MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by progval | 2025-09-13 18:32:21+00:00
I don't know what to make of it. The author looks prolific in the field of ML, with 8 published articles (and 3 preprints) in 2025, but only one on LLMs specficially. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=AB5z_AkAAAAJ...
by calf | 2025-09-13 18:32:47+00:00
There's also the validity of learning methods, despite what studies may claim, there's no scientific "grand theory of meta-learning", and if ideas are misapplied/misused there's a risk of falling into scientism, which would be just as harmful as economically driven credentialism. At worst it is just the austerity version of education—learn it yourself because we can't afford the school resources to teach/coach/nurture subjects.
by Mawr | 2025-09-13 18:33:36+00:00
Not at all? There is an obvious difference between modern languages' (Go, Rust, Zig) build systems and the old mess (C++, Java, Python). You have one tool that does everything you need, from formatting and linting to package management and building. No need to choose between Maven or Gradle or try to string together five third party programs that barely work together.

> I’ve worked in Go codebases where it’s not simply “go build”.

A rather funny statement that says the opposite of what you intended. That you can expect most Go projects to be built with just `go build` is high praise.
by groggler | 2025-09-13 18:33:36+00:00
North Korea's nuclear program has been slow and you give financial ability as a way out of it.. Decades ago is still decades late, then there is the dollar short aspect of their program.

I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.

Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.
by voidhorse | 2025-09-13 18:34:09+00:00
This is totally orthogonal to your original claim that systems thinkers are "liberal" philosophers but OK.

McCulloch and Pitts, early cyberneticians literally invented neural networks. See the wikipedia page on neural nets.

Another really simple one: Law of Requisite Variety. If that's too simple, I'd encourage you to bear in mind that Norbert Wiener, beyond his direct contributions to mathematics in the form of signal processing filters, is also responsible for the view of control as communication, which motivates much of the approach to control and stability in digital systems.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-13 18:34:17+00:00
> However. There's also good news. AI is also an amazing tool for learning.

Absolutely. For example, I've been learning Autodesk Fusion, and after establishing a small foundation through traditional learning techniques, I've been able to turbocharge my learning by asking precise questions to AI.

I image this really sucks for those whose business model relied on gatekeeping knowledge. (like training companies)
by johnisgood | 2025-09-13 18:34:27+00:00
I have left lots of comments about Ada, but I do not have them at hand right now. People should check out Ada's contracts (pre- and post-conditions), and subranges. They are pretty cool.

... and of course Ada / SPARK. You can do a lot of checks at compile time, so no performance penalty for any checks whatsoever. It is worth looking into.

And yes, you are right. Ada has concurrency constructs builtin the language that help you avoid dead locks, race conditions and all sorts of concurrency-related issues.

If anyone finds my comment with regarding to it, or may help me find it (there may be a website that could help with that), please let me know. IIRC there is a website for finding comments containing particular words from me, for example.
by hirvi74 | 2025-09-13 18:35:00+00:00
I agree with essentially everything you said. While reinventing the wheel isn't always to most efficient solution, such actions have sometimes paid dividends in my past.

> People need to be more curious, and strive to be more knowledgeable.

Absolutely, though I am not sure lack of curiosity nor strive is always the issue. It's one thing to green field one's own solution in an attempt to better one's abilities, but it's also a bit idealistic in a working world of impending deadlines and death-march Agile sprints.

In this case, a 25 line function to solve a constraint would likely take me far less time than grokking an external library's documentation, but in many cases, I feel developers jump on external dependencies because time is of the essence.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-13 18:37:15+00:00
Emacs lost popularity because from ~ 2010-2020 the project was a bit dead. There was a lot of issues going on with emacs forks and in general the maintainers weren't merging functionality that became standard in other editors like multiple modes in a buffer, LSP support, or tree-sitter grammars. The community filled in to write packages to bridge this gap but it became a bit silly to download 20 plugins just to get a basic modern editing experience. So community interest left to other projects like VSCode or neovim.

The project sort of "woke up" in 2020 and has been landing new functionality at a crazy pace. Now I pretty much look at every NEWS file to see what changed salivating over the changes. At times the changes feel overwhelming as someone who only hacks on emacs when there's time, but the other great thing is emacs has such a high guarantee of stability (usually) that even if you aren't up-to-date on the latest and greatest your config can just keep chugging as it is.

