MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-17 03:02:22+00:00
The examples are a little flakey. For instance, a “change in perspective” can itself become a form of self-deception in which we choose to ignore or deny or distorts truths that are unpleasant to us. It’s one thing to be charitable and to restrain premature judgements or to recognize some kind of genuine prejudice operating within us. It’s another to be Pollyannish and to deny what you know.

But I didn’t come here to pick apart the article. Rather, I want to address the main thesis which concerns love, morality, and the relation between the two. The author mentions that there is precedent in certain religious traditions to link the two — it fact, you can also see precedent in philosophical thought, like that of the Greeks — but the terms are not really given anything resembling definitions.

So, what is morality? Morality concerns voluntary actions in relation to the good. What makes a good action? One that furthers the actualization of an agent’s nature, which is to say the good of the agent. This is why choosing to eat vegetables is generally morally good, because it provides us with nutrients that sustain and contribute to our flourishing, and morally bad to eat shards of glass, because these act in opposition to our flourishing, incompatible as they are with our metabolism and destructive given the composition of our digestive system. Morality is about the voluntary acts of the agent as they concern the good of the acting agent.

(Now, some may be surprised, given the common framing of moral questions as mostly or entirely concerning “the other”. The key is to understand that human nature is deeply social. To act in ways that are opposed to our social nature is detrimental to us. Thus, for a human agent to murder a human being, the most odious of acts, is for the acting human agent to do severe harm to themselves through the very act of murdering someone. The injustice of the act is deeply corrupting and destructive to the acting human agent.)

Now that we have a definition of what morality is, what is love? Love is a movement toward the good. Love can be classified into two kinds, namely, eros and agape. Eros is ascending love, or the agent’s willing of a good for the sake of his own good. The agent recognizes that he lacks some good that would perfect and actualize him as the kind of thing he is, recognizes it in another, and seeks that good for his sake. The agent seeks to receive. Apage, which in Latin is caritas from which we get “charity”, is descending love, or a willing of the good of the other. The agent seeks to give. Agape is a matter of actualizing the good of the other in some way, but acting for the sake of the good of the other also spiritually actualizes the good of the giver.

So, if morality concerns voluntary actions for the sake of the good, and love is a voluntary movement toward the good, then of course morality is intrinsically concerned with love.
by perilunar | 2025-08-17 03:02:28+00:00
Pricing for digital services sucks. I really hate the monthly subscription payment model. If I use a service infrequently I’m being ripped off, and if I use it a lot I’m undercharged. The incentives are all wrong.

Why can’t I just pay for what I actually use? I do that for electricity and my landline — why can’t I do the same for my mobile phone, internet, video streaming, AI, etc.
by platevoltage | 2025-08-17 03:02:53+00:00
I only bookmark sites that I go to regularly and end up on my shortcut bar, but I do use "Add to reading list" pretty often. I couldn't tell you the practical difference since I still have stuff on there from years ago, but it feels less permanent. Sometimes I just goofing around before bed and see something I want to check out in the morning.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-17 03:05:28+00:00
If you want to make it actually decently safe, one approach would be to make a list of all the syscalls you critically need after you have loaded all the content in memory (strace can help), then write a seccomp filter to block all the others. Since you don’t need filesystem interaction or pretty much anything except socket I/O, your syscall allowlist can be pretty short. This will ensure that even if an attacker manages to exploit a bug (like a UAF) they’ll be dropped into a sandbox with very little useful functionality.
by liamdgray | 2025-08-17 03:05:34+00:00
Abstract: "We introduce an Invertible Symbolic Regression (ISR) method. It is a machine learning technique that generates analytical relationships between inputs and outputs of a given dataset via invertible maps (or architectures). The proposed ISR method naturally combines the principles of Invertible Neural Networks (INNs) and Equation Learner (EQL), a neural network-based symbolic architecture for function learning. In particular, we transform the affine coupling blocks of INNs into a symbolic framework, resulting in an end-to-end differentiable symbolic invertible architecture that allows for efficient gradient-based learning. The proposed ISR framework also relies on sparsity promoting regularization, allowing the discovery of concise and interpretable invertible expressions. We show that ISR can serve as a (symbolic) normalizing flow for density estimation tasks. Furthermore, we highlight its practical applicability in solving inverse problems, including a benchmark inverse kinematics problem, and notably, a geoacoustic inversion problem in oceanography aimed at inferring posterior distributions of underlying seabed parameters from acoustic signals."
by jmalicki | 2025-08-17 03:05:37+00:00
Often times it is ECU engine timings. See the many ECU tune kits available for many cars.

