden failed to force everyone to get the vaccine

to

* The DOD added COVID-19 vaccines to the Joint Regulation on Immunization and Chemoprophylaxis for the Prevention of Infectious (which already included several mandatory vaccines including for influenza) after the FDA had approved the Pfizer vaccine, mandating military personnel to get the vaccine until 2023.

Very interesting that once you unpack an anti-vaxxers alarmist arguments, you're left with a completely different understanding of reality with nuance and all.
by ctippett | 2025-08-30 03:24:35+00:00
I commented on this genuinely thinking the article was interesting, enough so that I was curious about the company behind it. It seems the founder is very good at "growth hacking", the majority of their stars on GitHub appear fake and now I'm suspicious about how this article made it to the front page with such little engagement.

I could be completely off base here, but I can't shake the feeling of inauthenticity.
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-30 03:24:48+00:00
That could work. The only thing I have noticed with my laptop+ enclosure based setup is that the disks go to "sleep", probably due to power management, so if it has been a while since I accessed the contents, I need to click on the mount point in the explorer window for the disks to start spinning and the files to be available again. I don't want to deal with that so I was thinking that a box with slots for multiple internal disks will not have such issues. I can try to tinker with USB power settings but that could be a time sink/brittle solution.
by andy99 | 2025-08-30 03:26:16+00:00
> I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes

Possibly the same idea: lots of people at work don't appear to think about what they are trying to achieve and just execute tasks very mechanically. The most likely explanation is they are just lazy or bored, and so intentionally or not just haven't thought about the implications of what they do and just do a task someone gave them. Some people appear to be like that in other aspects of life too, they just don't think so don't form any mental model about whatever subject, basically out of laziness or disinterest.

There's lots of subjects I don't care about, say celebrities, that I would not question anything someone told me about them or their lives, even if e.g Taylor swift did something contradictory to the model a fan had of her behavior, I wouldn't question it.

I do wonder about how someone could be simultaneously passionate about something and also not have a model of it. But I think for e.g. some wacky conspiracy, one might be interested in the people involved, but completely disinterested in physics or history or whatever so have views that are consistent with how they think Hillary Clinton or whoever would behave but inconsistent with some other common sense world model in an area they never think about.
by graycat | 2025-08-30 03:26:41+00:00
Ah, never had anything to do with LaTeX.

Now, TeX, that's one of my favorite things!

Ah, just today used TeX on a paper in anomaly detection that exploits the Hahn decomposition!

In the paper of the OP, was there a place where it claimed it had a subset of a set when it was really an element of the set. Don't be careful about the difference between elements and sets and can get back to the Russell paradox.

Also, for some positive integer n, e.g., n = 3, we can have an n-tuple, e.g.,

(A,B,C)

but, guys, so far we've said nothing about the components of the n-tuple being numbers, e.g., for error correcting codes, elements of a finite field, multiplying an n-tuple by a number, adding n-tuples, taking inner products, so, so far, with just some n-tuples we a bit short of a vector space or vectors.
by jasperry | 2025-08-30 03:26:59+00:00
To push back a little: Designing the syntax of a programming language always involves tradeoffs; nothing is "just wrong". For better or worse, equal sign as assignment has become widely used and understood. I think the author's use of colon is neat, but it is confusing if you're used to seeing that as the type indicator; again, a tradeoff. I like the look of := as the assignment operator but it adds another shifted key to type, which can push you that much closer to RSI for such a common operation.
by Grimblewald | 2025-08-30 03:27:01+00:00
If you know how to do it well, you just do it well, its hard work but dooable. What is harder is learning to understand why what was written, that looks good, is actually bad. Usually something small, tucked away, or an issue arising from multiple things spanning distinct functions that culminate in a werid issue. That kind of detective work is draining and time consuming. It doesnt come with the emotional boost of looking at your work and feeling pride. Instead you look at something that finally works and feel releif that its over. That alone paves the way to a totally different emotional and cognitive relationship with your work. That is why for me, at least, it is more cogntiviely intense.
by avs733 | 2025-08-30 03:27:34+00:00
> Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.

This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-08-30 03:27:42+00:00
Author aside I thought this was a very interesting answer to a question I didn't know I had.

I had been thinking that sending my children to a school with high achievers could leave her at a relative disadvantage but this data would seem to say otherwise.

I wonder if this conflicts with Malcolm Gladwell's observations on one's relative ranking when it comes to college matriculation (that its more important to be at a high percentile of your institution than your global rank)
by iracigt | 2025-08-30 03:28:43+00:00
This book in particular is primarily about error correcting codes.

Take a message we want to communicate and add some additional data that allows recovering the message even if part of it is corrupted. The hard part is choosing what additional data to include to recover from enough corruption with small overhead and in a reasonable runtime.