I disagree with the other commenters about there being a steep learning curve. If anything it's amazing to me how people can go through the vim tutorial and learn about motions and selection commands just to type things into a window. Emacs has no such requirements and if you enable cua-mode you basically get any editor out there. Emacs's learning curve mostly comes form the fact that people who like to hack elisp and customize Emacs start constantly growing their configs.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-13 18:37:25+00:00
> By the time any part becomes boring, I start to automate/generalize it, which is very challenging to do well. That leaves me so little boring work that I speed run through it faster by typing it myself than I could prompt it.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can use AI to build your tooling. (Unless it's of sufficient complexity or value that you need to do the work yourself)
by hvb2 | 2025-09-13 18:38:13+00:00
Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical.

Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-09-13 18:39:28+00:00
>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas

If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.

If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
by scotty79 | 2025-09-13 18:39:38+00:00
Isn't it even simpler? There are no (or almost no) questions in the training data that the correct answer to is "I don't know".

Once you train model within specific domain and add to training data out of domain questions or unresolvable questions within domain things will improve.

The question is, is this desirable if most of users grew to love sycophantic confident confabulators.
by tezza | 2025-09-13 18:40:31+00:00
this happened to my mother-in-law, where she was the crasher.

in North London there is a large Turkish centre that hosts Turkish weddings. She was invited to a wedding there.

Traditionally, the bride and groom stand in the centre of the room and then family members lineup next to them all in a procession.

As you enter the room to reach the bride and groom, you must shake the hands in turn of all of the people in the procession.

When my mother-in-law eventually got to the bride and groom, they realised that the bride and groom were strangers. The accurate wedding was taking place upstairs at the same time.

There are multiple wedding venues in that particular Turkish Centre.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 18:42:28+00:00
If you read the definition of wrights law it's fairly obvious.

> Wright's law, also known as the experience curve effect, states that as the cumulative production of a product doubles, the labor time or cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage

We're up to about 8 billion solar panels produced ever, maybe 2 billion or so a year now.

That's a lot of doublings.

There's been about 700 nuclear plants. Not a lot of doublings.
by tra3 | 2025-09-13 18:42:34+00:00
I used to suffer from analysis paralysis when designing even basic things, be it software engineering or my next week's schedule. After all, paraphrasing, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".

I found it much better to take the first step and progress from there, even when the full solution is not known. Maybe it's a testament to the limits of my own context window. Having said, I'm not advocating for abandoning architecture or engineering principles. I like the idea of "Growing software" [0]. It's perhaps a more holistic metaphor.

In terms of short circuiting large bureaucracies, I found "Fighter Mafia" [1] to be an interesting example of this. A group of military officials/contractors managed to influence aircraft design, somewhat outside of the "official" channels. The outcome was better than if it went through normal channels.

[0]: http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_Mafia
by gond | 2025-09-13 18:42:38+00:00
I self hosted for 20 years, worked flawlessly, gave up because of security concerns. I would like to go back to it.

Question: How do you manage the security on such a box? Is there any simplification I missed?

I couldn’t keep up with it. So many patches, unrelated to mail, broke something in the stack, bringing the server into a critical state. Often, I had to lock down everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two. These were two days without mail.
by bostik | 2025-09-13 18:42:38+00:00
Also a major contributing factor to second (and third) order effects. Humans, groups, even societies all respond to changes - and if you cannot anticipate what those changes might be, then you are out of luck.

(You will never get all them right. You will never even be able to list what their entirety will be. But you have to be able to predict the order of magnitude of a few of them.)
by krapp | 2025-09-13 18:43:03+00:00
I suspect the consequences they're referring to are the consequences the right is currently trying to manufacture consent for. Stochastic violence against the transgender community, the government proscribing leftist political orgs as terrorist groups, Trump sending the national guard into blue states to "crack skulls," that sort of thing.

Trump orders all flags in the nation at half mast and Kirk is being treated like a fallen statesman and hero, the State Department claiming it will revoke the visas of any immigrant who speaks negatively of Kirk, the breathless media coverage, Trump ranting about "leftist violence", the right wing's endless calls for violence and war on social media (going entirely unclamped-down upon,) and the narrative being created that Charlie Kirk was a peaceful intellectual scholar and activist of the likes of MLK Jr and Jesus Christ.

It's obvious a stage is being set here. And of course when whatever happens happens, it will be blamed on the left.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-13 18:43:33+00:00
> I would argue that the only people we do not owe empathy to are those who oppose empathy, as Kirk did.

The full quote said that instead of empathy one should think about sympathy. However, with the full quote the argument looks weak.

Edit: here is a link https://m.youtube.com/shorts/vojXvj2B6RI
by spwa4 | 2025-09-13 18:43:41+00:00
Does that, in your mind, apply to everyone? For example, would it be okay to execute a few of the people people who protested in support of Oct 8 just when it happened, long before there was any reaction?