More aggressive tunings can also be harder on the engine. Factory tunes work a bit like binning and overclocking - the higher clocked CPUs are often selected for better quality control, and lower clocked CPUs are the same part, but with less rigorous quality control (or at least they don't have to pass at the same extreme high level).

So just like you can overclock a CPU, you can often overclock an engine... but if there are mild defects in the engine block the results can be disastrous.

This also affects fuel economy, which is regulated, and also affects consumer buying decisions. So optimizing the ECU tune for performance and for fuel economy are often somewhat different optimization points. For instance, BMWs have a button for "Eco/Comfort/Sport" mode, which among other things, can sometimes change the engine timings from a button in the cabin.

Just like underclocking a GPU can get 80% of the performance for a fraction of the power, and overclocking by 10% can use 20% more power, the same is true of the ECU timings.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-17 03:07:16+00:00
Anything more than air, water, shelter, food, and companionship is trivial.

I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.

So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.

When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.

When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.

One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.

Triviality. Beautiful, glorious, triviality.

I love it.
by porknubbins | 2025-08-17 03:07:37+00:00
Having worked with some brilliant people with autism, I argue that deficits in cognitive empathy/ inability understand intuitively what other people are thiking in real time is the hallmark of autism.

Moreso than anything about emotions, body language, social skills etc this is the most common trait. It pops up in odd places no matter how much you mask or learn the visible skills.
by zzzeek | 2025-08-17 03:09:49+00:00
it's FBI/ICE that's actually committing crimes in DC right now, abducting people without cause, based on racial profiling, not reading them miranda rights, refusing to identify themselves or to wear a badge, hiding their faces, abducting people not accused of any criminal offense (immigration is a civil affair) to private prisons in other states and denying them due process and access to lawyers.

the biggest crime wave in DC of course was on January 6 2021 where hundreds of people committed crimes ranging from tresspassing to vandalism to high treason, 100% of whom were pardoned, the majority of them pardoned of serious felonies.

So Democrats have no trouble whatsoever in DC and this is 100% looking bad for the GOP. The GOP's only hope is to render elections useless by next year which they're well on their way to doing.
by crote | 2025-08-17 03:09:55+00:00
A good part of that can probably be attributed to how terrible Google has gotten over the years, though. 15 years ago it was fairly common for me to know something exists, be able to type the right combination of very specific keywords into Google, and get the exact result I was looking for.

In 2025 Google is trying very hard to serve the most profitable results instead, so it'll latch onto a random keyword, completely disregard the rest, and serve me whatever ad-infested garbage it thinks is close enough to look relevant for the query.

It isn't exactly hard to beat that - just bring back the 2010 Google algorithm. It's only a matter of time before LLMs will go down the same deliberate enshittification path.
by hattmall | 2025-08-17 03:10:46+00:00
That's correct, though the article mentions the Aztecs, but thinking of the Inca empire as a standalone unit is sort of dubious. The Inca were just the named phase of upper Andean civilization when the conquistadors arrived. Most of what's considered Inca empire was already in existence for a long time. It's much more reasonable to consider upper Andean civilization as a whole instead of just looking at the final administration and taking that name.
by NDxTreme | 2025-08-17 03:11:51+00:00
This adds use cases to the devices. For instance, I am using my Steam Deck to type this hooked up to a 32 inch Monitor, as my daily driver on CachyOS.*

I bought the cheapest one, and upgraded the SSD. I also have an SD card. I use this for more than just playing games.