These are used everywhere from WiFi to hard drives to QR codes to RAM chips -- the ECC in ECC RAM being "error correcting code" and now partially mandatory with DDR5.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-30 03:28:56+00:00
Your comment is somewhat perplexing. The characterization of "unhinged lunatics" seems misapplied here, as it is difficult to overlook the fact that ICE itself has consistently demonstrated behavior that could reasonably be described in precisely those terms.

From family separations and indefinite detentions to systemic patterns of abuse and rights violations, the agency has engaged in conduct that undermines any claim to legitimacy or proportionality. To suggest that external actors are the destabilizing threat, while disregarding ICE's own record of cruelty and lawlessness, inverts the reality of the situation in a way that strains credulity.

Perhaps there’s a more precise way you could describe people who resist ICE, since labeling them "unhinged lunatics" makes your point less clear.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-30 03:30:13+00:00
The real numbers require infinite storage and infinite computation. There are both distinctly unphysical concepts.

The real numbers are a useful mathematical trick that make it possible to prove results in calculus. What you surrender in return for being able to prove statements is to give up the ability to compute expressions. This may be a worthwhile trade-off for physicists but for the universe (which does many computations and zero proofs) it's quite a burden.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-30 03:30:31+00:00
I would argue sadly in this economy it is not. I don't think you should be learning how to model and texture, but you absolutely should be learning how 3d data, textures, materials, metadata and so on are structured. Specifically you should understand matrix multiplication, traversing rigs and scene hierarchies, float array and integer array buffers for face index and vertex data, and so on. The list is very very long, and unless you are purely like, an online account web dev or cross platform bit twiddler which I feel is greatly decreasing in value (and is very competitive because of 40 years of bit twiddlers before you), then you absolutely need to be doing this stuff. Once you've done all that, you'll find the modeling part isn't even so far away from you for hard surfaces at least, but organic is truly its own life quest. You're right on that part.
by rainyrockies | 2025-08-30 03:30:38+00:00
Although I have have met and currently work with many people who struggle with direct interactions to an extent where one could consider it a personal problem, I have also found that people who are direct or don't "beat around the bush" also often get VERY upset when treated similarly.

I'm not saying that there's no space for direct communication and that everyone needs to be formal and socially polite during every interaction. But I've met many people who act like you describe John does who very much do not appreciate getting it back, implying some level of awareness that their directness is hurtful on occasion.

I've only met a few direct people who can take it as well.
by gaborcselle | 2025-08-30 03:32:38+00:00
This new solar thermoelectric generator (STEG) traps heat on one side and cools the other, making electricity from the hot-cold gap via the Seebeck effect. Unlike solar panels, which need direct sunlight, STEGs can use ambient heat and scattered light. That’s why they still work in shaded or cloudy areas—any temperature difference can generate power. Today they’re only ~1% efficient (vs. ~20% for solar), but the new design is 15× better than earlier STEGs. They won’t beat solar panels yet, but could be useful in spots where panels underperform.
by koolba | 2025-08-30 03:33:45+00:00
It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.

It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?
by GarnetFloride | 2025-08-30 03:33:48+00:00
It seems like a lot of people think that the first draft/prototype/whatever has to be perfect.

It doesn't. It never is. It can't be.

My favorite example of this was the Moon shot. Each step was learning how to do just that one step. Mercury was just about getting into orbit, not easy even now with SpaceX though they are standing on the shoulders of those giants. Then Gemini for multiple people and orbital maneuvering (that experience gained them lots of learning) and then Apollo 8 was still a dress rehearsal even though they flew around the Moon.

Each step HAD to be simple because complexity weighed too much. But each of those simple steps were still wildly complex.

Every time I would dive in and code up something that I though was easy, it would blow up in some weird way, and I have found that doing each step individually and getting it right, might sound like I was going really slow, but it was smoother so it was faster in the end because I wasn't chasing bugs in all the places, but just one.
by credit_guy | 2025-08-30 03:34:06+00:00
I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply.

I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards.

My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were groomed with precious taxpayer money, and they betrayed the trust placed in them. It is understood that every person has the right pursue their own happiness the best way they can.

[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...
by Grimblewald | 2025-08-30 03:34:20+00:00
This is it for me as well. It comes down to which is quicker to write. If I need an exact solution or implementation, then I just write it, because the code is significantly more efficient to describe the problem in than in plain english. An exception being visual things like plots, if we just care about a way to get to a plot, vague english is fine and likely less effort than writing code.

i.e. function to calculate things, just write it; want to plot some data, vibe it. I can see immediatly if its not quite right and in a line can ask for the change i needed, zero cognitive effort required to fix issue, and hey presto, we have what we want.

i think this stems from the fact natural language is generally quite inefficent for logical statements / arguments / instructions but can gather visual ideas far more efficiently than code can.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-08-30 03:35:28+00:00
My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.

Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.