I would also like to point out there is a very large difference between firing and killing. So no, people getting fired is not somehow equivalent to a killing.

There are incredible numbers of people who support, even celebrate deaths. And we're not even talking about the other difficulties, like perspective (e.g. the death of a Russian father fighting in Ukraine, do you celebrate or mourn?)
by macintux | 2025-09-13 18:43:56+00:00
Many years ago I took a look at my high school senior yearbook for the first time since I’d graduated. I spotted a note from a girl asking me to call her after graduation.

I didn’t remember the name (first name only), and the phone number was from a different town 20-30 miles from my high school. Unfortunately I don’t believe I still have the yearbook, so it shall forever remain a mystery. I literally had, and have, no clue.
by ekidd | 2025-09-13 18:44:11+00:00
There are two deep capabilities that make Rust, Rust:

1. Banning shared, mutable data. You can't change data that other code might be reading. This is a huge win for threading and multiple CPUs, but it's a dramatic departure from other popular languages.

2. Knowing how data is laid out in memory. This is classic "systems programming" stuff, and it's also present in C, C++, Zed, etc. This usually goes along with making memory allocation visible (though not always in C++). This is a big win for performance.

If you wanted to build a "scripting language" version of Rust, you could probably lose (2). Languages like Haskell are even stricter than Rust, but they hide the details of memory layout. But then you need to decide whether to keep or lose (1). If you keep it, your language will have good threading, but users will need to think about ownership and borrowing. If you lose (1), then your language won't feel very much like Rust.

It would be an interesting intellectual exercise! But actually turning it into a popular scripting language would probably require the same luck and the same 10 years of work that most successful languages need to get real traction.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-09-13 18:44:48+00:00
You are trying to shift from facts to meta, "I never said this", "I did not say that”.

You are accusing me of a grand narrative, so let's quote it: "Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts."

That was the "grand narrative": that both things can be true. That nothing is black and white...

Before replying, please first read, and if you still insist on writing something, talk about facts, not vibes.

So far I'm the one who has provided sources.
by firefax | 2025-09-13 18:45:07+00:00
>If you been to Japan, access to unhealthy food is extraordinarily easy.

But so is healthy food. Imagine saying "I ate nothing but 7/11 food for two days and I feel the best I have in years" in America.

Where I'd be having a hot dog or pizza I was having onigiri. Small things like that add up.

And yes, they do walk a lot -- I spent a whole evening just walking around Shinjuku in awe of the place.
by pandaman | 2025-09-13 18:45:24+00:00
> Company has to make a good faith recruitment effort.

Yes. And as the topical article and countless other ones state - they don't. They actively obfuscate their job openings so they do know they act against the law. And it's so easy to observe that their "good lawyers" cannot help here.

>The government doesn't believe that it can win on the merits, and hence they settle.

That's just, like, your opinion, dude.
by adastra22 | 2025-09-13 18:46:07+00:00
Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:

1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.

2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.

3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
by h14h | 2025-09-13 18:46:20+00:00
BEAM's concurrency model makes it the ideal runtime for web servers IMO. Similarly, the ubiquity of JS in the browser makes it an excellent runtime to target as well.

I agree though that it would be amazing to compile Gleam code into universal native binaries. Would make it a fatalistic general-purpose language.

AFAIK it's entirely possible -- just more of a resourcing concern given the small team.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-13 18:46:25+00:00
Historically it's been the latter as a stabilization fund [0], but is increasingly moving to the former because due to political pressures Norway has had to push for ESG, which has begun to degrade some of the political power a fund like the GPFG has, because China, India, the UAE, KSA, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian and EMEA countries are spinning up SWFs and SDFs that do not really care about ethical concerns.

It's not like 20 or 30 years ago when the only pension funds with massive amounts of dry powder were the Ontario Teachers Fund, CalPERs, or the GPFG.

There are alternative capital markets now because it has become easier to raise capital outside the West. For example, look at the IPO boom happening in India todau - a number of Silicon Valley startups that would have listed on the NYSE decided to list on the NSE instead because it's easier for a company with $50-100M in revenue to IPO in India versus the US today, which is what Freshworks trailblazed in 2021. The same thing happened in China and HK in the 2010s, which helped build the domestic capital market needed to trickle down into VC funding that helped spawn companies like DeepSeek and Biren.

In Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the gold standard for SWFs and SDFs is Temasek in Singapore and what became the Master Trust in Japan - they are entirely focused on developing new industries by coordinating state capital and SoEs with private sector capital, and are driven by the primary goal of developing industry - not moral or ethical considerations. National security and sovereignity is the overarching goal.

Western funds have become heavily politicized due to the rise of activist investors along with the fact that the majority of capital at this point is a mix of private sector capital and very large (think billions of dollars of AUM) family offices where a heir or group of heirs wants to leverage their fortune for their pet project (eg. Actual Communism and extreme far left politics like Fergie Chambers [yes I recognize the irony] or extreme far right politics like Timothy Mellon)

[0] - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/sovereignwealth/files/...
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-13 18:46:29+00:00
As others have pointed out. The BEAM is one of the most efficient VMs out there. It isnt FASTER than C or C++ but it is insanely efficient. Stuff like a simple hello world fits in small bytes in memory. The resilience of the BEAM is impeccable. Discord reaps the benefits and uses Rust when it needs to. I love backend systems and my ideal backend always winds up being similar to what BEAM provides OOTB.

My only reason for not using it is nobody pays me to use it, they pay me to write basic CRUD apps in .NET
by nand2mario | 2025-09-13 18:47:06+00:00
Author here. You’re right—EDO or FPM would be correct for the era. But as others have noted, DDR3 is fundamentally different from early 1990s memory, and it simply won’t run at the very low clock speeds of a 486. SDRAM, on the other hand, behaves in a way that’s much more comparable to the memory used back then.
by potatototoo99 | 2025-09-13 18:47:54+00:00
Something like this has also happened to me when in holiday in Spain. I was looking around nice buildings open to the public, and entered one that I later found out happened to be a university. Walking around I entered one very well decorated hall, also because it started to rain and had to wait somewhere until it passed. To my horror, more people started coming in as well and I realized I was in for some sort of book or thesis presentation on the subject of Spanish language on the Balearic islands.

I barely speak Castilian Spanish (the more common one) and it was instead in Catalan Spanish, so I didn't understand a word, but stayed for the 1-2 hours it took, clapped, and skipped the handshakes/signing part of it.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 18:49:20+00:00
> If you think that makes me callus, you need to develop a thicker skin.

Since GP also made the typo, I don't know if/to what extent a joke was intended here.

(The adjective, here intended to mean "emotionally hardened", is "callous". A callus (noun) is a region of literal thickened skin. Although "callous" can also literally refer to skin which has calluses.)
by ath3nd | 2025-09-13 18:50:09+00:00
> That Hamas are the enemy in a war. It's a serious problem. Wars are like that.

The 20k children Israel murdered are also Hamas, right? Hitler also thought the same about the Jewish children he murdered during the Holocaust. War crimes are war crimes, genocide is genocide.

> A disgrace that Qatar "hosts" the Hamas leaders, and that the Iranian regime funds the whole lot.

The irony is that wanted war criminal Netanyahu himself can't be "hosted" in the most of the free world, cause there is a warrant for his arrest.

> Meanwhile, my approach is grounded in a singular idea: That Hamas are the enemy in a war. It's a serious problem. Wars are like that.

And my approach is grounded on the singular idea: Israel is doing a genocide and genocide is bad.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-09-13 18:50:43+00:00
Quite the opposite: it explains that it is mathematically straightforward to achieve better alignment on uncertainty ("calibration") but that leaderboards penalize it.

> This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards

Even more embarrassing, it looks like this is something we beat into models rather than something we can't beat out of them:

> empirical studies (Fig. 2) show that base models are often found to be calibrated, in contrast to post-trained models

That said, I generally appreciate fairly strong bias-to-action and I find the fact that it got slightly overcooked less offensive than the alternative of an undercooked bias-to-action where the model studiously avoids doing anything useful in favor of "it depends" + three plausible reasons why.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-13 18:51:08+00:00
It is somewhat funny that nobody is talking about this. Thiel sounds like a gin addict on payday, why is he so insistent on this nonsense? The answer is much simpler than the article implies; it's eschatology.

Thiel understands that the main way you "use" religion is by leveraging dispensationalist narratives to reinforce the idea of "prophecy" and "truth" post-hoc. If you can create your own angel and devil (eg. "Russia vs Ukraine") then you can lead other people through your interpretation of faith. This is a documented phenomenon since Zoroastrianism, the reason the state embraces religion is to demolish secular identity and control thought.

It makes sense, when you think about it. The ultimate form of subversion is legitimizing your low-wage, uneducated burnouts and making the intelligentsia the new social underclass. Once you do that, everyone that matters will believe 2+2=5.