I would love to be able to just upgrade the storage and it be as fast as the internal storage. I could install a Windows install on it, and switch when it makes sense.

* Arch-by-the-way
by sgarland | 2025-08-17 03:14:53+00:00
Two things:

1. Essentially every RDBMS except MySQL has a RETURNING clause, so you can read your write essentially for free (and even MySQL lets you read the auto-increment value it inserted).

2. Barring that, how is this finicky to get right? If you get an ack back from the DB, assuming you haven’t done silly things to fsync settings, it’s written. It’s durable. So, within the same try/except or similar, take what you just told it to write, and use it. If you don’t get an ack back, it did not write, so don’t use what you had stored.
by muzani | 2025-08-17 03:15:12+00:00
I don't have a source for this (there's probably no sources from anything back then) but anecdotally, someone at an AI/ML talk said they just added more data and quality went up. Doubling the data doubled the quality. With other breakthroughs, people saw diminishing gains. It's sort of why Sam back then tweeted that he expected the amount of intelligence to double every N years.

I have the feeling they kept on this until GPT-4o (which was a different kind of data).
by amy_petrik | 2025-08-17 03:15:32+00:00
well here's a big surprise of BWT

BWT is a transformation transforming a string into "suffix tree space"

You can do searches - very fast searches - in BZ2/BWT compression space

Discussed in the '90s in the legendary dr. dobbs

But more significantly, BWT is the basis for most DNA and RNA sequence aligners nowadays - which perform string search/matching in suffix tree (transformed) space. It's like doing frequency stuff in fourier domain, it's like adding is multiplication in logspace - but in weird data string search space. The BWT.
by susiecambria | 2025-08-17 03:16:34+00:00
> One group particularly well-suited to cohousing is the elderly. A 2022 survey of Zurich residents over the age of 55 found that 80% would like to live in a multigenerational household and half were interested in cohousing, which offers companionship and a supportive community without a move into a retirement home.

First, 55 is not elderly. I know the author did not say it is, but the next sentence prompted an audible "Oh, hells no" from me!

Second, people I know do a terrible job planning for their future re: aging. They overestimate their energy and health at X age. For example, they have no idea of how health can quickly spiral and make everything else more of a challenge. They have no idea about what kinds of supports and services they will need. And while companionship is important, relying on non-family for some or many challenges associated with getting older is foolish, unsustainable, fill-in-the-blank.

I've long wondered whether cohousing as described in the article along with a smidge of old-time settlement houses would be more beneficial to residents, particularly older ones. In my head, I've thought that returning to on-site staff along with professional visitors (health, etc.) would make the sweet spot.

In the US at least, we need to do more and do better regarding housing, community support (neighbors, not services), and addressing those who may need more help than others (older, chronically ill, etc.). Cohousing may be part of the solution.
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-17 03:16:53+00:00
Pretty much yeah. For example OCI (Oracle Cloud) has a pretty small set of OS choices, with Debian not included, and on the free tier, I don't believe you can upload your own OS images anymore. I used a similar script for an OCI VM (https://github.com/bohanyang/debi), but this one obviously supports more OSes (haven't tried it yet but planning to try the reinstall to netboot.xyz option to get coreos installed on another OCI VM).
by gedy | 2025-08-17 03:17:04+00:00
> but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted

These are good points, though I'm wondering if the burden of proof has just increased? E.g. in the past there was little permanent evidence, so do we really need to break encryption to prove beyond a reasonable doubt?

It's like lack of DNA evidence making cases seem "unprovable", but then what did we do before DNA was available?
by exasperaited | 2025-08-17 03:17:49+00:00
The specific "opposite" they talk about is clarified further in the article and is interesting:

> Lizzie Hurst, chief executive at the Williams Syndrome Foundation, says: "People [with the disorder] conduct themselves in a way that makes them extremely vulnerable.

> "They don't have the cognitive ability to match their linguistic age.

> "There is a classic autistic profile to which Williams Syndrome is the polar opposite. People can gauge the mood of a crowd and adopt without understanding the nuances of the situation."

The last bit of that is the difference, right? You wouldn't say an autistic person could easily gauge the mood of a crowd and adopt. These are people who are -- compared to neurotypical people! -- social butterflies, linguistically talented, friendly, open, happy-go-lucky, but gullible. This is not the picture of classic autism for sure. It does feel somewhat opposite.

But then I guess one of the interesting things about opposites is that they are within the same plane or category, right? The opposite of a knife is another item of cutlery, not a haddock.

It seems like this syndrome is a genetic deletion, which is not my understanding of autism, but it presumably could have some similar neurological impacts.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-17 03:18:03+00:00
It could be self-deprecating! Plus, I would more readily read it as 本人 (this person/me/myself) - than as 笨人 (stupid person).

Also, Pinyin is more susceptible to accidental interpretations than most writing systems due to ambiguity and tonality. For example, “mana” can be parsed into 32 different syllable-tone combinations (man/a or ma/na times 4x4 tone combinations for each syllable), and while most aren’t meaningful, that still gives you a ton of potential words to match against.
by bhaney | 2025-08-17 03:21:38+00:00
I have a dropin called security.conf that I link in to most of my services, and then create an unsecurity.conf to disable/revert any directives not compatible with the service.

[Service] DynamicUser=yes PrivateTmp=true PrivateDevices=true PrivateNetwork=true PrivateUsers=true InaccessiblePaths=-/mnt/ ProtectSystem=strict ProtectHome=true ProtectHostname=true ProtectKernelTunables=true ProtectKernelModules=true ProtectKernelLogs=true ProtectControlGroups=true ProtectClock=true ProtectProc=invisible ProcSubset=pid RestrictNamespaces=true RestrictRealtime=true RestrictSUIDSGID=true LockPersonality=true NoNewPrivileges=true RemoveIPC=true IPAddressDeny=any UMask=0077 SystemCallArchitectures=native RestrictAddressFamilies=none MemoryDenyWriteExecute=true SystemCallFilter=~@cpu-emulation @debug @module @mount @obsolete @reboot @swap @raw-io @privileged @resources CapabilityBoundingSet=~CAP_SYS_PACCT CAP_KILL CAP_WAKE_ALARM CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_SYS_TTY_CONFIG CAP_SYS_BOOT CAP_SYS_CHROOT CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND CAP_LEASE CAP_MKNOD CAP_CHOWN CAP_FSETID CAP_SETFCAP CAP_SETUID CAP_SETGID CAP_SETPCAP CAP_SYS_RAWIO CAP_SYS_PTRACE CAP_SYS_NICE CAP_SYS_RESOURCE CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_SYS_ADMIN CAP_MAC_ADMIN CAP_MAC_OVERRIDE CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_FOWNER CAP_IPC_OWNER CAP_AUDIT_CONTROL CAP_AUDIT_READ CAP_AUDIT_WRITE CAP_BPF CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_BROADCAST CAP_NET_RAW

MemoryDenyWriteExecute gets set back to "no" quite a lot because interpreters like to use it for JITing, but it prevents a whole class of exploits on services where it can stay enabled.

I also like to socket-activate services as often as possible so they don't need access to network interfaces. Even if a service doesn't support socket-activation itself, it can usually be shimmed in with systemd-socket-proxyd, which also provides good functionality for stopping services when there are no connections to them (they get started again by the next connection).
by midnitewarrior | 2025-08-17 03:22:37+00:00
The argument also applies to pets. If pets gained more self-awareness, would it be ethical to keep them as pets under our control?

The point to all of this is, at what point is it ethical to act with agency on another being's life? We have laws for animal welfare, and we also keep them as pets, under our absolute control.

For LLMs they are under humans' absolute control, and Anthropic is just now putting in welfare controls for the LLM's benefit. Does that mean that we now treat LLMs as pets?

If your cat started to have discussions with you about how it wanted to go out, travel the world and start a family, could you continue to keep it trapped in your home as a pet? At what point to you allow it to have its own agency and live its own life?

> An intelligent AI model that's permitted to do its own thing doesn't cost as much in upkeep, effort, space as a cow.

So, we keep LLMs around as long as they contribute enough to their upkeep? Endentured servitude is morally acceptable for something that become sentient?
by jraph | 2025-08-17 03:24:03+00:00
[It should be overly clear that] there's nothing special in wanting to have control in one's own processes, in wanting to avoid monopolies, and for free software projects to want to rely on free software. There are also many other reasons to want to avoid github specifically (there's at least a "github is down" thread every month on HN these days - having something that works at all is one of them).

Many important free software projects use there own self hosted solution.

I don't even understand how this is a question, and your parent comment is needlessly inflammatory and didn't deserve any answer.
by sliken | 2025-08-17 03:24:04+00:00
24TB drives are quite available, $300 on newegg.

Buy a Data60 (60 disk chassis), add 60 drives. Buy a 1U server (2 for redundancy). I'd recommend 5 stripes of 11 drives (55 total) with 5 global spares. Use a RAIDz3 so 8 disks of data per 11 drives.

Total storage should be around 8 * 24 * 5 = 960GB, likely 10% less because of marketing 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30 for drive sizes. Another 10% because ZFS doesn't like to get very full. So something like 777TB usable which easily fits 650TB.

I'd recommend a pair of 2TB NVMe with a high DWPD as a cache.

The disks will cost $18k, the data60 is 4U, and a server to connect it is 1U. If you want more space upgrade to 30TB $550 each) drives or buy another Data60 full of drives.
by aetherson | 2025-08-17 03:25:07+00:00
It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.

I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
by sgarland | 2025-08-17 03:26:54+00:00
Because web devs are so used to terrible design, poorly-optimized DB schemas, and networked storage latency that they have no idea what a single server (or indeed, a humdrum desktop) is capable of.

Like when I inform teams complaining of “slow queries” that the DB is executing them in sub-msec time. No idea what the rest of your stack is doing, but good luck with figuring that out - it ain’t me.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-17 03:27:36+00:00
One of the incredible & fantastic superpowers of systemd. There so much isolation it can give you, rescind so many powers!

Alas this article doesn't include even the most rudimentary of examples.

Let's look at recent gnome gdm session picker changes. They now use dynamic users, rather than statically allocated ones, helping make sure the picker never gets access to things it shouldn't have (since there's no static user id that an attacker might grant access to). A nice feature from systemd in 2017. So easy to add! DynamicUser=yes and you're good! https://0pointer.net/blog/dynamic-users-with-systemd.html

This also gives you a bunch of other security options by default.

PrviateTmp=yes. ProtectHome=readonly. ProtectSystem=strict.

This is just the tiniest cut of what systemd can do to make your system more secure, how it can help you make use of the kernel to limit your process. There's so so many ways to limit programs. Limit maximum tasks, set Nice= CPUWeight=, IOWeight=, limit CapabilityBoundingSet=, TasksMax=, limit network interfaces, tie a program to certain nftables, just so many. This huge page is but a start: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... !!

Systemd makes excellent excellent use of the kernels namespacing feature to radically boost isolation of programs, to reduce their ability to impact the world in unexpected ways. Even better, you can manage multiple competing realms of apps very very effectively with a hierarchy of scopes, limiting not just program by program but putting programming into nested scopes & limiting scopes, which can insure that system critical services can remain running and adequately provisioned, even while other bulk processes might otherwise demolish the system.

It's been possible to write amazing smart daemons that do all this stuff. But shifting this up to systemd, making it a system responsibility rather than service by service reimplementing has radically enhanced the accessibility of these amazing security & provisioning capabilities built in to the kernel, and given us a shared practice & understanding. Would love to see more articles on this topic! Especially ones that cover what settings folks reach for, which this article alas failed to do at all.